LBJ, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate. I'm now old enough that the events of my childhood are now explained by unsealed records and the historical perspective.
On the 50th anniversary of overwhelming Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, August 7th 1964, a BBC documentary featuring archival audio of President Johnson and his advisors discussing the complicated and controversial decision to announce an "unprovoked attack" on American ships and the retaliatory strike that followed. President Johnson said "we seek no wider war," but a much wider war followed. bbc 
Modern journalism is the way it is because of the work 40 years ago of two Washington Post reporters who did most to investigate the White House under President Richard Nixon. They were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Newshour’s Owen Bennett-Jones – himself a former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton – looks at how their story, which started off covering a Washington burglary case, ended up exposing the wrongdoing of an American president. bbc
# Related
Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian
leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too
much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do
whatever they want--which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and
brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships
posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars
both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going
to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy
today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the
nation. pdf