Watergate: To the Contrary, the System Didn’t Work

This week marks 50 years since Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in response to Watergate, the first and only sitting president to step down. The term Watergate itself, especially its suffix “-gate,” has become synonymous with sleaze.

The Watergate scandal and how it brought Richard Nixon down

The scandal remains central to Nixon’s legacy, even though we have a fuller appreciation of his presidency today, which included reducing Cold War tensions with the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, ending the Vietnam War, and enacting a forward-looking domestic program including the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Even though few people know anything specific about Watergate, two generations of Americans learned that what it demonstrated uppermost was that “the system worked”: The corrupt administration of Richard Nixon had to go, the national media performed admirably in their coverage of a challenging and fast-paced story, and that, while it was traumatic for the nation, the Constitution not only held but guided us through the process. However, with eyes much more open today, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that, to the contrary, what Watergate showed was that the system didn’t work.

Today we seem unable to investigate Watergate objectively

Fifty years is often a sufficient passage of time for revisionism to reshape our understanding of even the most complex and controversial subjects. By then, usually, everyone has left the scene, the records are all or mostly all open, a younger generation demands a fresh history written for them, and we are in a proper frame of mind for a reconsideration of what we thought we knew. Even divisive, white-hot political subjects can be examined more objectively after a sufficient passage of time. Not so with Watergate. The history we have of Watergate today is remarkably similar to what journalists wrote in the 1970s. The question for us is: Why? What makes Watergate different? Why does Watergate seem to be an exception to the usual process of historical inquiry?

It took nearly a hundred years for the nation to experience its first presidential impeachment of Andrew Johnson in the late 1860s, and a little over 100 years for the nation to experience its second, of Richard Nixon, in the 1970s. Enough time had passed that the era of Andrew Johnson seemed quaint by comparison.

Celebrity journalism, constant news reporting

Journalists covering Watergate became celebrities, no longer content with simply reporting the news when the opportunity to star in their coverage based on the innovation of anonymous sources was far more lucrative. In 10 years, we went from evening national news programs of 15 minutes in length in the fall of 1963 to our first experience with politics 24/7 in the fall of 1973 after impeachment proceedings were initiated following the “Saturday Night Massacre.” I’m not sure we were ready for that, with the editorial pages of most major newspapers saying mostly the same thing, and only three national television networks within about six blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan.

Fifty years ago, a majority of Americans viewed the Watergate Special Prosecutor as impartial even though there was not a single Republican in the office, and many had ties to Robert Kennedy’s Department of Justice. Back then, we did not think judges were interested in politics. Prominent military officials claimed not to vote in order to maintain separation from partisan activity. Sen. Sam Ervin, chairman of the most significant congressional investigation, was portrayed as a simple country lawyer and constitutional expert pursuing the truth.

The shocking collapse of Nixon’s popularity

The fact that there were three Republicans on his committee demonstrated the bipartisan nature of its inquiry. When Nixon ultimately lost control over his tapes, their content showed that only someone as paranoid as Richard Nixon would have bugged himself and others, or condoned wiretapping, break-ins, and the politicization of the U.S. government. This narrative that Nixon was unique was so effectively constructed, deployed, and reinforced that many of the 61% who supported him in 1972 – one of the four great landslides of the 20^th century – became convinced by it in fewer than six months. By the summer of 1973, Nixon was underwater in public opinion polls and never recovered.

Richard Nixon was probably the most investigated politician in U.S. history, although he might no longer hold that record. The figure depicted by Washington Post political cartoonist Herblock as crawling out of the sewer every four years to campaign for something is probably no longer the number one political villain either.

No one wants to investigate events objectively today

When I started the first website dedicated to the Nixon tapes in 2007, in answering inquiries from the media, scholars, and members of the public, I would estimate that at least 90% of the questions had to do with Watergate. Journalists who had made their names, careers, and fortunes writing about the subject relished it – but only the 1974 version, as I came to learn. The millions of pages of records that have been opened for research in the decades that followed were of no great consequence for those recognized as experts. New records and new context were inconvenient and either ignored or folded into conclusions established decades before.

