For those of us who have been handcuffed in broad daylight while we were reporting, or chucked into jails for short or long periods, the fears are far more acute.
To be sure, Nixon is on the defensive for the instant. But his rattlesnake hatred of a free press is only scotched, not dead. The threat to us remains, latent and anxiety-producing. We do not think that the time-worn old slogans about "The people's right to know" are enough to make the people really give a damn.
What we need is for the people to recognize that, scattershot as we may be, we are all they've got. To cite a few examples:
When the rare brutal cop knocks in a son or daughter's (or one's own) teeth after a minor pot bust, if the press has been forced down the drain, then that cop will be around to knock out some more teeth.
When the municipality pays $2.5 million for a $2 million turbine, if the newspaper is out of business, no one will expose the mayor, city inspectors and contractors who conspired to share the $500,000 boodle money. The taxpayers will simply have to pay the $500,000 and vaguely wonder what hit them.
When another Caesar-possessed president decides he wants to crisp Latins or Southeast Asians in the name of freedom (along with assorted U.S. servicemen), if there is no loud-mouthed media to ring with the debate, then we'll be into another impossible war without ever really hearing about it.
How do we get this bread-and-butter-and-bombs idea of the press across? History has not taught us well. After all, clearly "Jemmy" Rivington's importance was that he exposed the excesses of the Sons of Liberty and protected the rights of the grumbling Tories: the small, individual, daily citizen's rights. Yet who but a few journalism majors ever heard of Rivington?
Just as clearly, the press's best hours in 1973 have been when we exposed Nixon's housebreakers, burglars, wiretappers, would-be blackmailers, police staters who would sack our small, individual, daily citizen's rights. Who but a few remember that....already.
Leslie H. Whitten is the lead investigative reporter for columnist Jack Anderson and author of The Alchemist.