The Loss of Innocence

At a glance, it is hard to imagine what possible similarities can be drawn between the politically motivated burglary that lay at the basis of the Watergate scandal and the mass murder of Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers at My Lai. The latter appears so horrible as to dwarf the former in terms of the severity of the crime. However, the comparison is indeed possible when the reaction of the American public, the attempts by the government to cover up the incidents, the role of the media in covering the events, and the eventual outcome of each incident are examined in the light of the time when they occurred, specifically the United States in a social and political turmoil of the 1960s.

While certainly significant simply by their nature, the two events became so monumental - and memorable - because of the circumstances in which they occurred. In case of Watergate, it was the president of the nation utilizing the resources and executive power of his office in an illegal manner to spy on and blackmail individuals for no other reason that they were his political opponents - and then compounding this crime by attempts at bribery and by obstructing justice. In case of My Lai, a group of American servicemen massacred a village-full of unarmed non-combatants for no apparent reason whatsoever.

In both cases, one certain aspect of American innocence has been shattered, specifically the general belief in "American exceptionalism," or the belief that Americans would never behave in a certain manner. An American president was not supposed to stoop to the level that Nixon exhibited, nor was he expected to be "vindictive, vulgar, and small-minded" (Davidson and Lytle 377) that Nixon revealed himself to be in the White House tapes revealed during the Watergate investigation. On the other hand, "as defenders of a democratic culture, Americans were supposed to behave differently from the rest of the corrupt world" (Davidson and Lytle 415), which included American soldiers, regardless of the country in which they conducted their operations. The incident at My Lai, however, showed that American soldiers were just as capable of pointless brutality and cold-blooded murder as their Communist opponents or even the Nazi forces in World War II.

There is a difference in how the cover up of the two incidents was attempted. With Watergate, when the five burglars of the Democratic Party headquarters and people associated with them were put on trial, they were put under "political pressure to plead guilty and remain silent" (Davidson and Lytle 374). The extensive resources available to the U.S. president were used for the cover-up. With My Lai, the commanding officer on the ground simply did not report the details of the incident, instead providing simple numbers up the chain of command. Interestingly, though, both incidents were eventually unraveled through the efforts of congressional committees, which reinforced the importance of separation of power in the U.S. for avoiding corruption and other illegal actions by other governmental bodies.

In both cases, the role of the press cannot be overlooked. In the beginning, the actions of the press were quite different in these two cases. With Watergate, the press served as the true Fourth Estate, the watchdog of the government, tenaciously protecting the interests of the American people in regards to the right to know what their government was up to. In case of My Lai, the press was not much more than a mere reporting agency, passing along the information on what "amounted to one more confusing day in a war that, by 1968, was being waged with more than half a million American troops" (Davidson and Lytle 402). But once the details of the My Lai raid became known, the press was just as active in pursuing the story as it was during Watergate.

Another difference between the two incidents was in the reaction of the public to them. With Watergate, public outrage was almost universal, driven perhaps by the betrayal of trust that the American people place into the hands of their elected representatives and executives. With My Lai, although the emotions were just as high, they were much more polarized. This reflects the split in the American society's attitudes toward the Vietnam war; those who were against the war were properly outraged by the conduct of American soldiers, while war supporters denied that such atrocities were widespread and tried to diminish their severity by comparing them to atrocities committed by the Viet Cong.

While the two incidents have some similarities in the way they influenced American society as a whole, the differences in the public reaction and press coverage indicate that the Americans did not really perceive them in the same light. Perhaps this is also the reason why Watergate is still remembered as the defining moment of the Nixon administration, while My Lai is a barely known fact of the Vietnam War. Americans are much more concerned with what impacts them at home rather with what takes place abroad.

Bibliography
Davidson, James W. and Lytle, Mark H. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, Vol. II. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2004.