Capers, Tapers, &c.

"Well, I'm just a simple country lawyer . . ."

For Americans above a certain age, that one phrase can conjure up a season of political memories. Thirty years ago this summer, Sen. Sam Ervin took the gavel of a congressional committee to investigate the growing Watergate scandal. The committee's proceedings from May 17, 1973, until August 7, 1973, were the most-watched political drama of the 1970s. By some counts, as many as 85 percent of U.S. households tuned in to some portion of the hearings.

Then again, the hearings were almost impossible to avoid. Each of the three commercial networks took turns broadcasting five hours of committee coverage per day; PBS rebroadcast the footage each night. Ervin's cornpone accent -- Howard Baker's earnest performance of his role as inquisitorial sidekick -- the whisperings of committee counsel Sam Dash -- were as ubiquitous that summer as Archie Bunker's grimaces.

Americans understandably do not care to relive Watergate -- the 30th anniversary of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee on the night of June 17, 1972, received relatively little media attention. But the anniversary of the hearings deserves attention: Much more than the original burglary, the investigation marked a new epoch in American political life.

All these years later, Richard Nixon remains a demon figure in American history, the symbol of villainy and corruption. Yet the remarkable fact about him is that he did almost nothing that one or the other of his predecessors had not done before him.

Did he wiretap his political opponents? So almost certainly did Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and 1968.

Did Nixon try to obtain his opponents' tax returns for political purposes? So very probably did John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. Richard Nixon was audited three times in the mid 1960s and believed to his dying day that the audits had been ordered by the White House.

Did Nixon accept illegal corporate campaign contributions? So did Lyndon Johnson (as Robert Caro teaches us) -- and so very probably had every president since the ban on corporate money was passed in 1907.

Did Nixon attempt to use the FBI and CIA for political ends? So, Nixon believed, had Johnson and Roosevelt. In fact, Nixon created his bumbling "Plumbers" unit inside the White House precisely because he feared that J. Edgar Hoover was too partisan a Democrat to be trusted to serve him as he (Hoover) had Johnson and Roosevelt.

The use and abuse of state power for partisan ends by presidents from Roosevelt to Johnson was not public knowledge -- but it was not exactly a secret either. Like Roosevelt's wheelchair, these practices might be called "non-secret secrets": facts that everybody interested in politics knew, but that were not to be mentioned out loud.

Nixon, in other words, was not caught breaking the rules -- he was caught following them. He was doing unto others as had been done unto him; and many of the solemn figures who sat in judgment over him in the summer of 1973 knew it.

But Watergate was different in three important ways from the political dirty tricks of the past. First, Nixon had gone further than any of his predecessors: While each president since FDR (with the possible exception of Dwight Eisenhower) had done some of the things Nixon did, none of them had done all of them.

Second, Nixon was caught -- and that mattered. It's one thing for political operatives to whisper stories to each other in dark Washington bars -- quite another for those stories to be told under oath in open court and rebroadcast on the evening news. Watergate brought the clandestine into the open and forced the American public to decide whether the old rules of politics were acceptable or not.

Third and finally, the Watergate burglary became a national scandal precisely because it occurred at a time when Americans were already junking all kinds of old rules in all areas of American life. Nineteen seventy-three was a year when "It's always been done that way" stopped being a good justification for anything, from barring women from all-male golf courses to burning trash.

Still, you can understand why Nixon was so baffled and vexed by the Watergate scandal. He must have felt like the kid who gets caught with the bag of apples on the day the local orchard-owner decides he's not going to put up with pilfering one day longer. His natural impulse is to wonder: "What about all the other apple-stealers? Some of them took a lot more than I did. It's not fair to change the rules to punish me when you left all of them alone . . ."

Now, it should be stressed: The change in the rules was a change for the better. It's good that political espionage is no longer acceptable; good that politicians are expected not to trade contributions for favors; good that even presidents are supposed to be held accountable if they obstruct the processes of justice.

And that's why it's important, as we observe this 30th anniversary of the near-impeachment of one president, to remember why America genuinely had to impeach another: Bill Clinton. The rules laid down in 1973 mean nothing if they don't apply to Democratic presidents too. A disturbing number of the veterans of Watergate seemed only too willing to exonerate Clinton for conduct that eerily resembled Nixon's -- and a disturbing number of the journalists seem to agree. Talking about Watergate without mentioning Clinton is like remembering the Hatfields without mentioning the McCoys: It leaves behind the suspicion that maybe Tricky Dick was right after all -- that perhaps, for the inquisitors and those who covered them, Watergate was all politics after all.