Watergate Babies.

Veterans of Watergate think no scandal measures up to their own.

JOHN Dean remembers when the Republic teetered on a precipice, with night falling all around. "There was a sense of fear in the air," he recently told the Washington Post. "It really sent a shudder" through the land. The most patriotic heads "thought this man might do something really troubling." This was far from "lying about sex"; this was genuinely "frightening."

The event, of course, was Richard Nixon's firing of Archibald Cox as Watergate special prosecutor, the key moment in the history of American fascism. Dean-like others from that era-cherishes the memory, and will brook no comparisons. Never mind that Cox was duly replaced by Leon Jaworski, who did a perfectly respectable job of driving Nixon from office. Dean and his brethren have a manifest interest in guarding the uniqueness of their experience.

Call it scandal jealousy; or, as the anti-Clinton priestess Lucianne Goldberg does, "Carl Bernstein disease" (named after the Nixon-toppling investigative journalist who tells anyone who will listen that the pursuit of the current President is absurd). The veterans of Watergate are furious that others have encroached on their turf, daring to oust another President and, worse, citing the precedent of 1973-74 in doing so.

One after another they come, crying, in effect, "No war like our war, no idealism like our idealism, no national cataclysm like our national cataclysm!" In a kind of last hurrah, they are instructing America in constitutional principles, according to which only Presidents named Nixon can commit impeachable offenses. They are worried that, with Clinton down, their "legacy," as Father Robert Drinan likes to say, will be sullied. So they scold today's impeachment forces with an almost comical passion. Murmured one Washington observer, "Can you imagine if Barbara Jordan were alive?"

DEAN OF PUNDITS

Few would have guessed, back in January, that John Dean would be one of the media stars of 1998. But there he is, mainly on NBC's cable spinoffs, bantering with the anchormen, stroking his chin, and tut-tutting with Lanny Davis. After his turn as a Watergate witness 25 years ago, Dean entered the federal witness-protection program, then took up investment banking. Geraldo Rivera-the most resourceful of the Clinton media apologists-resurrected him in midsummer, putting him on the air to deliver one message: whereas Watergate was momentous, Monicagate is trivial.

At the end of their first segment together, Rivera-as if in acknowledgement of the oddness of Dean's resurfacing-asked, "How's life, by the way?" To which the former Nixon aide replied, "Life is well."

It got even better for him. The more apt the Watergate analogy grew, the more Dean was needed to throw cold water on it. Linda Tripp had proposed to write an expose of the Clinton White House under the name "Joan Dean," a concept that appalled the President's defenders. The real Dean assured his audiences that he himself had refused to wear a wire (to incriminate John Mitchell, among others), unlike the dastardly Tripp. He complained of "a very aggressive prosecutorial effort to nail the President." He published in the New York Times an open letter to Monica Lewinsky, warning the young temptress of the pitfalls of public testimony. And he mastered the art of the soundbite, opining that the Nixon presidency saw "a lot of hate crimes" while the Clinton presidency had featured "a lot of love crimes."

Rivera gushed. He was openly proud of his rediscovery, offering Dean night after night as the man who "knows better than anyone else how different the two scandals are." Dean-silver-haired and measured-developed a reputation as a sage (at one point, Rivera turned to him and said, "John Dean, be our wise man now"). He could occasionally sound like a cross between Mike McCurry and Leo Buscaglia, judging Roger Clinton (with whom he had "chatted before the show") to be someone with "a lot of love for his brother," not "sophisticated about politics," but a striver who had learned from "his own mistakes." And "I think we all, Geraldo, learn a lot more from what we do wrong than what we do right. Those mistakes really are the great teachers"- which elicited from Rivera a Seventies-like, "Oh man, definitely they are!"

Carl Bernstein, another darling of Nixon's demise, is plainly chagrined to be out of the action. He has been penning op-ed pieces and visiting the talk shows, utterly dismissive of the efforts to investigate Bill Clinton. Echoing a popular talking point of the moment, Bernstein griped in August that "there is no proportionality here." He urged the country to shrink from a "legal confrontation" over a "consensual sexual affair." Kenneth Starr, he alleged, was using "a Nuremberg prosecution for war crimes" against a "jaywalking offense."

