NEWS ANALYSIS : Nixon’s Fall Opened ‘Gate’ on Scandal and Scrutiny : Politics: Watergate affair has echoed for 20 years. Its whisper is heard in the questioning of Mrs. Clinton.

WASHINGTON —  With his passion for history, Richard Nixon undoubtedly would have appreciated the irony.

On the last day of the former President’s life, Hillary Rodham Clinton sat in the State Dining Room at the White House, fielding the most intimate and pointed questions any First Lady had ever faced from reporters. Twenty years ago, she had come to Washington as a young law school graduate to work on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment proceedings against Nixon. Now she was dodging rocks from the landslide that those proceedings, and the Watergate scandal that precipitated them, had set off in U.S. politics.

Many events in Nixon’s rise affected the climate of contemporary politics--from his trumpeting of the Silent Majority, the distant predecessor of Clinton’s forgotten middle class, to his elevation of crime, civil rights and other “wedge” issues that split the New Deal Democratic coalition along racial and class lines. But nothing Nixon did influenced American politics more than the manner of his fall.

As much as any other single event, Watergate has shaped the rules and rhythms of modern political life. The scandal that destroyed Nixon’s presidency stands as a transitional event--from an insular, clubby and even secretive political process to a system that is more open and decentralized but chaotic, cynical and vitriolic.

Watergate changed the way the public and the press view politicians; it influenced the way candidates raise money, the way Congress conducts its business and the level of disclosure about private lives that is demanded of public figures, such as Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps most directly, it institutionalized the use of scandal as a weapon in the ongoing ideological and partisan wars over policy. After Nixon’s fall, the pursuit and promotion of scandal has become a routine tool that political parties use to weaken their opponents and derail their policy agenda. From Jimmy Carter’s Peanutgate (the probe of whether peanut warehouse funds were diverted to campaign coffers) to Whitewater, every President since Nixon has been confronted with at least one major scandal that threatened to erode his political support.

“It was in a sense the founding of this new form of politics,” said Cornell University professor of government Martin Shefter, co-author of “Politics by Other Means,” a book examining the role of scandal in the struggle between the parties.

None of these developments is rooted in Watergate alone. In many instances, Watergate compounded trends already set in motion by the Vietnam War.

To many Americans, Watergate confirmed Vietnam’s lesson about the danger of concentrated executive branch power. In the “cover-up,” “stonewalling” and deception of the scandal, the governmental “credibility gap” that first opened around body counts and the Tet offensive hardened into a permanent feature of political life. In the same way that victory over the Depression and Hitler’s Germany symbolized government’s potential for an earlier generation, Watergate and Vietnam stand as the enduring touchstones for a generation profoundly disillusioned with government.

Polling conducted by the University of Michigan shows that the growth of distrust in government began before Watergate. Race riots and the anguish over Vietnam triggered a substantial drop from 1964 to 1968 in the percentage of Americans who said government could be trusted to do what’s right most of the time.

But Watergate accelerated and locked in the trend. Between Nixon’s reelection in 1972 and his resignation in 1974, the percentage of Americans in the Michigan surveys who trusted government most of the time dropped from 48% to 34%. Since then, trust in government has only rarely peaked above its Watergate depths: In the 1992 survey, just 26% said they trusted government to do what’s right most of the time.

Just as revealing as the poll numbers is the repeated use of “gate” as a way of naming political scandals in Watergate’s wake. As Michael Schudson observed in his recent book, “Watergate in American Memory,” the list includes Billygate (involving President Jimmy Carter’s eccentric brother, Billy), Koreagate (involving the Korean CIA’s effort to buy influence in Congress), Debategate (involving charges that Ronald Reagan Administration officials swiped one of Walter F. Mondale’s debate books in 1984), Irangate (one of many names applied to the Iran-Contra affair) and Whitewatergate today.

This linguistic reflex bears a subtle but powerful message: By linking almost all subsequent scandals to Watergate, it suggests that they “are all a piece of the same cloth, a continuing story of dishonesty and corruption that manifests itself with slightly different details,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said.

