In the summer of '72 I was a long-haired college student at the U of M working in the newsroom of the Minnesota Daily, when the news wires began spitting out the first reports about a break-in at the Watergate office complex, headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
The Watergate story came over the wire and the bells on the teletype were rat-tat-tatting like a Tommy gun.
I ripped off the story from the sputtering wire, read the copy out loud and hollered something like "Nixon is all through!" to the glee of my young colleagues.
I mention this because two Watergate new stories broke last week; Jeb Stuart Magruder, the suave, "I-lost-my-moral-compass" Nixon deputy had just died at the age of 79; and, a related story about the Shakopee Historical Society's decision to create a public exhibit to unpaper the Watergate role of home town business scion Maurice Stans, Nixon's Chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President", (CREEP).
Magruder was reconstructed as a born-again Christian but was not delivered from the infamy of being the second person convicted in the scandal and the first to turn on the President. Stans remains a Shakopee icon but has water stains on the linen of his fresh pressed legacy.
Watergate brought down many more in the Republican Party and ushered in an era of Democratic control and election reforms, including limits on contributions and "sunshine" laws mandating reporting of where political contributions come from.
The heart of these reforms has been effectively crushed by the Supreme Court.
In 2010, the Supremes ruled in the landmark Citizens United that corporations are people, too, (sniff-sniff), striking down limits on independent expenditures. Last month the Court struck down caps on individual expenditures, meaning political spending limits are now the number "infinity".
