The cover-up is worse than the crime. That’s the main lesson drawn from the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. President Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign from office (rather than be impeached) when he and his White House aides attempted to conceal their involvement in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), vice chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, put it succinctly: “It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.”

Political scandals and cover-ups in Washington are nothing new. The latest example is in the just published, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Co-written by well-respected journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the book charts the president’s rapid and tragic decline in his mental acuity and the concerted efforts of a tightly knit coterie of aides to keep it all from the public.

This is not the first time a president’s declining health was concealed from the public. President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke in 1919, early in his second term, which left him incapacitated. His wife Edith and his personal physician kept his condition secret, and his wife performed most of his official duties for the remainder of his term through........

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