
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994                   TAG: 9405170049
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

AUTHORITY

ONE CRITICISM of the late Richard Nixon's presidency is that, with Watergate, he finished off the job begun by Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam policy in making the American people utterly distrust their own government.

That could be a bad rap.

Historian Gordon S. Wood won a Pulitzer last year for his "The Radicalism of the American Revolution." But Wood had already built his scholarly reputation on his 1969 masterpiece, "The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787," reissued a few months ago in paperback.

In it, he traces the evolution of American political thinking from the late colonial period, when the English Whig tradition informed the colonists' views, to the adoption of a written Constitution, an American invention.

The Whigs, objecting to the powers of the unelected crown and aristocracy, upheld the supremacy of the people's elected representatives in a fairly chosen Parliament.

Wood shows how quickly after the Declaration of Independence, the Americans - now without crown or aristocracy - transformed their earlier distrust of unelected courtiers into distrust of governmental authorities they themselves had elected.

Credibility gaps, it seems, didn't begin with Johnson and Nixon. They're as old as the republic.

by CNB