America is obsessed by Watergate. It's become the backbone of a wave of political scandals: Irangate, Koreagate, Filegate. That's a lot of gates. St. Peter must be busy opening and closing them all day long.

I was still a young political corespondent for the Baltimore Dispatch in the early seventies. The closest I got to the White House, though, was when the Nixon kids would host a brownie or cub scout party, and I'd be sent to get the rest of the fourth grade's reaction. It wasn't long after that that I became a renegade journalist, hooked up with Gonzalez, and published our famous expose of Super Bowl X: Punt? The Kicker's In A Dress. But I digress.

If anything, Watergate confirmed what the rest of us knew all along: the political infrastructure of this country has been guilty on crime, blackmail, petty theft, sodomy, and crimes so heinous that not only are they impeachable, but in some states, the perpertrators would be fried like a pair of eggs in a pan of butter.

To his dying day, Nixon clung steadfast to his denial of any involvement in the Watergate cover-up. The man lived a self-dillusioned fantasy of fallen hero, Jesus at the cross, King Arthur trampled by his own son. But the rest of us know better. The man had his finger deep within the pie of a rigged election. Nixon tried to rig an election, and for all we know, he succeeded. Even today, the issue is dwarfed by the bungled burglary of G. Gordon Liddy and associates, the so-called "Cubans." But Nixon rigged the election. he bumped McGovern. In light of this, the question lingers: who else rigged an election? Truman? Roosevelt? Kennedy? Reagan? Bush?

All I know is this: somewhere on those 264 hours of taped conversation that Nixon crafted and which are being held in the National Archives and Records Administration in our nation's capital, there is a slightly faded, relatively unknown recording of Nixon and Halderman singing "Louie, Louie." How do I know? I'm a reporter; it's my job. I've been shuffling my feet all over this globe for the past twenty five years kicking myself for missing the opportunity to snag that tape and make a million dollars off of Chinese bootlegs. The market for such music is incredible. It's a long story, but all I can say is it involved a drunken first lady, a twenty foot Aquasport fishing boat, two bottles of Jamaican rum, and the best damn night I ever had in a hammock. What that woman would have done for me. But alas, all things good are lost in the end. I'm left with the fondness for a forgotten an era, a romanced past where greed was king, where CREEP stuffed its pockets to keep our country on the straight and narrow path to hell, where the president, the one man we believed we could trust, turned about to be a deceiving son of a bitch with sweat stains under his arm pits and a yellow streak from here to Katmandu. Come to think of it, has anything really changed?

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