Conclusion

Certainly, such trials as Watergate or Hinckley’s might be called ordinary criminal trials. The defendants were charged with committing acts which are crimes in anyone’s book: bribery, perjury, breaking and entering, attempted murder.

The public stir over who is involved creates a political trial and gives it importance. The trial itself might be conducted according to a strictly legal agenda. Perhaps no one seeks to use the trial as a political apologia. Yet the political agenda will be carried in the media and becomes inescapable in everyone’s mind, including those in the courtroom. This is not to say that such trials are by nature partisan because of the media attention and an unspoken but evident political agenda. The rule of law is not incompatible with thorough and fair media coverage. Partisan trials can result from the lack of media attention, as the Star Chamber trials illustrate, as well as from irrepressible media. The rule of law is strengthened by responsible media, just as it is undermined by irresponsible ones. The same can be said for the bar, for the bench, and for all involved. The truth is that the law has life only when it is respected throughout society.

Defendants in political trials are representative persons. The crisis they undergo in the trial is, vicariously, ours. We identify with their struggles—whether Stans’s injured innocence, Magruder and Dean’s repentance, Liddy’s defiance, Goetz’s fear and rage, or Hinckley’s confused anguish. When journalists and others who tell the stories of political trials do their jobs responsibly, we as citizens learn the political intricacies, moral entanglements, even mental disturbances involved in public responsibility. Those who tell the story have the same obligation to answer to the requirements of truth as those who wield power have to answer to the requirements of the rule of law. As citizens in a democracy we must hold them both accountable.

If we, the public, are to be in a position to learn from the Watergate or the Hinckley trials, of necessity we will understand that such trials operate from two agendas, one legal and one political; in two different courts, the judicial and the historical; before two juries, the twelve in the jury box and the uncounted in public opinion; facing two judgments, the short run which might result in a prison sentence or other institutionalization and the long run which is the defendant’s reputation and the public’s sense of what is appropriate in politics. Few lessons can be learned from the purely legal agenda, but the wrong lessons will be learned from a partisan trial with only a political agenda. It is the tension between the two sides of political trials which produces valuable results.

The way we learn from political trials is as fundamental as anything in politics. Its clearest formulation is in Plato’s cave analogy.⁸⁹ Plato asks us to picture a group of people who have lived all of their lives in a cave. All they know of the world comes from the shadows cast upon the wall. Because that is all they have ever known, that is all they are inclined to want to know.

If we learn from political trials only what we want to learn about responsibility, we will only reinforce our stereotypes because we will see only the shadows. Much depends on the media. If those who tell the story of Watergate or Hinckley tell us only what we want to hear as measured by the ratings, we will not be challenged to think. Politics itself and political trials, the miniature of politics, will be written with a soap opera script. On the other hand, if the media tell us what we might not want to hear, if they challenge our image of what the real world is, their ratings might fall and we will have killed the messenger. Is that the dilemma: either the illusion of truth or death to the messenger? Yes, if we are not responsible as citizens. No, if we recognize that we as citizens are as responsible for the rule of law and the statement of the truth as are judges, juries, lawyers, and news reporters.

The opposite of responsibility is cynicism. Cynical lawyers, politicians, and news managers presume that truth in politics and law is the image. This leads to the assumption made by those engaged in the Watergate cover-up that the rule of law can be replaced by directives about a public relations problem called Watergate. Plato made no such assumption. He saw that a democracy could degenerate to the point where citizens became drones, but he also saw that we have more potential.⁹⁰ The key is whether or not the public believed in standards of justice and truth which were not merely matters of public taste and preference. In short, is the rule of law possible? We might easily be misled, but we can be responsible.