This year August 9 marked the day Richard Milhous Nixon resigned as the 37th US President back in 1974 and the Discovery channel aptly aired its documentary “All the President’s Men Revisited” that day to mark the 40th anniversary of the Watergate.
I watched the 1976 classic “All the President’s Men” countless times during my newsroom days as a commercial crimes investigative reporter – and eventually won the 2005 SOPA award for one of my exposé thanks to this inspiring and fascinating “violent” movie, as Robert Redford the narrator in the documentary put it.
And I can’t help wondering: does the movie have any relevance today?
Obviously President Barack Obama is not President Nixon. The former has not been impeached like the latter. But the recent CIA spying on the Senate is exactly the present day equivalent, with some cyber elements of course, of the Watergate break-in.
Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale University is right when he wrote that Obama “is wrong to support the limited response of his CIA director, John Brennan, who is trying to defer serious action by simply creating an “accountability panel” to consider “potential disciplinary measures” or “systemic issues.””
CIA Director John Brennan apologized to the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month when he admitted his agency not only spied on computers used by its staffers but also read the emails of the Senate investigators involved in investigating the controversial post 9/11 CIA interrogation and detention program.
Senate committee members were certainly not impressed even though Obama continued to support Brennan as a “man of great integrity”.
With continued failure to live up to his promise of a more transparent government, Obama is increasingly tainting his leadership to put himself in the history books for all the wrong reasons – probably not as bad as Nixon but only time will tell.