Watergate

It's a big world, and lots of things happen. And certainly in the 20th century there were plenty of events. But one of the more enduring ones surely would have to be the Watergate break-in of 1972 and its aftermath. And one of the connections to that somewhat long-ago event just passed away at 92.

Bernard Barker, A Watergate Burglar Dies at 92

It was June 17, 1972 when Mr. Barker and others were arrested at the Watergate complex, having broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Ultimately, President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office in 1974.

Articles, books, movies galore have been produced about the story. But aside from starting with planning the break-in itself, the presidential world started to unravel when the burglars placed a piece of retaining tape over a door's catch that left it visible from the outside, rather than placing it completely vertical on the door's edge, making it invisible with the door closed.

It was the misapplied tape that Frank Wills, a Watergate security guard noticed that alerted him to a burglary. The rest is history. And plenty of it.

So, if nothing else, the Watergate burglars added a piece of crime detection lore to the manual. The serial killer Son of Sam was eventually apprehended after a parking ticket that he received at one of his shootings drew enough attention to make an investigator ask why was someone with a Yonkers address on Shore Parkway in Brooklyn at the time of the shooting?

Spotting missing license plates played into quickly catching up to the Oklahoma City office building bombers. A L.I. serial killer of prostitutes was ultimately done in by a traffic check for a missing license plate. The body in the back of truck under the landscaping debris was also incriminating. The list can go on.

In the obituary, Susan Jo Keller writes that Mr. Barker, a Cuban-born American said he was involved in the break-in because he felt they might get some goods on the Democrats and that it would speed up the "liberation" of Cuba.

In 1972 Fidel Castro was president of Cuba. In 2009 it seems his brother Raul runs the show. All in the family. In the 1950s when I was growing up in Flushing and going to grammar school at P.S. 22 Castro's son or nephew was attending P.S. 20, less than a mile away. This of course was when the United States was still trying to woo Castro to be an ally.

All these years later and Cuba is still under a Communist thumb, and might remain that way if it continues to stay in the family. It is being significantly delayed from becoming a de facto 51st state hosting game shows having a week-long change of venue.

Ms. Keller closes the obituary with an obituary writer's technique of quoting the recently departed. The last words, so to speak, to remember them by. (The Last Word is also an excellent collection of New York Times obituaries, complied by Marvin Siegel, forward by Russell Baker.)

In repeated interviews, Mr. Barker expressed no regrets about his role in the two break-ins [there was another famous one], saying he believed he had been acting in the interests of national security. But in 1976 he did tell a reporter: "Washington's a place to keep away from. Cubans don't do very well up there."

And when they don't put the tape on the door right, others don't do too well either.

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