By Michael Schudson - Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past

by Michael Schudson

It began with a burglary, the objectives of which are to this day unclear, and it led to the unprecedented resignation of a president in disgrace. For years the story dominated the airwaves and the headlines. Yet today a third of all high school students do not know that Watergate occurred after 1950, and many cannot name the president who resigned. How do Americans remember Watergate? Should we remember it? To what extent does our current "memory" of Watergate jibe with the historical record? Most important, who--the media? political elites? the courts?--are responsible for the particular version of those tumultous[sic] events we remember today? What Americans remember (and what they have forgotten) about the most traumatic domestic event in our recent history offers startling insights into the nature of collective memory. Michael Schudson, one of this country's most perceptive observers of the media, uses interviews, press accounts of recent political controversies, and poll data to explore how America's collective memory of Watergate has changed over the years, and what this reveals about how we can learn from the past. Schudson argues that Watergate was both a Constitutional crisis triggered by presidential wrongdoing and a scandal in which investigators pursued multiple, and sometimes veiled, objectives. He explores the continuing unsettled relationship between these two faces of Watergate. Liberals who deny that scandals are socially constructed miss part of the story, as do conservatives who deny or minimize the Constitutional crisis. The book gives special attention to several key domains where the memory of Watergate has been contested and as a myth inside journalism, as a debate over reform legislation in Congress, as a set of lessons in school textbooks, as a new language for the public at large. Schudson's findings are often surprising. He argues that Richard Nixon has not been rehabilitated in the public mind and that there is good rea

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History

Paperback

First published July 1, 1992

About the author

Michael Schudson grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1980 and at the University of California, San Diego from 1980 to 2009. From 2005 on, he split his teaching between UCSD and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, becoming a full-time member of the Columbia faculty in 2009.

He is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others concerning the history and sociology of the American news media, advertising, popular culture, Watergate and cultural memory. He is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a Guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow. In 2004, he received the Murray Edelman distinguished career award from the political communication section of the American Political Science Association and the International Communication Association.

Schudson's articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Wilson Quarterly, and The American Prospect, and he has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Financial Times, and The San Diego Union.

Reviews

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

ok, so this is a book i read very quickly for my historical methods research project. parts of it are dry, but others are really fascinating. i mean, if collective memory is the kind of thing that really gets to you excited. i'm not being sarcastic in that last sentence, he's using Watergate as a case study, but the whole thing is more about the way societies remember giant events.

[MM · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really interesting study of collective memory and media narratives.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times quite dry, but in all, a very interesting and useful examination of the means by which collective memory is shaped and contested.