The lens through which we here at The New York Sun tend to view Watergate is the prism of Vietnam. We recognize this is not the first thing many think of when they think of Watergate, as so many are doing this week following the disclosure of the identity of the Washington Post’s secret source. Many will think first of the lesson that the press is sovereign and that the president of America is not above the law. They are important lessons, to be sure, but there were a lot of laws being broken at that time, some perhaps, as the AP is reporting, even by the Washington Post’s celebrated source. And the press wasn’t the only sovereign with an interest in the story.

What lingers for us is that Watergate came to a head during the most desperate days of a war for the freedom and self-determination of the 50 million or more people of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Washington Post and the other papers began to go after the president at a time when President Nixon was frantically trying to negotiate an honorable settlement, one that would permit American GIs to withdraw at a pace that would allow the free Vietnamese forces to prepare for the task of guarding against an onslaught from the communists.

Certainly the Washington Post and the other papers were within their rights to take on the president, even in the midst of a war. We do not question the patriotism of the press or any of its reporters or editors. It was Nixon who made the blunders that cost him his office and that a president of stronger character or greater wisdom might have been able to avoid. There were honorable, patriotic men and women on both sides of the Vietnam debate. But neither are we so naive as to think that all of those in the long line of newspapermen – and sources – who put Nixon on the defensive were indifferent to the effect it was having on a war so many of them had come to oppose.

Nor do we think of Nixon as the big loser in Watergate. He finished out his life with dignity and honor and, for that matter, wealth. The losers in Watergate were the people of Indochina. It was they who had looked to America for protection. Yet in one timeline we read on Watergate, the word Vietnam appears only once, with a note that the New York Times and the Washington Post began publishing the classified history of the war known as the Pentagon Papers and that less than three months later, the White House “plumbers unit” broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who had leaked the documents.

From the beginning, the whole Watergate saga was intimately linked to the Vietnam drama. Nixon was finally ousted in 1974, in August, and in early 1975, the Congress cut off supplies and materiel for the South Vietnamese military. That precipitated the retreat from the Central Highlands and the final communist drive to conquer the South, which culminated in all of Indochina being thrown into the darkness of totalitarian rule. Millions tried to escape. Millions died. That was neither the goal nor the fault of the Washington Post or of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein or of their secret source. But it is what we here think about when we think of Watergate.

And it’s something to think about whenever the press confronts a beleaguered president in the midst of a war. It’s not a partisan matter. The editors now conducting The New York Sun made this point repeatedly when it was a Democrat, William Clinton, in the crosshairs of an independent prosecutor without budgetary or political constraint. We cited the warning issued by Justice Scalia, when he dissented, in Morrison v. Olson, from the ruling in which the high court permitted an independent counsel to operate. The Great Scalia warned that with such an unrelenting attack there was a danger that what could be affected was the “boldness of the president, “and when the leaders of America lack for boldness, the costs around the world can be enormous.