Jeff Greenfield writes:

It is fitting that a giant television screen loomed over the members of the January 6 committee Thursday night. The core premise of this hearing was that the images from that day, accompanied by the comments and testimony of key players in Donald Trump’s orbit, would galvanize a national audience.

It’s too easy — and more importantly, unfair — to dismiss the presentation as “political theater.” The interviews with insurrectionists, the blunt comments from former Attorney General William Barr that Trump’s beliefs were “bullshit” — were effective tools in trying to communicate what happened on Jan. 6 and in the days and weeks before. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), in her role as chief prosecutor, skillfully summarized the evidence to come, which promised to paint a damning portrait of a president and a coterie of aides and acolytes, determined to retain power “by any means necessary,” including the wholesale abandonment of constitutional norms. The violence captured in the videos was gut-wrenching, and the testimony of the victims of that violence was powerful.

But looming over Thursday’s event, and the hearings to follow, is one key fact: In the broadest sense, we know what happened. We may learn compelling details, and we may see a clear, coherent picture of what happened, but we know the sitting president of the United States oversaw an attempt to overturn an election and seize power the voters denied him. We know he embraced the sentiments of the rioters who stormed the Capitol. And it is this fact that so contrasts this proceeding with what happened almost half a century ago.

If you think back (inevitably) to the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, every dramatic moment in those proceedings came in words spoken by witnesses, unadorned by visuals and made-for-TV moments: the affectless face of John Dean as he recalled telling President Richard Nixon that there was “a cancer” on the presidency, and — most significant — White House functionary Alexander Butterfield telling minority counsel Fred Thompson yes, there was a taping system inside the White House. (If you watch the video, you’ll see a reporter at the press table behind Butterfield suddenly snap to attention, the body language shouting: What did he just say?)

The old-fashioned, methodical parade of witnesses during the Watergate hearings was powerful not because of what we saw, but because of what we heard: We were learning facts we did not know, and that was, over time, causing minds to change. [Continue reading…]