Watergate was a watershed in the history of American politics and it may well prove to be such a crucial junction in the history of American education. A generation earlier, the launching of a Russian satellite proved to have an enormous impact on American educational systems, as Sputnik became the catalyst and the symbolic rallying point for a crash program in developing American scientific and technological education.

The Watergate experience will hardly be so clear cut: Watergate was an internal agony, not an external threat; Watergate was not a simple dramatic stroke, the affair was complex and drawn out, even beyond the unprecedented resignation, and subsequent "pardon," of an American president. The trauma has been etched deep on our national psyche and we are likely to see the traditional American reforming instinct surface again in educational and curriculum reforms, using "Watergate" as a battle cry. Obviously, the political phenomenon of Watergate will affect the study of history, politics, and government, at all levels from the elementary school classes in "Civics" and "Current Events" to the curricula of the graduate schools and law schools. But it is also likely that the impact of Watergate will be found in the teaching of language arts. For millions of Americans who witnessed, Watergate was a war of words, a drama of language manipulation.

After two years of investigation and controversy, two events especially focused public attention on the use and abuse of language: the televised congressional hearings in the summer of 1973, and the release of the White House transcripts in the late spring of 1974. During the televised hearings, the various linguistic issues ranged from random charges of "grammatical errors" to formal charges of legal perjury. Some people were concerned that Standard English Usage was being violated, while others responded to the barrage of clichés and repetitions, the bureaucratic and legalistic jargon, the omissions and circumlocutions of the witnesses.

In the early skirmishes in this war of words, it took only a few days of the Ervin committee televised hearings (May-June, 1973) to alert and alarm the language purists, the legendary fussy Miss Thistlebottoms, who registered their horror that "so-called educated men" -- college graduates and lawyers -- were violating every rule in the old grammar book. Defenses of "good English," "Standard English," and (quaintly enough) "The King's English" began to appear in newspaper letters-to-the-editor columns. Although such complaints were indeed accurate in most instances -- the Watergate witnesses could hardly open their mouths without uttering a solecism per sentence -- most observers would agree that these critics had missed the main point.

But such fussiness did not come principally from those who are professionally concerned with language qua language: the linguists and scholars and the classroom teachers of English. NCTE, for example, had established, a year earlier, a Committee on Public Doublespeak. At that time, Robert Hogan, NCTE's Executive Secretary, stated: "Behind the appointment of the committee is a resurgent interest in the content of language. The question is not just whether subjects and verbs agree, but whether statements and facts agree."

During the Watergate hearings, most members of the NCTE committee listened to TV not for subject-verb agreements but for those techniques of language manipulation which were being used to conceal truth. Many Watergate witnesses were educated men, from the nation's finest schools, who used their skills in language to lie, to evade, to conceal, to confuse. So obvious was their manipulation that citizens who aren't normally interested in language matters recognized, vaguely at least, that language indeed was being used -- either as a weapon or as a mask.

Within days after the Ervin committee hearings began on television, certain stock phrases ("at this point in time"), words ("inoperative"), metaphors ("game plan," "laundered money"), and bureaucratic and legal jargon provided source material for political cartoonists, nightclub comedians, TV talk show hosts, and satirists of all sorts and degrees, from the professional to the barroom pundit. Herblock and "Doonesbury," Art Buchwald and Russell Baker, Mad and National Lampoon had a heyday. It was a cornucopia of cant for satiric recycling.

Even the more solemn Watergate watchers were astonished by the verbal performance. David Wise (The Politics of Lying) sent me his "favorite" Watergate quote -- a 300-word answer by Ehrlichman (to a "yes-no" kind of question) in which the words simply flowed out, sidetracking, winding back and forth, looping around, eventually ending nowhere, a diversionary bit of rambling nonsense. In my judgment, one of the high spots (low spots?) of Watergate testimony was that of Patrick Buchanan, later described by Time as "quick-witted and fast talking. . . . the Administration's most effective witness." A sampling, of Buchanan's effectiveness:

Senator Inouye: "Do you think it's ethical?"
(long pause)
Buchanan: "I don't think it's unethical."
Senator Montoya: "Do you think it's proper?"
(long pause)
Buchanan: "I don't think it's improper."

