Watergate Will Always Be With Us : Nixon: In democracy, it’s not winning or losing, but playing by the rules.

After the eulogies, beyond the reminiscences, we can recognize that Richard Nixon was neither the beginning nor the end of serious presidential misconduct, but he was its summit; more, his career was the pivot on which our understanding of it turns.

Watergate versus China? History doesn’t work that way. History is not an Olympian deity balancing the scales. It is what people do with the past and how people tell its story. It is narrative and sequence, and if we are speaking of the presidency, Watergate sticks out. There’s no road to Gerald Ford, our only unelected President, without it, nor any path from him to Jimmy Carter without Nixon’s pardon.

Half the population is too young to remember Watergate. But Watergate has shaped our political horizons; it is in our laws and our language. Watergate-inspired investigations revealed earlier abuses of power by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Watergate-inspired legislation made it harder to hide later presidential misdeeds. Watergate abides in the high standards we hold, and in the low expectations we have, for political leaders. It still overwhelms our political vocabulary: cover-up, dirty tricks, what-did-he-know-and-when-did-he-know-it. The term - gate is used all over the world. Richard Nixon, who saw in civics only politics, and in politics only a zero-sum game, bequeathed to us our archetype of scandal and our language of suspicion.

There is no easy summing up of Nixon, the man, nor is he justly reduced to Watergate. But history is not justice so much as irony. The irony here is that Watergate, more than any other event in living memory, reminded us that democracy is unique among political systems in being measured by the legitimacy of its process, not the substance of its results. In democracy, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game--not how earnestly, but how well, within the rules and spirit of a government of laws.

It’s the lesson Nixon never understood. But he taught it, despite himself, to the rest of us.