By L.F. Brown
19 September 2004
When Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate office complex in Washington D.C., noticed adhesive tape on the lock of a door connecting the building’s basement garage to a stairwell on June 17, 1972 and called the police, little did he know how wide the reverberations would be as a result.
One of these has been the almost knee-jerk attachment of the suffix ‘–gate’ by the media (which now includes the blogosphere) to seemingly every public scandal since, for instance, Koreagate, Billygate, Irangate, Nannygate and Paulagate. The latest is Rathergate, referring to the current furore over allegedly fake memos that CBS's "60 Minutes," presented by Dan Rather, aired in order to prove that President George W. Bush shirked his duties during his time with the National Guard in the 1970s.
The original ‘–gate’ was of course the site of the bungled burglary into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and had nothing to do with water.
Yet the label would soon stick no matter how far in type or severity the scandals were from their original inspiration, as a few examples from the past decade or so have proved.
When it was revealed in 2000 that the Gore campaign had received a videotape of a Bush debate practice session, the label Debategate was not too far behind. That it had already been used to describe the case of a copy of the Carter campaign’s debate briefing book being sent to the Reagan campaign in 1980 proved no impediment. Not to mention that neither involved burglaries.
In 2002 three San Francisco police officers beat up two men outside a bar. One of the officers was Alex Fagan, Jr. whose father had just been promoted to Assistant Chief of Police. Allegations of obstruction of justice over the incident were later pursued before a grand jury. The twist was that the officers had demanded the men hand over their takeout fajitas. So there were no more fajitas for the men and Fajitagate was born.
During the half time show of this year’s Super Bowl, pop stars Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson got in trouble when he exposed her breast. This was dubbed Nipple-Gate even though the problem was that there was no cover-up.
The rest of the world has not been immune. In England there was Camillagate, involving an extramarital love affair between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles and a phone call.
Back stateside, a $200 haircut for President Clinton in Airforce One on the runway of LAX in 1993, which it was alleged was holding up traffic, became Haircutgate. It was to be later rendered on a par in the political lexicon with Monicagate, which had much more in common with Watergate than any other of the ‘–gates’, with an impeachment vote for a president, including charges of obstruction of justice. One wonders by how much their relative importance has been diluted as a result of this naming game.
It makes an interesting diversion to speculate how differently things could have turned out that early morning at the Watergate. When Frank Wills first noticed the tape on the door he initially thought it was the work of a cleaner wanting to keep the door open and so he removed it. On his return ten minutes later he found that it had been replaced. It was then that he became sufficiently suspicious to make that phone call.
If chief burglar James McCord, instead of replacing the tape, had just called off the operation, the police probably would not have arrived and discovered similarly taped doors throughout the stairwell up to the sixth floor leading to the Democratic offices. President Nixon, who famously declared that he wasn’t a crook, may not have been publicly affirmed as such and the media wouldn’t have had Watergate to kick around anymore.
And what effect, if any, would there have been on the media’s propensity to auto-dub scandals if the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the time had not been in the Watergate, but perhaps instead their later headquarters, the Mayflower Hotel? Billyflower sure packs less of a punch. Or what if the owners of Watergate had decided on a different name for their building?
What is more certain though is that the general public, already weary of high profile scandals with the accompanying proclamations of lessons learned and promises of stiff action to follow, and being presented with a string of indistinct sounding scandals like drops in the often murky sea of public life, are more hesitant to walk over to the water’s edge.
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