Let’s consider that there was a kind of Nixon derangement syndrome – not only in predictable places like his political opposition, but also the establishment in his own party, cultural elites of all kinds, and especially the national media. And that this attitude left its mark on the history we have today. Nixon was not chased from office by Democrats alone, but also by Republicans – some of whom had never accepted him since Eisenhower/Nixon steamrolled their favorite candidate, “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft, in 1952.

Nixon didn’t fight hard enough

One of the lessons of Watergate might be not that Nixon was excessively partisan but instead that he was not partisan enough. He might have been visceral in his pursuit of Alger Hiss by the standards of the late 1940s, but by the late 1960s, the stakes were much higher. Presidents since Nixon who have faced the threat of impeachment and removal from office figured out how important it is to take care of 34 votes on their side in the Senate, sufficient to block the two-thirds majority required for removal from office.

If politics is the continuation of war by other means, Nixon was wholly unprepared and almost naïve about the nature of combat he faced. His 1972 landslide didn’t make him all-powerful; power began to drain from him the moment it was over because everyone knew he would never appear on another ballot again. Nixon was an easy target and always has been. Looking at Nixon through a more neutral prism allows a modern observer to weigh the possibility that Nixon wasn’t despised by his worst critics because he was what they said he was. He was despised because he was often effective at key moments throughout his career.

Looking back on Watergate at last

Only since Nixon’s death in April 1994 have we gradually acquired the perspectives needed to reexamine Watergate – as a result of the impeachment of Bill Clinton and, more recently, Donald Trump, and an even more visceral political era that itself is beginning to make the Watergate era quaint, as Watergate did for Andrew Johnson’s era. No matter where one is situated on the political spectrum, you’ve seen it done to your side.

We now know, for instance, that some of the investigators who accused Nixon of improper conduct engaged in improper conduct themselves while pursuing Nixon. Today we question the validity and even the constitutionality of special prosecutors. We understand that judges are human and can be influenced by fame and partisanship. The media landscape today is very different and includes many more perspectives. We understand that impeachment is a political process without the usual safeguards of a criminal or civil proceeding – which can also be manipulated. We understand that one of the reasons grand juries operate in secrecy is because it makes it difficult for us to hold them accountable.

What did Nixon do wrong?

When it comes to Watergate itself, what wrongdoing can we actually attribute to Nixon himself? I’m not saying the answer is nothing, but is that not a fair question to ask? Regardless of your answer, my response will be: How do we know that? Also: What context do we need? If the conventional wisdom today is that the most impeachable thing Nixon did was obstruction of justice, as illuminated by the “Smoking Gun” tape in which Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, discuss using the CIA to block the FBI investigation of Watergate, even John Dean – formerly known as Nixon’s chief critic – has come forward in the past 10 years to say that tape was misinterpreted when it was released in late July 1974, because when it was recorded six days after the 1972 Watergate break-in, Nixon and Haldeman did not know enough to obstruct anything.

The system did not work

For the Watergate narrative to hold in 1973 and 1974, that Nixon was a uniquely criminal figure who should be removed from office, we could not be permitted to learn about the misdeeds of others until Nixon was gone – since the goal was to drive him from office. If the guiltiest person deserves the fairest trial, we were missing the critical context needed to judge Nixon – not just the 61% who supported him in 1972, only to abandon him six months into his second term of office, and those who worked for him who later questioned their decision to do so, but all Americans.

The system did not work, and the process of historical inquiry has not worked. Because of our misunderstanding of Watergate, we have also misunderstood the entire Nixon era. Instead, let’s reexamine Watergate in its full context: a struggle over presidential power that started two decades before, a nation that doubted itself after Vietnam and civil rights, Cold War convulsions that rippled across the globe in the 1960s, and a political system in the midst of a shift not seen since the 1930s when the New Deal coalition came together.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.