ELECTION YEAR 1996 IS LOOKING very much like election year 1972, when most voters decided to return an incumbent president to office despite doubts about his honesty and trustworthiness. Will a Nixon-like victory for Bill Clinton be followed by the aftermath of the November 1972 landslide — the two-year slide into Watergate disgrace? Of course, history never precisely repeats itself, but the answer could be yes. One has the sense that voters — certainly Clinton supporters — are putting the possibility of a crisis in the presidency at the back of their minds and hoping for the best.

Which is what most Nixon voters did in 1972. But with one difference: There was a lot less information available at that point in 1972 about Nixon scandals than there is today about the Clinton scandals. A whole generation of journalists made successful careers out of Watergate, but most of those careers were made in 1973 and 1974; Washington Post metro reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein may have been writing about Watergate every week in the summer and fall of 1972, but CBS news rookies Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung waited until 1973 to get up at 5:00 a.m. and stake out the houses of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. In 1972 Watergate was followed in depth only by the Post; the CBS Evening News scheduled a three-part series, though after pressure from the Nixon White House, it ran only two segments; the New York Times offered some coverage; otherwise, in the words of Theodore White, “The rest of the American press came in nowhere.”