Part of that was the watchfulness that I started to exhibit. The tales of government spying, undercover activists/leakers/tools, and the endless hearings - all led to a twitchy paranoia that permeated our lives.
You've probably heard the saying,
It's amazing that the Trump administration manages to function.
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I was out of the army and majoring in journalism at S.F. State when Watergate broke. I wasn't a liberal or conservative then. I was just hoping to get a degree and a good job. But two things occur to me now:
1) As a naive "kid," the idea of a "government" doing something wrong struck me as shameful. Good Lord, what if Kennedy had affairs, etc.? But my teachers, who knew better, never sought to give *any* perspective to the whole affair. They just gleefully brought up the latest salascious stuff, day after day.
2) For myself, not knowing any better, I just studied day after day as the teachers assigned us phonetic spellings of the name of each person involved, etc. The damning thing? As I look back now, even though I was attending a college well-known for its journalism major, I do not recall ONE INSTANCE where we were encouraged or given insights into an alternative view of reporting the story. It was all about, "How do we find out who did what?" There's nothing wrong with that. But there was never any discussion of ANY wider examination of what parties had done in the past. There was no "wide-angle." It was ALL about professors hoping the trail would lead to Nixon.
For a (sort of) related story from almost the same time, read this very interesting perspective that was just written about the "Pentagon Papers" story. This was also discussed while I was at S.F. State. And the overwhelming view was that Ellsburg was a hero and the subject of what a news outlet's obligations are to the country in which it exists NEVER came up.
http://jewishworldreview.com/0618/arkes060418.php3
Tim Turner
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