Immediately after his conviction, John Ehrlichman wondered to reporters whether the Watergate investigation was worth all the lives destroyed or irreparably altered in its wake.  I wondered what he might think of the language process that had brought the condition about.

             Words have the power to enrich and to limit our lives. Ehrlichman, the lawyer, was surely aware of this fact.  And the enrichment or the limitation depends on how the words are used.  Words are loaded with feelings, and associations and their use is a highly subjective process.  They never mean exactly the same thing to different people.  But we must use words if we are to talk, and talk we must if we are to evaluate experience. That's what the judicial process is all about.

             John Barth, the novelist, tells us that to "turn experience into speech... is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it."  Undoubtedly those prosecuted in the Watergate investigation feel poignantly that - in the telling - their experience was falsified.  But "only so betrayed," says Barth, "can experience be dealt with at all."  And though verbalizing experience betrays and falsifies it, says Barth, the writer, "only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking."

             Man is a symbolic animal, a slave to words; he has got to know and understand.  Had the Watergate investigation not been pursued to its conclusion, we would have lost some of our dignity as human beings.

             A poet once said, "Sensations or feelings that I cannot put into words seem so much more lovely than the rest."  He, like Barth, like Ehrlichman, also feels the verbalizing of experience betrays and falsifies it; but he persists.  He must verbalize his feelings, lovely as they are, in order to understand them.  He has no other choice.  That's what makes him a poet.  And once feelings are understood, they become something other than feelings and are somehow not so lovely.

             That's why we read poetry and fiction.  We recognize our own sensations and feelings as they repeat themselves in the experience of others. And the vicarious experience we gain through reading makes our own experiences more real.

             Obviously, since the experiences of Watergate have been put into words, they are not so lovely.  And since they are not so lovely as before, the players feel that their experiences have been betrayed and falsified.  Many of them have said as much; they look to the perspective of history to make the record clear.

             The selecting and ordering of feelings and actions to determine motivations inevitable in a particular situation is the work of man with language.  As the judicial process works, we must hope that the total effect of the arguments will verbalize an experience and make it understandable with as little betrayal and falsity as possible. We must hope that the fiction, the poetry, the vicarious experience will produce a truth in which we can recognize our own sensations and feelings and thus enable us to judge the actions of others with compassion.

     Yes, Mr. Ehrlichman, the Watergate investigation was worth all the lives destroyed or irreparably altered, for without writing the story, we would not know the truth, false as it may seem.    

                        Bill Reynolds