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The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.
--
Rolling Stone (2 August 1973)

 

Hunter S. Thompson

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The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to "counterpower," to "positive" criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century).

 

Jacques Ellul

 

Gerald R. Ford was the most accidental of American presidents, but when he unexpectedly appeared at the crossroads of history, he seemed to have been placed there by a deliberate act of providence.
In one important respect, Ford was different from most of his predecessors and all of his successors: He did not seek the presidency... Ford became the 38th president because of the shortcomings of others and because he had earned the trust of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. When the corrupt Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign as vice president, it was Ford's congressional colleagues who virtually forced President Richard M. Nixon to accept him as Agnew's successor.
And when the embattled Nixon was finally engulfed by the Watergate scandal and forced to resign himself, it was the unimposing "gentleman from Michigan" who inherited the leadership of a deeply troubled nation.

 

Gerald Ford

 

Gerald R. Ford was the most accidental of American presidents, but when he unexpectedly appeared at the crossroads of history, he seemed to have been placed there by a deliberate act of providence.
In one important respect, Ford was different from most of his predecessors and all of his successors: He did not seek the presidency... Ford became the 38th president because of the shortcomings of others and because he had earned the trust of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. When the corrupt Spiro T. Agnew was forced to resign as vice president, it was Ford's congressional colleagues who virtually forced President Richard M. Nixon to accept him as Agnew's successor.
And when the embattled Nixon was finally engulfed by the Watergate scandal and forced to resign himself, it was the unimposing "gentleman from Michigan" who inherited the leadership of a deeply troubled nation.

 

Jerry Ford

 

You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so.

 

Christopher Hitchens

 

Yet what He is still unable to say after the passage of eighteen triumphant centuries, He said in His own age, eighteen centuries ago, in the very moment when all was lost. Eternally understood, He said, "It is finished." "It is finished." He said that just when the mass of the people, and the priests, and the Roman soldiers, Herod and Pilate, and the idle ones on the street, the crowd in the gateway, and the newspaper reporters (if there were any such at that time) in short, when all the powers of the moment, however different their sentiments might have been, were agreed upon this view of the matter: that all was lost, hopelessly lost. "It is finished," He said, nailed to the cross as He was, at the very time when His Mother stood there -- as if nailed to the cross, when His disciples’ eyes were as if nailed to the cross by horror at this sight. Hence Motherhood and faithfulness submitted to the moment’s view of the matter, that all was lost. Oh, then let us by this most horrible thing, which once took place (and that it happened only once is not to the world’s credit, but rather that the crucified one is eternally and essentially different from every other man) let us learn wisdom in the lesser relationships. Let us never deceive youth by foolish talk about the matter of accomplishing. Let us never make them busy in the service of the moment, instead of in patience willing something eternal. Let us not make them quick to judge what they perhaps do not understand, instead of willing something eternal and being content with little for themselves! Let us rightly consider that a generation is not on that account superior because it understands that a previous generation acted wrongly, if in the present moment they themselves do not understand how to discriminate between the momentary and the eternal aspect of the thing at hand.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard