ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER SCANDAL

Talk about déjà vu. Once again the party out
of power is demanding an investigation. To
which the administration responds: (a)
There's nothing to investigate because, (b)
we've already investigated and explained it,
(c) too much time has been wasted on it as it
is, (c) the country has more pressing
problems that need our attention, and (d) any
or all of the above. Or, to put it in more
concise fashion: Move on, there's nothing to
see here.
Nothin' doin', says the loyal but insistent
opposition, aka the Republicans in the House.
Yes, there have already been seven different
investigations in addition to 13 hearings on
what happened before, during and after the
bloody massacre at Benghazi, which took the
lives of four brave Americans. Jay Carney,
the White House press secretary, wasted no
time counting them all up, and noting that
none of them had hit pay dirt.
But that was before a smoking gun was
discovered in the form of an email from a
political operative at the White House laying
out the administration's cover story for its
mouthpieces to repeat--a version of events
that fell apart once there was enough time to
examine it. So let's start Investigation No. 8.
Besides, the GOP has a fighting prosecutor to
lead the next investigation, and he doesn't
care how many reams of documents the
administration released about Benghazi while
holding back the key one. "I'm not interested
in summaries, I'm not interested in
synopses," says Trey Gowdy, a congressman
from South Carolina who's been chosen to
captain the GOP team this time around. "I'm
interested in access to the documents . . . and
I'm not interested in whether the appropriate
questions were asked in the past."
To which Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip
in the House, responds in his always eloquent
way: "That's baloney."
I can identify. I've been there. It was another
scandal in another year, another decade,
another century, a whole other era. That
scandal was dubbed Watergate, after the
apartment building where the headquarters
of the Democratic National Committee had
been burglarized, raising questions and
setting off demands for an investigation. I
was writing editorials at the time in that key
listening post, Pine Bluff, Ark., and it all
sounded like baloney to me.
Week after week, month after month, our
editorials in the Pine Bluff Commercial pooh-
poohed the whole idea that the White House
was involved in some nefarious conspiracy to
cover up the truth. But then we -- and the
country -- learned that the attorney general
of the United States, the Hon. John N.
Mitchell, who was married to a Pine Bluff
belle, character, and heavy drinker named
Martha Beall Mitchell, had been lying about
Watergate all along. And even more
surprising, at least to me, Martha had been
telling the truth.
The scales fell from my eyes. Why, it hadn't
been baloney after all. The Pine Bluff
Commercial would sponsor a nationwide
drive to erect a monument to Martha, and I
was proud to lead it. People all over the
country sent in their little $5 and $10 checks
to help build it. Blessed are the poor. These
folks had believed Martha all along. It was
both embarrassing and cleansing to be have
been proved wrong, and I was grateful to
her.
I can still hear echoes of that old scandal in
this new one. Some of the lines don't seem to
have changed much at all: "After 12 weeks
and two million words of televised testimony,
we have reached a point at which a
continued, backward-looking obsession with
Watergate is causing this nation to neglect
matters of far greater importance to all of the
American people. We must not stay so mired
in Watergate that we fail to respond to
challenges of surpassing importance to
America and the world. We cannot let an
obsession with the past destroy our hopes for
the future." -- Richard M. Nixon, Address to
the Nation, August 15, 1973.
I had a friend back then, Steed Joyce, who
after years of keeping track of supplies at the
Cotton Belt railroad, decided to go off and
became an Episcopal priest. He tried to warn
me not to put my trust in princes, specifically
R. Nixon and his minions. To commemorate
my folly he sent me a beautifully calligraphed
scroll in the perfect Hebrew script he'd
learned in seminary. It's a copy of Verse 1,
Chapter 8 of the Book of Nehemiah: And all
the people gathered themselves together
before the water gate . . . Steed, now the
Reverend Mr. Joyce, had thoughtfully penned
the Hebrew words for Watergate, Shaar
Hamayim, in red. So I couldn't miss them.
I've still got that little piece of Scripture, now
preserved in a simple black frame, hanging
on my office wall where I can see it every
day. Just in case I'm ever again tempted to
dismiss talk of a White House scandal as
baloney.