A fitfully perceptive account of the collective American "memory"
of Watergate, and of what this tells us about the nature of
history. Schudson (Communication and Sociology/UC-San Diego;
Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion, 1984, etc.) contends that
Watergate, like other traumatic public events, has entered the
national consciousness in a variety of ways. It is, of course,
still within the reach of personal recollection, not only for the
participants but for the milllions who watched the televised
hearings. It has produced a massive body of published writing and
it still casts a long shadow over national politics, as the
Irangate affair showed. Yet, Schudson points out, questions arise.
How significant was Watergate, in fact? Was it a serious
constitutional crisis or just a "scandal"? Was the real villain of
the piece Nixon, or was it the political system that produced him?
What does the collective memory of Watergate tell us about how we
learn from the past? Does it tell us that there are facts of
history we would do well to remember, or, rather, that our past is
largely constructed by our present? Schudson bobs back and forth
among these possibilities, his aim being less to answer such
questions "than to identify them and their continuing influence."
The result is a great many interesting remarks and observations
concerning particulars, coupled with an irritating circularity and
vagueness of direction in general. This is especially apparent when
the author attempts to extract general conclusions about what it is
to learn from the past. Much labor is expended in arriving at the
unremarkable view that the past is neither wholly objective nor
wholly constructed. Schudson is at his beat when describing the
careers, reforms, myths, celebrities, and expectations created by
Watergate, and when showing how Watergate became a lens through
which, for better or worse, Irangate was viewed. Sociologically and
politically interesting; philosophically half-baked. (Kirkus
Reviews)
A look at what Americans remember (and what they have forgotten)
about one of the most traumatic domestic political event in the
America's post-war history.
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