Watergate kids

In Phoenix, Tom Liddy is running for office. Anne Kleindienst isn't. Too bad for us.

By Amy Silverman

Aug 7, 2000 | I am a child of Watergate, but only in the most obvious sense, which is to say that I was a child at the time. I was 5 years old the summer of the break-in, and my only political memory is the John Lindsay for President bumper sticker my mom stuck on a box in the garage. Someone had ripped the other one off the back of our station wagon.

In our family, it was more than OK to take unpopular political positions. My mother is descended from socialists and I picked up the cue, which made me a lonely child growing up in Phoenix, a place where government is a dirty word and even Democrats are armed. I spent many solitary summer afternoons in the '80s licking envelopes for losers in empty campaign headquarters. Mom was so proud.

There was never any question in our house about Watergate: bad. Very bad. And the scandal definitely had an impact on me. But it was nothing stars and stripesy, nothing like seeing the movie "All The President's Men" and deciding to become a journalist. To be honest, I decided to be a reporter after Meg Ryan moved to New York to go to journalism school in "When Harry Met Sally." Looked like fun, so I did the same thing.

It's more that Watergate became my baseline for evil. My mom wouldn't let me see scary movies as a child so Richard Nixon was my Freddy Krueger. This point of view worked fine for years -- it was, for instance, a perfectly acceptable opinion for an adult living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But when I moved back to Phoenix a few years ago, I realized much of the world had bought into some revisionist account of the Nixon era. Suddenly, the guy was OK.

Nowhere was this new spin so celebrated as my native state. Arizona had become like some sort of Argentina for Watergate-era figures from both sides of the aisle. One of the lawyers for the Committee to Re-Elect the President lives here, as does a special prosecutor from the Department of Justice. The guy whose desk at the Democratic National Committee was rifled practices law in Phoenix. Richard Kleindienst, Nixon's attorney general, lived a couple of hours north of Phoenix until he died in February. Even G. Gordon Liddy, the freaky, flesh-burning, Limbaugh wannabe who started the whole Watergate mess in the first place, has a home in Scottsdale.

Mostly coincidence, I'm sure, but this place has always attracted Do-Overs, people who leave their families and their pasts to start again on the strip-malled frontier. Arizona attracts libertarians too, more than just conservative Republicans. Don't particuarly care for the laws of the land? In Arizona, there's always a way around 'em.

All of which makes Phoenix a great place to be a crooked politician or a political reporter.

Being a political reporter here has forced me to broaden my horizons. I can honestly say that I have friends who are Republicans. And after our last governor, Fife Symington, was convicted of bank fraud and left politics to become a chef (in a fancy restaurant, not prison -- he's dodged that bullet so far), I thought nothing could faze me.

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