Bob:

Watergate is associated with abuses but also with reforms– measures, the “Watergate-era reforms,” intended to go some distance toward solving the basic problems.  For scholars, law professors and the community of practitioners engaged with these reform enactments, the new biographies of Nixon now being published are irresistible. Evan Thomas, Being Nixon: A Man Divided (2015); Tim Weiner, One Man Against the World(2015).  To borrow a sneering comment by Nixon, it is easy to “wallow in Watergate.”

One question that then comes up is: what in these narratives is the nature of the elemental “corruption” that led to Nixon’s downfall?  There’s mention of campaign money, in the discussion of secretive fundraising and the “hush money” that Nixon and his staff paid to the Watergate burglars in return for their silence.  But private money–brought from the outside to corrupt the government from within–is not the key, or a key, to the story.