The Watergate scandal turned 40 years ago the other day, and it’s still as fresh in my memory and as fascinating a topic to read about and discuss as ever. Like a lot of people my age, it really was the moment of our time – a sitting President awash in a building crisis that started slow and steady, building to an unforgettable crescendo and his resignation in disgrace. I remember it all – the ‘Saturday Night Massacre”, the Ervin Committee, listening to the Senate confirmation hearings following Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s resignation on the radio, Nixon’s speech when he released the transcripts of the tapes, watching the events of his final day in office (I stayed home from work and was flat on my back as a result of heat sickness), and, finally, hearing of Nixon’s pardon by Gerald Ford on the radio. It all seems like yesterday.

I remember my brother Mark and I seeing “All The President’s Men” something like five times the summer it came out; a big poster of Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein hung prominently in the cellar where our band Top Priority practiced. It remains my favorite all-time movie and I never get tired of watching it. I mean, Redford, Hoffman, Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Hal Holbrook as “Deep Throat” – I still think of those great dramatic scenes in the parking garage whenever I find myself in one to this day.

It’s interesting to read Woodward and Bernstein’s perspective after forty years; some may agree with them, others tend to see things in a different light. And there are stories like this that make you think that, like most scandals of this nature, the full truth will never come out, too many people involved with all kinds of stories left to tell.

Still, compared with Barack Obama’s newly-owned “Fast & Furious” scandal, at least with Watergate no one was killed, which (at least in my mind) makes F & F and the President’s use of executive privilege far worse than anything the White House “plumbers”, John Mitchell, and Richard Nixon ever concocted. I just wonder if there are any modern-day Woodward and Bernsteins willing to take on the myths that Barack Obama and his syncophants in an all-too-willing 21st century media have created about this president and his White House. Given the evidence we’ve seen to date, the answer, unfortunately, appears to be no. And we are all the worse for it.