WASHINGTON — Any time anything goes wrong in this city, the mother of all political scandals--Watergate--looms overhead. Just look at the names doled out to presidential flaps in recent years: Contragate, Travelgate, Filegate. And the overuse of the Watergate-period query: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"
The current controversy over tainted fund-raising practices in the 1996 election may not yet have a "gate" moniker, but it is eliciting especially vivid memories of the brouhaha that led to Richard Nixon's downfall more than 20 years ago.
After all, from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on down, many of those who figure in the current furor got their first taste of political scandal when those White House-sponsored burglars broke into national Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972.
The-then Hillary Rodham, fresh out of Yale Law School, was a low-level staff attorney on the House committee that considered Nixon's impeachment. Now she is being quizzed about her involvement in creating a White House computer system that may have been used for political purposes, her attendance at White House coffee klatches whose guests included many Democratic donors, and other related issues.
Asking some of those questions as chairman of the Senate committee that soon will start hearings on the various fund-raising controversies is Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who was the GOP counsel on the Senate Select Watergate Committee. A generation ago, it was Thompson who asked former Nixon aide Alexander P. Butterfield the fateful question: "Are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?"
The answer, of course, was, "Yes," and it was those tapes that ultimately proved Nixon's undoing.
While the scandals themselves are quite different, it was Watergate that prompted the formation of some of the existing campaign finance rules that Democratic National Committee fund-raisers are now accused of skirting. And improper campaign contributions were one of Watergate's many facets. In fact, illegal corporate donations to the campaign coffers of Nixon and others resulted in charges against 18 corporations and 24 individuals.
Thompson downplays comparisons between his current investigation and the one he honed his skills on years ago. In particular, he says, he dislikes the notion that in order to be successful in many people's eyes, a congressional investigation these days has to topple a presidency.
