Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks speaks in Gainesville on November 6th

It’s been a long and winding road for Jill Wine-Banks from her days as a prosecutor at Watergate to the publication of her book about that time and its impact on her personal and professional life.

But today Wine-Banks is on the rise, attracting attention for her new book, “The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President,” and for her comments as an MSNBC legal analyst and co-host of two podcasts, # SistersInLaw and iGenPolitics.

Wine-Banks will share their story with the Democratic Women’s Club of Alachua County at the Best Western Gateway Grand Hotel in Gainesville on November 6th. The group also honors two longtime Democratic Party women, Grace Nelson and Adele Graham, spouses of the NASA administrator and former Sen. Bill Nelson and former Governor Bob Graham, respectively.

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Her book has been a long time coming since 1976 when she first turned down the idea.

“I felt like I had nothing interesting to say, that everything was in the press, that one of my colleagues was also working on a book, and that I didn’t have much to add,” she said.

Wine-Banks made a national name for herself in 1973 as the “Mini Skirt Prosecutor” whose investigation helped bring down President Richard Nixon. From Watergate, Wine-Banks became a woman of first choice – the first female president of the American Bar Association and the first woman to serve as U.S. Army General Counsel under President Jimmy Carter. She takes her groundbreaking achievements seriously.

“It’s like being the oldest child, you have to do everything better than anyone who follows you because you open the doors,” she said. “One of my proudest accomplishments is that my successor as General Counsel of the Army was a different woman … I just want to make sure I won’t be the last, I open doors.”

In 2008 she returned to the idea of ​​making a book, although she only became known as a broadcasting expert a few years ago. This led them to believe that the growing divisions that characterize our current political times might lead them to look back on history. A literary agent pounced on the idea.

“She was very interested, especially when I was ready to go back to my original plan, which was to integrate the workings of justice, democracy, bipartisanism and the Watergate litigation drama with my personal story,” she said.

Beyond Watergate

And Wine-Banks reveals everything in her book, not just about Watergate, but about her personal life and her own insecurities, including her marital problems, a love affair back then, and her subsequent reunion with her high school sweetheart and the man she’s been with now has been married for almost 42 years.

“It showed the contrast between the public person I was portraying and the real me who was the personal private person,” she said. “I thought it was worth telling because I believe a lot of women find themselves in this special situation.”

Wine-Banks is an avid reader of memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies about those she considers successful women “to see how they overcome the hurdles they encountered, how they succeeded, how they got motivation and had the courage to get involved in society ”. Obstacles and, in their case, personal obstacles.

“I felt that if I told my story honestly, it would help other women realize that it wasn’t their fault, and that it was not their responsibility to fix it, nor was it in their power, and that it was me maybe that could help other women, “she said.

These days Wine-Banks sometimes ponders Rose Mary Woods and her testimony at the Watergate hearings. Wine-Banks caught public attention with their cross-examination of Woods, who unsuccessfully attempted to explain the deletion of 18½ minutes of a taped conversation between Nixon and a top advisor about their Watergate gimmicks.

Woods died in 2005, and Wine-Banks tried unsuccessfully to get Woods’ friends and family to speak to her about her book. “It was important that she be a real person. And she’s not a big opponent for me if she’s just a weak little secretary. And when she’s really an influential person, she becomes much more powerful. “

The expert is also known for the brooches she wears, which she chooses to make both a fashion statement and a political statement to accompany her comment.

She started wearing costume jewelry while traveling the world as a company director for Motorola and later for Maytag, but her now extensive collection of brochures emerged more recently with a desire to make a statement and not just copy her male counterparts by they carried a flag pen.

When she first appeared as a commentator, she wore a celluloid eagle with a sign that read “Defend America”. She immediately got positive comments on Twitter, thinking, “If I send a message through my Pin, I should do it carefully.”

Now Wine-Banks has hundreds of Pins in her collection and she’s always on the hunt for more, scouring the internet on sites like Etsy, flea markets, and in friends’ closets.

The question now arises as to which pin Wine-Banks will wear in Gainesville.

The post Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks speaks in Gainesville on November 6th first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

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