ILLUSTRATION: CARMEN SEGOVIA

Summer 2006 | At Last

Ah, Watergate

By Dorothy Samuels '75

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE I'VE JUST TURNED 55, and I'm still in the throes of my annual post-birthday funk. Or maybe it has something to do with global warming. But I find I'm thinking a lot these days about Richard Nixon.

And I mean that in a fond, nostalgic way.

Seriously. I miss him.

Indeed, when I recall my time in law school, what springs to mind first isn't sitting in classes taught by Don Berman, Dick Daynard, Dan Givelber, Steve Subrin, Dan Schaffer or any of the other inspired, and often-inspiring, young professors of my era. Or even, on a less-lofty level, the memorably excellent coffee I purchased before my first class each day at the little luncheonette across the street — that is, except first year, when Tom O'Toole, by then retired as the first dean of the revived and re-imagined law school, decreed his otherwise popular 9 a.m. torts class a no-coffee zone.

Instead, when I look back, I see in my mind's eye an astonishingly young-looking me sitting at the ugly brown formica table that doubled as a dining surface and desk in my dilapidated, but well-located and cheap Cambridge apartment. It is the spring of 1973, and the Senate Watergate Committee hearings are droning on in the background as I endeavor to study for my first-year finals.

It was very distracting. But that historic melodrama playing out on TV left a deep impression, imbuing my rather desperate effort to master the fundamentals of criminal law and civil procedure with a real sense of national purpose.

Which brings me to why exactly I miss our 37th president, and hint, it isn't accomplishments, like his breakthrough trip to China, or getting Elvis to appear with him at the White House to promote the war on drugs. As for Nixon's peculiar love of cottage cheese and ketchup for lunch, well, it isn't that either.

What I actually miss about the Nixon years, apart from my youth, is the robust response we all saw from Congress, the courts, the press and the American people themselves when it emerged that the president had seriously abused his office — a marked contrast to the rather meek response we've seen, at least until recently, in reaction to our current president's successive claims of king-like power to ignore existing laws and human rights treaties, and the Constitution itself, in the name of fighting terrorism.

Think of Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker and the bipartisan Senate Watergate Committee they led. Think of Judge John Sirica, and the Supreme Court under Warren Burger telling President Nixon he must obey a subpoena requiring him to hand over tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations. Recall the careful bipartisan dissection of abuses by the US intelligence agencies under President Nixon and his predecessors, which Senator Frank Church led following Nixon's resignation. One upshot was creation of the special FISA court, which our current president lawlessly insists he need not apply to for a warrant before commencing to spy on Americans.

Thanks to President Nixon, or more precisely, the reaction triggered by his misconduct, my time in law school coincided with one of the true high-water marks for the rule of law in this country.

What an exciting time to be entering the legal profession. Or, so it seemed, at least, to this law student.

Dorothy Samuels is a long-time member of The New York Times editorial board and author of the comic novel, Filthy Rich.