Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

Call it Camelot's revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long - because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.

You know, one of the things about Watergate and one of the things about the Nixon presidency is that it just keeps going. It never ends,

I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.

There's no question that Kennedy was an utter failure as a passer of laws during his proverbial thousand days.

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.