By contrast, the word “dome” wasn’t routinely appended onto the political scandals that followed the Teapot Dome affair, which involved the lease of oil fields that had been set aside for Navy reserves in the 1920s. Mellman notes that at that point, scandals were seen as individual, not systemic, failures.

The repeated use of “gate” today captures the reversal of that view.

“What people now see is a system that is fundamentally corrupt and corrupts people independent of their personal integrity,” he said.

That perception has directly affected the way the press covers government and political figures. Investigative reporting and muckraking had a long tradition before Watergate; but the press’s role in publicizing the scandal and felling Nixon engendered “the renewal, reinvigoration and remythologization of muckraking,” Schudson wrote.

Watergate, following Vietnam, deepened the media’s conviction that government was lying as often as not--and a reporter’s highest calling was to expose those lies. At the same time, the widespread argument that Watergate derived from character flaws in Nixon himself widened press scrutiny of candidates’ character--measured in everything from their personal finances to their sex lives.

The increased investigation and debunking that followed Watergate have given Americans probably more information than ever before about their leaders and their decisions--though Schudson observes that the press has inflated its role in exposing Watergate and subsequent scandals.

However, the climate of skepticism encouraged by press investigations of government deceit and incompetence has had the collateral effect of deepening public doubts about Washington.

That stands as another historical irony: The liberals who worked so hard to bring down Nixon through Watergate--including, in their own small ways, Bill and Hillary Clinton--have struggled ever since to sell an activist government agenda in the atmosphere of distrust that the scandal left behind.

Even more ironic, the solutions liberals advanced for the dangers of Watergate have further complicated the process of building a political and legislative consensus for new government initiatives.

One is the Watergate-inspired campaign finance reforms of 1974, which imposed strict contribution limits on donations to candidates for Congress and the presidency.

That reform fundamentally changed national politics. No longer could a candidate amass huge sums from a relatively small number of large donors, the way Nixon did in his 1972 reelection.

But, while the reform reduced the impact of any single donor, it paradoxically increased the overall importance of fund raising by forcing candidates to lay siege to an ever larger number of contributors to fund the rising costs of campaigns. As a result, the number of interest groups each member of Congress must avoid crossing has probably expanded--complicating the process of passing complex and controversial legislation.

With the election of the huge Democratic class of 1974--which included Gary Hart, Paul E. Tsongas and Timothy E. Wirth--Congress next democratized its internal procedures, overturning the seniority system and expanding the number of subcommittees in the name of increasing “openness” in the political process.

Like the campaign-finance reform laws, these initiatives carried the price of decentralizing and diluting power. The internal reforms reinforced the centrifugal force of the campaign-finance laws by weakening the congressional leadership’s capacity to reward and punish individual lawmakers who wouldn’t follow the party line.

Testimony to the effect of these new fund-raising and internal congressional rules comes in the excruciatingly slow progress of health care reform on Capitol Hill--despite the unified support of the President and the leaders of the Democratic majorities in both houses. The post-Watergate reforms traded “more openness for more paralysis,” Mellman said. “The pre-1970s Congress would have had a much easier time getting health care passed than this Congress.”

The 1974 Watergate election cast a long shadow over the Democratic Party, launching the careers of suburban reformers such as Hart and Tsongas who would articulate the “neo-liberal” challenge to party orthodoxy in the 1980s and help clear the ground for Clinton’s nomination and election.

Above all, Watergate left a world in which scandal has become a routine aspect of Washington life. Watergate created a legitimate constitutional crisis. But it also represented as much a means as an end for many critics opposed to Nixon’s policies in Vietnam and at home, many historians agree.

Aside from its legal merits, Nixon’s fall taught the political lesson that scandal is perhaps the most effective weapon a President’s opponents can marshal against him. Over the last 20 years, Democrats have most eagerly applied that lesson. Now, in a final irony, they are watching with horror as the political weapons forged in Watergate are turned against a Democratic President.