In Orwell's famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," he thought that it "should be possible to laugh the not-un formation out of existence." Unfortunately, Orwell was wrong. Nobody laughed.

As Richard Gambino wrote in "Watergate Lingo" (reprinted in this anthology) : "The torrent of circumlocutions, mechanical verbal formulas, misplaced technical jargon, palliative expressions, euphemisms, and inflated phraseology indicate that the brains both of speakers and listeners are being anesthetized or stunted.... It is often hard to tell whether they are merely dissemblers trying to paralyze the minds of others, self-deceivers who have crippled their own intelligences, or glib dolls whose characters remained undeveloped as their smartness grew."

Gambino suggested that the general emphasis on Watergate's sensational 1984 aspects (bugging, spying, etc.) obscured the importance of the ethical and moral irresponsibility which flourishes in the fertilizer of this debased language: "If our political language, and therefore our public thinking, becomes so debauched that moral meanings can no longer be clearly expressed, then all the gadgets, technology and techniques of Watergate will be unnecessary. We will have already slipped into a 1984 nightmare. A society that cannot speak or understand sense is condemned to live nonsensically."

But the dominant language problem of the whole Watergate affair was not what was said, but what was unsaid. Watergate essentially will be remembered as a classic example of concealment and secrecy, in all phases from the initial planning through all parts of the cover-up attempt. The language problem was that of omission, a more subtle kind of lying and deception than the "active" aggressive untruths we normally recognize as lies.

Virtue or vice is not confined to one party. Both of the "landslide" elections in recent years were achieved (as voters found out much later) by deception -- by suppressing, concealing, omitting certain key facts from the voters. Lyndon Johnson's promises of peace in Vietnam persuaded many people who feared that Barry Goldwater would bomb North Vietnam; years later, when the Pentagon Papers were revealed, the public found out the truth of Johnson's policy in that era.

The Nixon/Agnew rhetoric of "law and order" in the campaign summer of 1972 helped them win a lopsided election victory. Here again, the voting public did not know, was not informed, about the abuses of power. The facts about the Watergate affair, the Cambodian bombings, the President's income tax juggling and real estate deals, the solicitation of bribes from big business, the attempts to use the CIA, FBI, and IRS as political tools, were concealed from the American public during the election of 1972.

Two years later, many of the White House lawbreakers were in jail, others were in shame. Most citizens are Watergate weary now, yet some of the basic problems involved are those nonpartisan, enduring dilemmas of a democracy. For example, is there a "consent of the governed" if the citizens are deliberately uninformed, misled? Watergate will be remembered as a classic example of concealment, of omission, of a more subtle kind of deception that the "active" aggressive untruths we normally recognize as lies.

Our society's Judeo-Christian heritage emphasizes the prohibition of active lying: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." People well understand deliberate falsification, lying under oath, perjury. But very little attention is given by ministers, moralists, or churchgoers to passive deception, sins of omission, calculated silence and secrecy, evasions and half-truths. In fact, our society places high value on keeping quiet. Silence is golden. We make folk heroes out of those (including gangsters) who keep their mouths shut, who "stonewall it." And we label those who reveal the truth as squealers, informers, tattletales, and stool pigeons.

We grow up with ambiguities: our parents tell us to "own up" to our own errors, sins, misdeeds, mistakes, violations. We are told to "fess up," "be honest," "tell the truth." Yet, at the same time, our parents tell us (and we tell our children) that we are not to tell on others, not to be a tattletale on our siblings, our classmates, our companions (and later) our fellow workers when they err, sin, or commit a crime.

