Sacrifice Is for Losers

By Frank Rich -
New York Times Opinion

June 22, 2002

Last weekend marked the media's self-congratulatory 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and it would have spoiled the mood to suggest that all the energy expended on searching for ol' Deep Throat might be better spent trying to crack the Watergate under way right now.

This time the cancer is not on the presidency but on the economy, where the malignancy is a flood of corporate transgressions whose scope and scale, in the words of The Wall Street Journal this week, "exceed anything the U.S. has witnessed since the years preceding the Great Depression." As the first Watergate undermined Americans' faith in government for generations, so the replay threatens to do the same to American business. Or already is, if you regard the Dow Jones and Nasdaq averages, now flirting with their post-Sept. 11 lows, as metabolic measures of public trust in Wall Street.

It's a sign of the cultural sea change that Martha Stewart's ImClone stock trades threatened to knock John Gotti's funeral off the front page of New York's tabloids. The New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy praised the Mafia don to his readers by saying that at least the mob didn't come near "your wallets," as "the Enron sissies did."

The new Watergate, much like its prototype in the summer of '72, is still early in its timeline ‹ even though some in Washington, following the old script, reassure us that the story is almost over, that the public doesn't care about it, that the miscreants are all being punished and that reform is on the way. The five bungling burglars arrested on June 17 at the Watergate 30 years ago (can you name one?) are now all but forgotten by history, so minor was their role in the criminal conspiracy uncovered at the Nixon White House over the ensuing two years. The first culprit to be convicted in the new Watergate ‹ Andersen, on June 15 ‹ may also prove a passing footnote to the big picture.

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