May We Be Forgiven

students says. And a few others laugh.
    A student’s phone rings. It rings and rings while she digs through her bag—everyone watches. She answers: “Hello.” I stare, amazed that she actually answered her phone during class.
    “Who is it?” I ask.
    “My mother,” she whispers loudly.
    “Pass the phone forward,” I instruct, and the phone comes to the front of the room. “Hello,” I say.
    “Who is this?” the mother asks.
    “This is Professor Silver. And who am I speaking with?”
    “Malina Garcia.”
    “How many children do you have, Mrs. Garcia?”
    “Four.”
    “That’s lovely,” I say. “You must be so proud; but right now we’re in the middle of class.”
    “Oh,” she says. “Is it yoga? My daughters love yoga.”
    “No, Mrs. Garcia, it’s not yoga. Does the name Richard Nixon ring a bell?”
    “Yes,” she says, “the president who died of the forgetting disease. Such a shame, a beautiful man.”
    In the classroom, her daughter blushes.
    “Yes, Mrs. Garcia, he was a beautiful man. It was a pleasure talking with you. Your daughter’s paper was due today. Did she mention that to you?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Any idea what she might be writing about?”
    “Not really.”
    “Does she typically discuss her schoolwork with you?”
    “Not so much; mostly we talk about the family and her friends and things like that.”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Garcia,” I say, hanging up and passing the phone back to the girl. “Anyone else have a call they’d like me to make?” There is no response. “Isn’t it interesting that during Nixon’s time there were no cell phones, no texting, no BlackBerrys. Imagine how things might have unfolded differently if Nixon had been more of a future-forward president, instead of running an old-fashioned tape recorder with big bulky buttons that could get confusing—so that his secretary could accidentally push the wrong one and then, while answering the phone, put her foot on the remote pedal and erase all the good stuff.”
    The class stares at me, blankly.
    “Okay, well, let’s get back to it. Where were we …? Can one of you refresh us about what Watergate was?”
    A single hand goes up. “‘Gate’ is a suffix applied to a word to modify that word into a scandal, as in ‘Watergate,’ which was also named as such because it took place at a complex in Washington known as the Watergate. But in the years since then, any big blowup is called Whatevergate. So in fact it was the first of the ‘gates.’”
    “Interesting, and thank you. Do I have your paper?”
    “Yes, you do,” he says. “I am here from far away, and I must have very good grade in order to stay in this country. My family will cut my head off if I do not do well.”
    The class laughs. “You mean your family will cut you off if you do not do well.”
    “I mean what I say,” the student says.
    “I will take you at your word,” I say, and carry on, quoting from Nixon’s memoirs:
    The factual truth [about Watergate] could probably never be completely reconstructed, because each of us had become involved in different ways and no one’s knowledge at any given time exactly duplicated anyone else’s.

    I explain that at the time the scandal unfolded it was the most public example of political dirty tricks in American history and prompted the only resignation of a United States president and the indictment of the Watergate Seven (with Nixon named as co-conspirator—again a historical first). John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson all served time; Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson were never jailed. Among the others who served time related to Watergate were John Dean, E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Fred LaRue. … As is my habit, I digress, laying out the evolution of Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit, dubbed “the Plumbers.” Their first job was to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and get the scoop on the former RAND employee who felt it his civic duty to leak the Pentagon Papers. Nixon felt this leak was a “conspiracy” against his administration and wanted to discredit Ellsberg. He ordered his Plumbers to get everything they could find out to the media and “try him in the press … leak it out.” The attempted burglary is a comedy of errors: the burglers wait until the cleaning lady leaves, then find the door locked and have to break through a window. There are