In an early-October essay, widely reprinted, the once-hungry reporter let it all hang out. Watergate actors, he wrote, "all approached their roles with awe and a sense of heavy responsibility to the nation." The present period? A "moment of national madness." A quarter-century ago, the Rodino Committee (which, in truth, was largely a collection of hacks, now made out to be a sort of ultra-pure Round Table) exhibited "bipartisan purpose" and "reverence for the Constitution." The Hyde Committee, meanwhile, is a farce. Thank Heaven, said Bernstein, for "the sophistication and discrimination of most of the population," which has kept Clinton's poll numbers high.

Then, in a lovely Nixonian twist, Bernstein ascribed the campaign against Clinton to "payback"-"going back to Watergate, to Robert Bork, to Clarence Thomas, to the reprimand of Gingrich, to the shutdown of the government, to gays in the military, to 'Mrs. President.'" If this line seems familiar, it should: Nixon and his defenders employed it themselves, incessantly. Watergate, they claimed, had little to do with the stated charges, but was rather a form of retribution for the Hiss-Chambers case, the defeat of Mrs. Douglas, the weathering of the Special Fund controversy, the two-time dusting of Stevenson, the challenge to John Kennedy, and-last but not least- "peace with honor."

There is, to be sure, a bit of truth in both variations of this rhetorical tack. But that Bernstein and others like him should follow it so reflexively is, at a minimum, remarkable.

Suffering badly, of course, from Carl Bernstein disease are Democratic alumni of the Rodino Committee, three of whom appeared before the Hyde Committee as (in the words of one) "ghosts of impeachment past." Father Drinan, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Wayne Owens pleaded with the Republican majority to let Nixon's impeachment stand untainted by Clinton's. Drinan recalled the congressional comity and prayerful deliberation that prevailed in his day, "when the dignity and the majesty of the Rodino Committee was not out to embarrass or humiliate President Nixon." Drinan also refused to concede that a President could be impeached for murder-murder, that is, committed for strictly private, not governmental, reasons (although such murder, presumably, would even so not be consensual).

Holtzman reminded the committee that she and her colleagues had declined to recommend Nixon's impeachment for tax fraud, so respectful were they of the gravity of this action-"a last resort to preserve our democracy," which "must not be perverted or trivialized." Yet neither Holtzman nor Drinan had ever been so gingerly about impeachment. Drinan moved to impeach Nixon for the bombing in Cambodia (with Holtzman's support). And-as the New York Post editorial page was quick to point out-Holtzman herself voted to impeach Nixon on taxes, a fact that she chose to omit from her testimony.

There are, naturally, great differences between Watergate and the Monica follies; but there are marked similarities, too (particularly in the area of obstruction of justice). Above all else, what the Clintonites cannot abide is any mixing of their man's name with that of Nixon, two of the most damning syllables in the American political vocabulary. For years, "Nixon" has served as an almost unanswerable epithet, shaming the GOP. In 1984, Walter Mondale-piqued at President Reagan's frequent invocation of FDR, Truman, and Kennedy-advised Republicans to "stick with your own heroes: Harding, Hoover, and Nixon" (and how he lingered over this last!).

Watergate always meant that Democrats could affect superiority over Republicans (and that Republicans like Dean-and Elliott Richardson-could affect superiority over other Republicans). Charles Colson remembers how the young Hillary Rodham, a lawyer on the Watergate Committee, stared at him- smug, triumphant, "beady-eyed"-as he sweated it out at the witness table. And all of that, now, has been placed in jeopardy. That is why Democratic counsel Abbe Lowell insists, "The more we all try to dress ourselves up in the clothes of Watergate, the more we see they simply do not fit." That is why the columnist Al Hunt asserts, inanely, that majority counsel David Schippers-who does nothing if not exude moral and legal authority-"lacks the gravitas of a John Doar" (the chief Watergate counsel). That is why the hysterical Rep. Bob Wexler, Democrat of Florida, protests, when asked about the Clinton inquiry, "It's not historic!"

But it is. And those who have derived a goodly portion of their political validation from the disgrace of Nixon can hardly bear it. Clinton-the anti- Nixon, the avatar of the baby-boomers, the promiser of "the most ethical administration in history"-was not supposed to share this fate. And he must not. For the knights of Watergate can countenance only one impeachment in their lifetimes, and it has already occurred (with themselves, as luck would have it, as the heroes). In their minds, their scandal will always and forever be bigger than anyone else's; and never again will living be quite so important.