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INTRODUCTION: Janet Murray notes somewhat derisively that
digital history tends to be simply additive (1).
From a brief glance over our websites, they seem to confirm this. Watergate.info
begins its historical coverage by adopting the structure of conventional
Watergate histories, which limit themselves to the few years between the
burglary of Democratic Party Headquarters and the subsequent coverup by
the Nixon administration: "'Watergate' is a general term used to describe
a complex web of political scandals between 1972 and 1974"
(2)
However, a link to the 'What was Watergate' section presents the opposite
view, making even broader chronological links than Lukas or Kulter. In
this section, Watergate.info describes how Watergate is now an "all-encompassing"
general term, used to refer to everything from political burglary to bribery
to obstruction of justice (3).
Here is the inherent tension within this site, oscillating between a need
for chronological, linear structure, and the multilinear possibilities
of hypertext. Unfortunately, the suggestions that Watergate extends beyond
the conventional narrative of 1972-4 are not immediately followed up by
hypertextual links.
CHRONOLOGY: Where the hypertextuality first appears, in both Watergate.info, and the Washington Post, is within the standard coverage of the chronology of Watergate from 1972 to 1974. Both Watergate.info and the Washington Post lead their websites with a chronology retelling the linear story of Watergate: an early Saturday morning in the Watergate office complex, a security guard notices a door with its lock taped, he removes the tape, on his second round the tape reappears, so he calls the police, the Watergate burglars are arrested, one has a White House contact in his address book, the cover-up begins, and ends with Nixon's resignation (4). Both sites devote a particular section to this linear narrative. Within this section, users can hypertextually link to the primary evidence for each of the points on the timeline. In Watergate.info, for the date 'Easter Sunday, 1973', users read that "Nixon asks John Dean to prepare a report about the Watergate affair." They can then click on a link to hear Dean's recollections of the conversation with Nixon (5). In the Washington Post chronology section, users can click on a link to read an article from most days on the timeline. There are also links to more information on each of the key players mentioned in the chronology (6). However, to the extent that this chronology remains the access point for this material, it seems to be merely padding out the linear narrative with surrounding actors and background. At a deeper structural level, there are ways to circumvent this linearity. But from the purely chronological perspective which dominates these websites, hypertextuality and multilinearity are subsumed under the weight of the conventional story. This is the extreme case in the Watergate.info site, where the chronology consists of only three years: a 1972 foreshortened to begin with the first Watergate operation, an extensive 1973 dealing with the growing revelations, and a 1974 which ends in Nixon's departure by helicopter and Ford's subsequent pardon. Watergate.info has a vast collection of primary documents, but if they are not dated between 1972 and 1974, they do not appear in the Chronology section (7). Likewise the Washington Post begins the Watergate narrative with Nixon's election in 1968 and ends it with his resignation in 1974. This one dominant chronology is particularly ironic, given not only the hypertext theorists' claims that this is precicely what the internet can avoid, but also because Watergate, Nixon, and all the other players have been continually reinterpreted over the years, making them ideal for exactly the opposite kind of chronology.
PRIMARY SOURCES: Most damaging of all is what initially seemed so promising: the Post's hypertext links between points in the chronology and articles from that day. In J. Anthony Lukas' Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, the writer is at pains to point out that "Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon engulfed me - as they engulfed the nation - by degrees" (8). Barry Sussman, the Washington Post editor of the Watergate Scandal, admits that Post journalists wrote their articles "with no idea of what they were getting into" and "I felt the articles we were writing and those appearing elsewhere were like little pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle, being thrown into the newspaper at random" (9). But although the Washington Post's archive of Watergate stories forms a huge resource of the website, reading these articles as part of the site's chronology gives the impression that far from being random jigsaw pieces, each article, and each step in the timeline, represents one more move towards an inevitable impeachment of Nixon. But as the Post editor admits, "It was not until the end of March, 1973, that the Watergate story began to publicly ensare Richard Nixon" and "even then, at first, the question was not what illegal acts Nixon might have conspired in, but rather how his presidency was or would be affected by the scandal" (10).
GOING DEEPER: From this initial analysis, the history
of both websites is far from the hypertextual ideal.
It is necessary to delve deeper to find other, less obvious, hypertextual
possibilities.
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