OPINION:
When you get to be my age, sometimes you start a story with “Well, 50 years ago …”
So here’s a 50-year-ago story. While I’ve worked at The Washington Times for 30 years, I got my start in journalism half a century ago at a very different newspaper — The Washington Post.
No, I didn’t write for that once-esteemed newspaper. Instead, I delivered it. (I was just 12 when I took the job at the insistence of my insistent father, who regularly declared that he started working at 10 as a pinsetter at a bowling alley.)
So every morning, my twin brother and I would rise before the sun, ride our bikes to a neighborhood next to Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, sit atop the sewer drain and rubber-band a hundred newspapers.
I’d also bring home a copy every morning, arriving just as my dad was getting ready for work. Each day 50 years ago, he couldn’t wait to read the latest stories about one topic: Watergate. After the break-in, as junior reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein unraveled the tale, I, too, became fascinated.
So I’d get home and scoop my dad. I’d tell him all the good parts of what Woodstein had uncovered since the day before, reveling in my “I knew it first” omniscience.
A quick aside: I never thought I’d become a journalist. I didn’t know why I saved the Post’s Aug. 8, 1974, edition that hangs on my wall with the headline “NIXON RESIGNS.” And I didn’t know that a couple of years later, when we rode our bikes over to a nearby neighborhood to watch Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman film some scenes for “All the President’s Men,” that deep down, I’d caught the bug.
That’s a long introduction to get to what is regarded as one of the chief lessons of Watergate: The cover-up is worse than the crime. Now, if it’s murder, maybe not, but in this case, Republicans broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to get some dirt (it was completely unnecessary), and President Richard Nixon thought he was so powerful he could bury it all.
Which brings us to President Biden. You’ve been reading the news since he took office and know he is regularly a mess. He falls down, can’t put together a coherent sentence and gets confused easily. His descent into old age (and remember, it is just that) has been regularly documented.
But Democrats regularly denied that anything was amiss. Just a few days ago, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that Mr. Biden remained “sharp as a tack” and could “absolutely” serve another four-year term.
Asked last week whether Mr. Biden’s inner circle had covered up his declining cognitive condition, she asserted that “it is not a cover-up” and that it was ridiculous for public figures to suggest he resign before his term ends in January.
Peter Doocy of Fox News got to the nub. “It would seem that people in this White House knew that President Biden was slipping, and it was hidden from the American people. So, who ordered White House officials to cover up a declining president?”
“First of all, there’s been no cover-up. I want to be very clear about that. I know that’s the narrative that you all want —” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
Mr. Doocy pressed the issue, prompting the clearly prepared Biden spokesperson to repeat: “It is not a cover-up. I know that is the narrative that you all want. It is not.”
Well, sorry to say, that pretty much means there’s been a cover-up. We all could see the president was “declining” — and let’s be clear here, that isn’t a bad thing: You get to 81, you’re likely to start declining and, God willing, we’ll all get there.
But Mr. Biden is the president, and this is perhaps the most demanding job in the world. If you come into office in your late 70s, you will hit the wall hard, and Mr. Biden did.
Of course, the mainstream media, which have been hiding Mr. Biden’s declining mental acuity, repeatedly ignoring his obvious descent, couldn’t care less this time around about the cover-up — mainly because they were big players in the deceit.
Sadly, The Washington Post isn’t The Washington Post anymore — owner Jeff Bezos and his ever-thinning crew of “journalists” couldn’t care less about the facts, the truth — or the cover-up that has been Mr. Biden’s presidency.
Next week, 50 years ago, Mr. Nixon resigned because he was caught in a cover-up. Last week, Mr. Biden dropped out of the race because he, too, was caught in a cover-up. His crime? Pretending he could do the job.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
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