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The relevence of the Vietnam war -- and, by extention, Watergate -- to this election is what each candidate took away from it. John Kerry, and indeed most Americans, learned that if leadership does not properly lead then the mission becomes corrupt and dangerous, and that things rapidly escalate out of control, harming a lot of innocent people, helping no one, and leading to disastrous failure.

The members of the Bush administration -- and let's not forget many of them were in the Nixon administration -- took away from Vietnam and Watergate the lesson that if you control the message you control the reality.

The lessons the rest of us learned from Watergate and Vietnam were about the failures of leadership. The lesson Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld learned was that if they'd been able to control the message they'd have gotten away with it.

Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

# posted by the Editor on Friday, December 23, 2005