Top 167 Watergate Quotes & Sayings - Page 2
Explore popular Watergate quotes.
Last updated on November 7, 2024.
This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.
We`re a little bit low in the 1970s, right, post-Vietnam, Watergate era, malaise, all that, but this is more like the 1930s where the very notion of liberal democracy is being questioned, and that is disturbing.
The source known as Deep Throat provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.
Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency.
Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.
Maybe this Watergate is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe were going to benefit from it.
I think we'll go through a period when there's a revival of concern about ethics. After Watergate, we got the Ethics in Government Act, which has a lot of additional regulations.
I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.
I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior. You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.
Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.
When hot dogs like Mr. D'Amato or the Republican apologist Roger Ailes say that Whitewater is worse than Watergate, it's because they're suffering from a disease. It's called bull-imia, and it's the regurgitation of patent hyperbole.
You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.
There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.
Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
Golf mogul Donald Trump sports an arrangement of hair that is less a comb-over than a 'do-over, a candy-floss confection of gossamer wisps that comes off as the clumsiest cover-up since Watergate.
Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.
The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
I know that from the days of Watergate... the notion of two sources on a story has become the popular dogma about how you confirm something. And there is a lot of truth to that, but there are all kinds of ways to check to the extent that you can, a story that you get.
Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.
No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency - a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.
Gerald R. Ford was a decent and honorable man. Under his steady hand, the nation began the process of recovering from the terrible trauma of Watergate - the lies, distortions, cover-ups, misuses of federal agencies to exact political revenge, illegal wiretapping, burglaries.
I will appoint an attorney general who will reform the Department of Justice like it was necessary after Watergate.
I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.
I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.
I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.
If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.
Well, a lot of people don't want to be quoted. But keep in mind that Bob Woodward did all of his Watergate reporting with anonymous sources, and we know how that turned out.
Back in the '90s, whenever we were having '70s nostalgia, you could take the good with the bad. Like yeah, sure, Nixon happened, Watergate happened, but we also had bell bottoms and ABBA and 'The Brady Bunch.'
I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'
After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.
After the 1970s, when President Nixon's illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.
From the Fourth Amendment to post-Watergate reforms to the national outcry when Bush's warrantless surveillance was revealed in 2005, the United States has a strong tradition of overseeing the government's power to spy on its citizens.
Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.
Sometimes I forget some of the things I've done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn't know what was next.
I grew up a child of Watergate. It gave me a good dose of skepticism about authority. One of my favorite movies is 'All the President's Men.' Woodward and Bernstein, those guys were my heroes. I have a degree in journalism.
In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates' finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.
I was raised - professionally - in the Public Integrity Section. I started in 1976, stayed there for 12 years. It was formed after Watergate by then-head of the Criminal Division Dick Thornburgh, who ultimately became Attorney General.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?
The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
Nixon was a crook, but he was our crook. He didn't have the KGB do the Watergate job.
Watergate was unique because it allowed the public to play its democratic role in expressing its outrage at the presidency. And as a result, for the first time in history a president resigned.
I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were.
The possibility of collusion between Trump's allies and Russian intelligence is much more serious than Watergate. It is a constitutional crisis. It represents a violation of our republic's most sacred trust.
Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin's mantra that no person is above the law.
I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo - a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.
The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today.
I think that in the minds of many, the press is being seen less and less as a neutral observer in the impeachment enterprise and more and more as participants, or even collaborators. On Media's Participation In Watergate
I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.
I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
I sat next to Carl Bernstein throughout Watergate, and Woodward would come over, and they would argue everything out, so I was really tuned into what happened.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
Watergate is not the sort of issue that changes the vote. I don't know anyone who has changed their vote because of it.
When you talk about presidents, loyalty is a great thing until it becomes a bad thing. Witness once again Watergate.
I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
