July 25, 2005 - Most of us who were born before Jack Kennedy died remember Senator Howard Baker’s question. Not even the men and women at the head of President Nixon’s Enemies List voiced the opinion that he had anything to do with hatching the bungled burglary to tap the telephones at the DNR’s Watergate offices. That is not what Senator Baker (R-TN) was getting at. His question, repeated over and over, came after the massive cover-up unraveled in the face of Deep Throat’s revelations. When the Senator’s question was finally answered it brought down the Presidency and left us a legacy of distrust and suspicion that infests our political life to this day.

Senator Baker’s question is being asked again with more and more frequency and it is being asked by Republican as well as Democrat partisans. What did President Bush know in the fall of 2003 when he assured us that no one wanted to get to the bottom more than did he? When it emerged that the President’s closest political advisor and the Vice-President’s Chief of Staff were at the center of leaking Valerie Wilson’s identity the question took on a heightened significance. It raised a new corollary or two. When did the President learn that Rove and Libby were at the core of the controversy? When did he confront Karl Rove with the question? Was it before Scott McClellan was sent out to tell the press that the idea that Rove and Libby had anything to do with the leak was preposterous? Did he know what his troops were up to when they launched their campaign to discredit Joe Wilson?

The answers to those questions won’t bring down this President in the same way that it drove Richard Nixon from the Presidency. We don’t have a Sam Erwin or a Harold Baker in the Senate. We don’t have a Barry Goldwater to carry the message to the President and we don’t have a Pete Rodino to focus the nation’s attention. The political landscape has a different topography – one that favors and excuses abuses of power.

It is significant that Karl Rove learned his craft at the knee of Charles Colson, Nixon’s master of the “dirty trick”. For three generations Rove has put into practice the things that he learned in that academy of political manipulation. It is also significant that the young Karl Rove marked as an early accomplishment his own burglary of the offices of Senator Alan Dixon of Illinois, the theft of his stationary, and the sabotage of the Senator’s campaign with forged documents. That story has been repeated again and again, not with regret but with pride.

When the questions about the outing of Valerie Plame are answered they won’t raise the specter of an impeachment and trial. Rove and Libby aren’t Haldeman and Erlichman but the impact of their acts will resound well after this President leaves the Oval Office. They will have insured that the schism between the partisan will not be healed in a generation or two, that America will continue to be a nation divided and wedged apart by cynicism, disbelief and distrust.