“What was Watergate?” is the question to which reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein offer a reply in their latest dispatch in the Washington Post. The occasion is the 40^th anniversary* of our nation’s greatest political scandal. The famed reporters, who broke the story, now reckon that it was far worse than they had thought at the time.

Watergate, they have come to conclude over the years, comprised five campaigns, which they called “Nixon’s five wars.” The first, they write, was “the war against the anti-war movement.” The second was the “war on the news media.” Third was the “war against the Democrats.” Fourth was the “war on justice.” Fifth was “the war on history.”

We don’t particularly care to quarrel with Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein about those wars; Nixon had plenty for which to answer. But it strikes us that Nixon was invested in a sixth war that is missing from their list and that was the most important war of all. It was the war against the communists in Indochina.

Nixon didn’t start the war; it was started by the communists. It was President Kennedy who plunged us directly into the Vietnam War, and President Johnson who made it an enormous expedition. Nixon fought to avoid losing that war until the end of his presidency. To us, at least, it’s no small thing that during the big buildup the Washington Post was riding in support with all saddle-bags-in-the-wind.

That was in the 1960s, when the Post was edited by James Russell Wiggins. The paper has had some titanic editors over the years, including Benjamin Bradlee, who stood by Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein throughout the Watergate campaign. But Wiggins was the last of the editors to control both the newspaper’s newsroom and its editorial pages and, as an intellect, he was the paper’s most towering leader.

Wiggins died in 2000. His views on the Southeast Asia conflict, according to the Washington Post’s own obituary for its erstwhile editor, grew from his “conviction that World War II was a result of the democracies’ policy of appeasing Hitler in the 1930s.” The Post called Wiggins a “man for whom liberty always was balanced by duty, he believed the United States was bound to support its small ally.”

One of our favorite stories about Wiggins was told by Stephen Rosenfeld, who was the Post’s correspondent at Moscow when Wiggins made a visit to the Soviet Union. Rosenfeld arranged for the editor to see the leading North Vietnamese representative to the Soviet regime. “The Vietnamese laid out on his desk a whole sheaf of American newspaper clippings about the American peace movement,” Mr. Rosenfeld later wrote, “and told Russ that was how Hanoi intended to win the war.”

“Russ’s face reddened and he set his jaw,” Rosenfeld wrote. Eventually, when the Post turned against the war and threw in with the peace movement, Wiggins took his hat off the rack, either figuratively or literally, and left. LBJ was so grateful for Wiggins’ support of the war that he made the editor America’s envoy to the United Nations, where Wiggins served with distinction for the remainder of Johnson’s term.

In the latter years of Wiggins’ life, we used to make a point, when we were in Maine, of visiting him at the Ellsworth American, which he had purchased in 1966. We often ended up having a bowl of fish chowder at an eatery on the banks of the Union River. We have no doubt Wiggins was as horrified as Ben Bradlee and his famous pair of reporters were at the transgressions of Nixon.

Yet we have the sense that Wiggins was also horrified, as Nixon was, at the way the communist side counted on the peace movement to cut into support for the American war effort. It doesn’t justify the violations Nixon committed. But if the Watergate story is going to be told as a compilation of Nixon’s wars, the struggle of the 37^th president against the communists in Vietnam is an important part of the narrative, particularly because it is the part where he was he was on the right side.

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* The scandal began on June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars was arrested for breaking and entering an office of the Democratic Party at the Watergate building in Washington.