Slow and Steady

It seems like more and more often, I'm made to feel a bit "old" by some particular bit of history I remember being there for. But one bit that's being mentioned more frequently these days, and that came just before time, is the Watergate scandal. With current presidential scandals and talk of possible cover-ups in the news, people are actually referencing Watergate in less superficial ways than simply tacking "-gate" onto the end of something.

My knowledge of Watergate might be better than some, but feels patchy at best to me. I know the broad strokes, and the version of what happened according to All the President's Men. But anything beyond the most top shelf details were really out of my grasp. Appearing in timely fashion to address this was a new podcast called Slow Burn.

Courtesy of the web site Slate, Slow Burn takes deep dives onto smaller details of the Watergate scandal. It's a tight 30 minute (at most) podcast, but host Leon Neyfakh is able to pack a lot in. He helps you really understand each tiny part of the story in a complete way, making it feel vital and worth knowing. The episodes are filled with modern interviews, archival audio -- it's all very well researched.

The meta-thesis behind Slow Burn is to draw parallels between Watergate and the current election scandals surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. Smartly, the podcast never tries to one-to-one this stuff by actually mentioning modern events. Instead, the first episode lays out the thesis: If we were actually living through a real Watergate right now, would we know it? What did the people then know as they were living through it? The podcast doesn't have to spell things out, as it's impossible not to recognize how closely the events of the 1970s track with events of today -- the shifting nature of the explanations, the efforts made to divert or tarnish the media, and more.

My only complaint about Slow Burn is that its magnifying glass is sometimes so focused, and its overall narrative not obviously linear, that it's sometimes hard to fit the pieces into a larger whole. There perhaps ought to have been a "Watergate 101" here -- though I suppose you can read up on that any number of places if you need it. (Perhaps you'll respect the podcast more for not spoon feeding you in that way.)

An 8-episode season of Slow Burn has recently wrapped up, but the podcast was apparently enough of a hit that they've already announced another season to come at a later date -- to be based around the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

If you like some historical distance from your political horror show, I recommend Slow Burn. I'd grade it a B+.