My father is a communications and media professor, and he likes to make fun of his students for not remembering anything. His latest jab is to tell them they don't have to worry about Alzheimer's disease—because they have no memory to lose anyway. This would be sarcastic, were it not accurate. But it's not just his students.

Western society seems to be in the grips of a collective amnesia that reminds me of the scene in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the entire town forgets everything, and the local fortune teller reads the cards to tell people what happened to them in the past.

In therapy work it's generally assumed that people who can't remember the past have a reason for not doing so. It's either too disturbing, they feel guilty about it, or the burden is too great. I would say that all three count these days. But lately, we've had a vivid reminder of something called Watergate—something we really should remember, which seems logical enough not to.

To most, Deep Throat was a long-forgotten movie character (Hal Holbrook in All the President's Men), before he emerged from the recesses of secrecy and the past in early June, identifying himself by name: Mark Felt. He was the high-ranking FBI official and secret source who made the Washington Post's exposes of the Watergate scandal possible. These were the articles, published between 1972 and 1974, that proved that Nixon really did know about the bugging of the Democratic campaign headquarters, and the associated money trail, and much else besides.

While we have a lot to thank Deep Throat for, I think it's a good time go over what else it took to bring down old Dick Nixon. I do so for the benefit of everyone who sees all the parallels between then and now: the war, the paranoia, the secrecy, the crimes, the lies, and the intense frustration of the people at having no impact on government.

Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. The man who eventually presided over the most criminally intent White House before the present day came into power as two of the most articulate, beloved civil rights leaders lay recently buried.

Nixon was elected, in part, because he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Whatever that plan was, what actually happened was that Nixon secretly stepped up bombing campaigns and spread the war to Laos and Cambodia, laying waste to both countries and opening up Cambodia to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Though the war had officially begun just four years earlier, in 1964, Nixon's secret plan extended US involvement in the war for another six years.

Two short years after he took office, in the spring of 1970, Nixon made his infamous speech announcing that, behind the nation's back, he had been bombing Cambodia. US campuses erupted in protest, and fully one third of them were either closed down before the semester ended or came close to being closed. This was the spring of the Kent State shootings—when the National Guard opened fire and killed four students, all of whom were either passersby or photographers. If you want a taste of that era, dig out the Neil Young song "Ohio," which was written, recorded, manufactured, and available in record stores and on the radio just days after the shootings at Kent.

But the Vietnam War, tearing the country apart, dragged on. And this was the backdrop for the events of the spring of 1972—when five burglars with sophisticated bugging equipment, a lot of money, and the phone numbers of very powerful people in their pockets were arrested early one morning in the Watergate complex, attempting to place eavesdropping devices in the Democratic National Headquarters. Quickly, this bugging was connected to an organization called CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President. The thing I love most about the Watergate crooks is that at least they had a sense of humor.

You would think that the break-in, combined with the endless, devastating war and the Kent State shootings (along with the less-publicized shootings of students at Jackson State, SUNY Buffalo, and elsewhere), would have been enough to wake people up. There was, in reality, little else in the news. Bodies of American boys were coming home from Southeast Asia at a shocking rate. And then Nixon was caught cheating on his opponents. His excuse was he didn't know.

Then, one bit at a time, the shit hit the fan. There was a lot of help from Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Mark Felt, and the editors of the Post, who kept up a stream of reporting that could not be avoided by the media. And though it took a long time, the blood-soaked soil of the country was fertile. After that came the Pentagon Papers story—a series of articles by Neil Sheehan in the New York Times that proved, through secret government documents, that the Nixon administration knew about the atrocities of Vietnam, and that it had been working with a plan to lie to the people.

But consider that the Watergate story broke in the spring of 1972 and developed fairly steadily, such that by the November 1972 election, people pretty much knew what had happened. Yet Nixon won 49 states, losing only Massachusetts and Washington, DC, to George McGovern.

Meanwhile, in the years encompasing Nixon's reign, the country had gone through its greatest activist phase since the American Revolution. The decade following the Kennedy assassination was a time of unprecedented community involvement, protest, and creative outpouring. Students had taken over college campuses—not just through demonstrations, but also through changes in curriculum, banning the ROTC from some places, taking over student governance, and many other changes. Many people were aware of what was going on—far more than today, despite our beloved Internet. Still, Nixon, his war, and his scandals marched on.

Under the combined pressure of these developments, one by one, the "president's men" resigned. Some were convicted of felonies associated with Watergate. Some went to prison. Many spilled the beans on the whole affair. There was the issue of the Nixon tapes and the long gap in one of them.

Yet Nixon himself, as if enchanted by some evil spell, or charmed by presidential power, lived on like the undead. Somehow he kept enough people believing that he was totally innocent that they were reluctant to associate him with the break-in, or blame him for the war. But a movement against him was brewing. Finally, Republican leaders in Congress took action and, with their blessing, impeachment proceedings were discussed. It was at this point that Nixon resigned, in the summer of 1974. He quit more than two years after Watergate, four years after Kent State, and a decade after the Vietnam War officially had begun.

So, for those wondering what it takes to bring down a president or an entire administration, you now have a basis for comparison. The past is not always a good predictor of the future, but it's usually the best one we have. And by that method, it's going to take a long time for people to gain their focus and find their voice. And the world scene may need to get a lot uglier.

And yes, it's also quite possible that we will go on to see a Condi Rice or Jeb Bush presidency become a reality in 2008, no matter how badly Iraq is going, no matter what the state of the economy, and no matter what crimes have been committed so far. After all, crime is in the eyes of the victim