Granted, there are problems and distinctions concerning such silence which need to be discussed by our moralists, but some people recognize that these attitudes, learned in childhood, to be "loyal" to our group, to keep our mouths shut, later serve the interests of those adult groups most eager to keep their operations as secret as possible: criminal organizations; inefficient or corrupt bureaucracies; corporations or governments that abuse power or exploit people.

Much of the hatred of the press by Nixon and his supporters was not simply because the press was the messenger, the bearer of bad news, but because it helped expose the situation, it was the tattletale. The whole Watergate situation originated in the arrogance of a generation of expanded presidential power and was nurtured by an obsessive concern about secrecy, about plugging "leaks." After two years of exposes, the White House still spent much time trying to divert attention from the substance of the information and focus on the "leaks" and "squealers."

Thus we can see that the language issues in the first year of Watergate centered around "bad grammar" (deviations from standard usage), clichés, trite expressions, repetition of commonplace metaphors, parroting of bureaucratic jargon, a bit of outright perjury here and there, and a great deal of evasive circumlocution and unspoken truth. When the probers learned by accident of the White House tapes, a new phase began for Watergate word watchers. Here, suddenly, the illusions and fabrications, the images of the President and his associates, were devastated by their own words. The release of the transcripts in the spring of 1974 provoked three major controversies concerning language: Nixon's vulgarity; the editing and prior censorship of the documents; and the revelation of character conveyed by the words spoken in the Oval Office.

Nixon's pedestrian vulgarity was no secret among his intimates, nor his enemies. Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President 1968 had rather amply exposed what was under the PR image being packaged and sold in the 1968 election. But a large audience of true believers, which Nixon so carefully cultivated, did not know these aspects of his personality, or would not believe the critics who pointed them out. To those who had believed in the "morality" of Nixon, who had long seen Nixon as the innocent victim of the slanderous attacks of the villainous press, the (expletives deleted) in the transcripts were shocking. Emmet John Hughes, one of President Eisenhower's aides, commented that ". . . the single word that first came to mind as I read these transcripts was 'vulgarity' -- vulgarity of thought and vulgarity of conscience." Editors at the Chicago Tribune noted that the transcripts "provide a cultural shock. Presidents don't talk like city hall hacks, do they? But appearance -- the ruffles and flourishes, the prim smile and Sunday services -- confronted reality and lost."

Why such an intense reaction? For one thing, Nixon had set himself up for such a fall from grace through years of preaching and pieties. In Jungian terms, the distance and the tension between the projected persona and the repressed shadow had been growing dangerously far apart. Just as Agnew's law-and-order speeches would echo back, ironically, after he was exposed as a criminal, Nixon's pious pronouncements would be remembered; in the 1960 TV debates with John F. Kennedy, Nixon attacked the language of Harry Truman, in words which would come back later to haunt Nixon:

[Nixon] "It makes you realize that whoever is President is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to. And I can only say that I'm very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States. And I only hope that should I win this election, that I could [see] to it that whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House and say: 'Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.' "

More serious vulgarities were the intimations of ethnic slurs, especially anti-Semitism, in Nixon's informal White House conversation among colleagues. After the initial release of the transcripts, rumors that some of the deletions contained derogatory remarks (such as "Jew boy," "kike," and "wop") were denied by the White House as another example of irresponsible press coverage. But the allegations were substantiated in August when other transcripts were yielded by Nixon in compliance with the Supreme Court order. Although the critical legal evidence from these transcripts was Nixon's early knowledge of the Watergate break-in and approval of a cover-tip, magazines and newspapers noted these documents included a Nixon remark that his daughter ought to avoid public appearances at anything concerned with "the arts . . . the arts you know -- they're Jews, they're left wing."

