Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past

By Michael Schudson

Book Overview

Using interviews, press accounts of recent political controversies and poll data to explore America's collective memory of Watergate and what this reveals about our perception of the past, this book examines how the spectre of Watergate continues to haunt American politics.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465090842
• ISBN13: 9780465090846
• Release Date: July 1992
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.47 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Superb book!

I am using this book as a secondary source for an historical study on Watergate and the media. It is well written and informative. The author dispels several misconceptions about Watergate and provides several excellent examples. ************************ AND I MUST SAY.... To the 16-year-old reviewer (A Customer) that gave the book one star..... Imagine one book not telling you absolutely everything you need to know about a specific subject. It is so hard to find and read other books or use an online encyclopedia to look up background information. On behalf of the academic community, I am so sorry you have experienced such trauma! This review is a sad example of many students today. If any further action is required beyond sitting at a desk and breathing, it is too much effort. It is not only sad that this person does already know this piece of history, but it is sad to realize that this person expects others to do the thinking for him.

Important Analysis of How Watergate has been Interpreted in American History

The Watergate crisis dominated national politics for the last quarter of the twentieth century, and indeed its effects are still persistent in national discourse. Witness the use of the term "gate" to characterize virtually every political scandal since that time; "Contragate" is only one such instance. Many have written books on the Watergate break-in and the toppling of President Richard Nixon as a result of the cover-up that followed. This book is different, however, sociologist Michael Schudson explores in this fine work how Americans have remembered the scandal and used it since 1972. Schudson investigates how the crisis's formidable shadow has affected public life since that time, using collective memory to map the various ways in which Watergate has informed the larger society. Eschewing postmodern theory, he offers an accessible and insightful analysis of history, memory, and culture, emphasizing how the various uses of Watergate in constructing the past emerged and suggests that "the past in highly resistant to efforts to make it over" (p. 206). Schudson argues that any event opens certain paths of interpretation and closes other, but that those undertaking the interpretation may draw the meanings that they seek from the experience. At this level, these events offer a discontinuity with the past. At the same time, continuity reigns precisely because it is remembered in certain ways, and a timeline is constructed based on this remembrance, or as often as not its misremembrance. These condition the manner in which subsequent experiences and events are perceived by the various communities recollecting them. This suggests a wide divergence of lessons that may be drawn from any event, and we see it in how Watergate is perceived by the various groups who consider it. In working out the implications of this situation with Watergate, Schudson engagingly considers the use and abuse of history/memory in relation to this important event in American history. Using a four part framework, Schudson organizes the responses to Watergate. He discusses the constitutional crisis mindset in which opponents of Nixon interpreted Watergate as an abuse of presidential power and obstruction of justice. Many Democrats, certainly the majority involved in dealing with the crisis, accepted this as the dominant theme to be dealt with in Watergate. Since the crisis this position has dominated in American recollection. At the opposite extreme, Many Republicans have viewed the crisis as a "scandal" but not one driven by misconduct by the president and his lieutenants. Instead, Watergate represented a media-driven overreach that unjustly brought down a president. In this sense Nixon was simply a politician doing what all politicians do but was nonetheless hounded out of office by the reporting of the two leading newspapers of the era, the Washington Post and the New York Times. These two dominant narratives, perhaps they should be called meta-narratives, then subdivi

most comprehensive sociological approach to media and political scandal

This is one of the best books out there. Comprehensive and myth-dispelling, I think this is an essential read for anyone interested in politics, the media, and/or collective memory.