From Watergate to Obama

At a certain age, nostalgia becomes a chronic condition. You take a few doses of reality, and it usually goes away in the morning.

But a column by Sally Quinn in yesterday’s Washington Post, like one of Proust’s cookies, brings a rush of memories about a different time of political upheaval and, with the news that Carl Bernstein has written a new book about Hillary Clinton, the return of Watergate fever is inevitable.

If images from that time are like scenes from an old movie, they come not only from life but actual movies--“All the President’s Men” with Bernstein’s face taken over by Dustin Hoffman and Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn,” about her disastrous marriage to Bernstein morphing into Jack Nicholson.

Back then Ben Bradlee, who was editor of the Post, and Sally Quinn were featured actors, a colorful power couple of brainy journalists at the heart of the political drama being played out.

Bradlee was the rough, gruff, courageous editor who backed Woodward and Bernstein as they broke the scandal of the century. Quinn was his beautiful, sharp-eyed, social critic sidekick of whom Henry Kissinger observed, “Some reporters make you want to commit murder, Sally Quinn makes you want to commit suicide.”

She is still writing for the Post, and her column yesterday provides a link between that past and the future. Starting with an anecdote about the vacation she and Bradlee took to recuperate from Watergate during which they met a brilliant Brazilian whose skin color she couldn’t recall the next day, she muses about Barack Obama:

“Could it be that Obama makes people feel proud of themselves because they can look beyond the color of his skin? Perhaps some of the many people who are supporting him sense that doing so brings out the better part of their nature.”

Sally Quinn is still asking good questions.