Will Bunch: What Woodward and Bernstein Got Wrong About Watergate!rir

At 2 am yesterday, the Watergate scandal turned 40. Maybe it was appropriate that most of America slept through the occasion. I can tell you exactly where it was the night when it all went down, when those burglars were arrested inside the Watergate Hotel. I was asleep in my bedroom in a suburb of New York, a 13-year-old boy, still trying to make sense of this strange world I'd been born into, where police in blue helmets fought young people i the street, and great men were gunned down in their prime. The arrest of the Watergate burglars may have happened in the dead of night, but what came in the months ahead was truly an awakening. This was our time, our story. My friends' older brothers and sisters had Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and Kent State. But we were the backwash of the Baby Boom. We had Watergate. From the age of 13 to 15, I embraced the scandal with all the geek force that puberty could muster. Sunburned from swimming laps in the forced labor of summer recreation camp, I raced home so I could catch John Dean's afternoon testimony before the Senate Watergate committee, and the next summer I read the paperback version of the committee's report by flashlight at a campground along the Delaware River, while raccoons scurried under my tent. There are still, somewhere, embarrassing, Instagram quality pictures of me wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a reel to reel tape recorder that said, "Property of the Watergate Bugging Team." It wasn't just me, a culture was defined. Listen to the music that blared in static-y mono glory from 77, WABC, on the beach those Watergate summers, from Lynyrd Skynyrd "Now Watergate does not bother me" to David Bowie, "Do you remember your President Nixon?"