ABSTRACT
President Richard Nixon has done more to discredit our political institutions than any other person, group, or social movement in this century. The most notable exception is the nation's major political parties. If party leaders may be excused for not stopping Watergate before it got started, they must surely be faulted for not halting the cover-up once it was uncovered. The role of Congress in Watergate is a familiar one: to ventilate, publicize, embarrass, expose. Proceeding in its usual crabwise fashion, Congress uncovered the tapes and a lot more. The organization of the executive office under Nixon continues an ever-growing trend toward bureaucratization, a reaction, in turn, to the perceived failure of the presidential office to influence public policy in ways that will redound to its credit. President Kennedy's and President Johnson's staffs sought to lay the blame for bad public policy on the regular bureaucracy, all the while becoming more bureaucratic themselves.
