JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Woodward and Bernstein didn’t bring down a president in Watergate – but the myth that they did lives on.

However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work.

Woodward and Bernstein did disclose financial links between Nixon’s reelection campaign and the burglars arrested June 17, 1972, at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in what was the signal crime of Watergate.

They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixon’s former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal.

They won a Pulitzer Prize for the Post.

But they missed decisive elements of Watergate, notably the payment of hush money to the burglars and the existence of Nixon’s White House tapes.

Nonetheless, the heroic-journalist myth became so entrenched that it could withstand disclaimers by Watergate-era principals at the Post such as Graham. Even Woodward has disavowed the heroic-journalist interpretation, once telling an interviewer that “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon.

“Totally absurd.”

With the upcoming 50th anniversary of Watergate on Friday, here’s a related anniversary as well: 60 Years Ago This Week: the Birth of the New Left.

If a New Left emerged in 1962, that means there had to be an Old Left. The Old Left was dynastic — think Roosevelts and Kennedys — and aristocratic. More importantly, it was anticommunist.

Mohler points out that there wasn’t a ton of difference between the Old Left and conservatives in the first half of the 20th century.

“One of the things I often do with my graduate students is show them the 1960 platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States,” he says. “You go to a year like 2016? They are radically different. But in 1960, you’ll have a hard time drawing distinctions between the Democratic and the Republican parties on many policies. Because during the era of the Cold War, and in the wake of the New Deal, the two parties were pretty close together.”

By contrast, the New Left, as the SDS represented, was populist, youth-led, and radical. The SDS itself stemmed from campus socialist organizations. It took advantage of the youthful energy and idealism of that generation in order to push for change.

At the time, the SDS didn’t make much of a splash. The media didn’t herald it as a major event, and it didn’t create immediate ripples. But what came after it did change the decade of the ’60s and the era that followed.

The SDS and the Port Huron Statement begat the anti-Vietnam War movement, the activism of earnest young civil rights activists, and the “free-speech movement” on college campuses. They also served as the genesis of the Weather Underground, the Chicago Seven, the sexual revolution, and the gay rights movement.

As radical as the New Left was at the time, its tenets are mainstream in today’s Democratic party (and some of its ideas might even come across as outdated to this crop of leftists). Mohler puts it this way: “many of the ideas that were considered radical 60 years ago are now absolutely mainstream, and for that matter, nowhere near the left of what we might call the New New Left in the United States. In particular, taking a snapshot of the Democratic Party.”

Flashback: Amity Shlaes’ ‘Great Society:’ How Poverty Won America’s War on Poverty. There’s a reason why its epigraph is, “Nothing is new, it is just forgotten.”