Nixon's "jocko-macho" talk (as Nicholas von Hoffman called it) was amply demonstrated; the limited supply of tough-guy metaphors, akin to verbal locker room swaggering of muscle-flexing machisino at the beach: "tough it out," "stonewall it," "trade off," "head to head ... .. zone defense," "let it hang out," "bottomline it." Years earlier, some critics had felt that Nixon's overt enthusiasm for spectator sports (shaking hands with athletes, telegrams and phone calls to coaches) was simply a calculated ploy ("a grandstand play") to win the favor of certain voters, to create the illusion that he was "just one of the guys." It was no illusion. Nixon was not the first politician to use the imagery of athletics (see "Sports Metaphors" in William Safire's The New Language of Politics), but the transcripts reveal that the traditional emphasis on "fair play," "following the rules," and "good sportsmanship" had been replaced by a "win at all costs" mentality.

From the moment that the White House version of the transcripts was originally released, the massive number (almost 1,900) of omissions, "expletives deleted ... .. characterization deleted," and deletions "for national security reasons" or "unrelated material" made the transcripts suspect. If Nixon would release such damning material, how much more damning was that still concealed? Such inferences were widespread at the time. Were they reasonable?

Aristotle, some 2500 years ago, as the first major rhetorician teaching the art of persuasion, pointed out some of the common axioms used in persuasion: "If the less probable of two events has occurred," he said, "the more probable event is likely to have occurred too." Because rhetoric is involved in cases where there is doubt and disagreement (instead of certitude) , Aristotle continued with a series of common arguments which people use in order to make reasonable judgments: "If someone had the power and the desire and the opportunity to do something," Aristotle continued, "then he has done it." In other words, people have long recognized the validity of overwhelming circumstantial evidence in cases which will not yield to certitude because the statements or opinions of the various parties involved are in conflict.

The initial mistrust of the edited transcripts was confirmed by subsequent events: two months later, in July, the House Judiciary Committee issued its version of the transcripts, based on a more sophisticated technical analysis of the tapes. Although Chairman Peter Rodino did not accuse the White House staff of deliberate distortion, the evidence indicated that the "errors" and "accidental omissions" benefited Nixon. (Further evidence of the unreliability of the White House transcripts was provided a month later, August 5, when the President was forced by the Supreme Court to surrender other tapes which, by his admission, were "at variance" with his earlier public statements; three days later Nixon resigned.)

The House version printed Nixon's vulgarities, instead of censoring them with the euphemistic "expletive deleted." Ironically, the media then imposed a self-censorship: CBS-TV, for example, visually showed the vulgarities in an enlarged-print scene, but the reporter's voice-over left blank spaces as he read the text; the Chicago Tribune, in a front page box, apologized to its readers for printing "some" (not all !) of Nixon's vulgar language.

The House version also printed the omissions. Of special importance here were the fifteen pages of the Nixon-Mitchell conversation which weren't in the original version; the key omissions from the March 21st conversation ("stonewall it") ; and the frequent omissions of one-word Nixon responses to Dean. Some key words were recorded differently ("should" instead of "can") and the House version occasionally noted response laughter within conversations, thus suggesting some of the tone of the conversation. The House version was a great deal more damaging to President Nixon than the earlier edition, although the impact on the public was less, understandably so, considering the shockwaves of the first revelations.

The primary impact of the transcripts (both the White House version and the more revealing version from the Rodino committee) was that they laid bare the President's character. The May 1974 issues of the nation's newspapers and magazines were saturated with violent and bitter commentary about the transcripts, indicating that a shocked, angered, and sorrowed nation did not hesitate to infer the caliber of Nixon's character from the words which had been revealed. Almost unanimously, the assessment of Richard Nixon's character was rather harsh, even from those who once had been loyal supporters, but who now felt that they had been betrayed. Republican Senator Hugh Scott, who had earlier predicted that the transcripts would vindicate Nixon, was one of the first to express his disillusionment: "shabby, disgusting, immoral." Throughout the country these sentiments were echoed in an intense outpouring of criticism and analysis of Nixon's character as revealed in the transcripts. In the future, one must remember that in May 1974, Nixon was still a powerful protagonist; after his resignation and loss of power, he was seen by many as a pathetic figure, one inspiring pathos, and the tone and temper of subsequent criticism against him differed after "this point in time."

