jaunthie | Is this what the days leading up to Watergate were like?

I'm not old enough to remember Watergate well, although I can say that August 8, 1974 is my oldest conscious political memory. (Maybe that's why I'm innately cynical about politics.) I certainly don't remember whether there were days and weeks and months of speculation, waiting for charges to be filed (if any), and consistent efforts from both ends of the spectrum to spin facts instead of consider them in any depth. I'm finding myself deeply interested in the multiple investigations into this current administration (Plame, Abramoff, DeLay, Frist, etc.) to the point of feeling like I'm on tenterhooks waiting for Fitzgerald's indictments.

I was not nearly this interested in the whole Ken Starr investigation (and I have miserable memories of being trapped in an airport for 12 hours with nonstop, inescapable coverage of the impeachment hearings). Maybe that's because I didn't find the underlying issue (consensual extramarital sexual activities) to be of national importance, although I did and do think that Clinton was guilty of perjury, and that he was rightly nailed for it. He lied under oath. It's a crime, and he was punished for it (although not as extensively as he could have been). But I don't remember being on tenterhooks about it, not even during the impeachment (although again, that might simply be because I was stuck in an airport at the time, and the combination of flickering flourescent lights and squealing-television histronics gave me one of the worst headaches I've ever had). But I do feel that the current scandals (yes, plural) are momentous, and that the atmosphere in general right now is much more ominous than it was then. Am I misremembering? And for those of you who do remember, was the atmosphere similarly murky/gloomy/speculative before Watergate?