Jan. 6 Hearings: Will the Strong Opening Stick?

The Watergate hearings were full of surprises that jerked the public’s attention back to its TVs—and Nixon's crimes. The unexpected could happen again.

As long as I've lived in Washington, some fifty years now, thunderstorms have been a near-daily feature of late summer afternoons. When I first arrived they were mostly wet affairs, sheets of rain driven by wind gusts for an exciting 20 minutes or so, leaving the area temporarily cleansed of its notorious humidity. Today the clouds roil into far more me…