In the previous year, at the November 1973 convention of the National Council of Teachers of English, Walker Gibson, delivering his presidential address to that group, pointed out some links between the teaching of literature in the classroom and the analysis of the ongoing Watergate investigation. "When we read Hamlet, or Charlotte's Web, or whatever it may be," Gibson said, "we infer dramatic character from language. Because Hamlet says the things he says, in the way he is made to say them, we conclude that he is this or that sort of a person, and we have our evidence before us in the words on the page or stage. Learning to read is learning to infer dramatic character from linguistic evidence." Gibson then made some analysis of the Watergate hearings, of both the witnesses and the senators, and of some of the inferences one could make from their language: "What does it say, for example, about a person's attitude toward law and order if, when describing some a clearly illegal act by a White House colleague, he calls the act inappropriate?"

At that time, Gibson was speaking about the publicly known Watergate testimony as witnessed on TV. No one knew then that the very words of the President in the Oval Office were being tape-recorded, and that they would eventually become public. Gibson's point is even more germane when one considers the impact of the transcripts. Louis Mumford, for example, said that he felt as if Nixon had "committed moral suicide in public" when the transcripts -were released. Carey McWilliams, writing in The Nation (May 18), ironically commented: "The Nixon of the transcripts is an authentic person. It is refreshing to listen to the real private voice after years of exposure to the public television voice and manner. The transcripts contain his words and phrases. This is the way he thinks. No PR fakery, no television smirking, no smug self-righteous rhetoric.... This is a hard-bitten operator, a political huckster, a man on the make and obsessed with making it." The differences between a person's public and private voices (or personae) has long been an intriguing topic for teachers of Ianguage and literature. For years to come, it seems certain that the Watergate transcripts will be alluded to in the classrooms as teachers explain and illustrate this practice of inferring character from speech.

Another lesson which should be learned from Watergate, and which can be taught in the classroom, is that language can be manipulated to downplay, to hide, to conceal, to omit. More attention can be given, in a kind of "defensive rhetoric," to teaching students how to recognize the strategies of silence, the tactics of omission, evasion, diversion, circumlocution.

Hopefully, one of the political lessons which can be learned by all citizens is the need for comprehensive disclosure laws, codes of ethics, open information laws by which political groups, commercial corporations, and governments at all levels must reveal full, clear, understandable information about their financing and operations. Citizens and consumers will eventually recognize that all of the various "Truth-in-" laws (lending, packaging, advertising, etc.) are related to this basic concept of full disclosure, At present, the privacy of the individual citizen is being invaded at the same time the secrecy of the corporate structure is being protected; this trend must be reversed. Perhaps, one way to start is in the classroom, by making students aware of these patterns of concealment.

Watergate also revealed a serious, widespread public misunderstanding about the adversary role of a free press in a democratic society. Even after all of the disclosures and confessions of guilt, many Americans still believed that the press, the media, had railroaded Nixon. History teachers might point out to their students that American presidents in the past have had a long tradition of wanting the press to act as a volunteer "public relations" staff, but that the press sees its role more as a "watchdog," well aware that political power can be abused, has been in the past, and probably will be in the future. Perhaps schools ought to re-think their journalism and media programs. Instead of teaching the few kids how to put together a school newspaper, or training a few in the mechanical or electronic aspects of television, it might be more beneficial, if we instruct the many of our future voters about the issues and problems of the press in a free society.

Hopefully, young people will grow up in this generation with fewer illusions, with fewer romanticized myths about our history and our politics, with a greater awareness of how fragile democracy can be. Hopefully, the schools will recognize that our future citizens need a more sophisticated literacy, a literacy which includes training in the critical analysis of propaganda techniques, language manipulation, and the new media.