Thoughts After Watergate

About the “ultimate” meaning of Watergate we cannot be certain. Should we regard it as a transient stain on the Republic which time will blur, as it has blurred so many others? Or does it constitute a new kind of evidence for the view, expressed occasionally in these pages, that we are experiencing a social and moral unraveling, a coming-apart of social binders, a crisis of discipline and belief?

Intellectuals have an occupational fault: they overinterpret. Give th...