World
Richard Nixon resigned 50 years ago. The political world has never been the same.
Howard Baker on the decisive moment in Watergate and Richard Nixon’s presidency
Howard Baker and John Siegenthaler talk about a conversation with President Nixon that led Baker to find the facts, regardless of politics and party.
University of Tennessee
WASHINGTON – Exactly 50 years ago, a beleaguered President Richard M. Nixon entered the Oval Office, stared into a television camera and performed an act that still echoes in today’s very different political world.
He resigned the presidency.
“By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America,” Nixon said in a prime-time address on Aug. 8, 1974.
The level of political healing in America over the past half century is debatable.
Nixon’s resignation remains a singular event in American history. It, and the Watergate scandal that devoured his presidency, bequeathed a political environment that is more partisan, cynical and distrustful of government.
‘Vulnerable’ to unscrupulous presidents
Some historians and political scientists said Watergate proved that “our Constitution works,” in the words of Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford. They also said that, half a century on, the institutions that held Nixon to account have frayed, and too many leaders have drawn negative lessons from Watergate, seeking to exercise Nixon-style power while avoiding the land mines that ended his presidency.
“We’re still very vulnerable to an unscrupulous president,” said Michael Genovese, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University and author of “The Watergate Crisis.”
A more partisan world
“To me, the story of Watergate is the story of the system working as intended,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told USA TODAY. But Graff noted he’s not sure it works as well in these polarized times.
“Unfortunately,” Graff said, “the politics of today make it much harder to hold any president to the standard that was widely agreed upon in 1974.”
Partisan polarization is one reason that another Nixon-like presidential resignation is hard to foresee.
Back in 1974, more than a few Republicans supported Nixon’s removal from office.
In recent decades, the political parties have been more uniform in rallying around presidents in trouble, whether it was Bill Clinton over his relationship with a White House intern or Donald Trump and allegations surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
U.S. Houses controlled by the opposition party impeached Clinton and Trump – Trump twice – but partisan base loyalty helped them win acquittals in the Senate and resist calls for their resignations.
No one wants to be another Nixon.
A system under strain
Nancy Kassop, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at New Paltz, said things have “changed so much” since Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. “We’re not playing traditional politics anymore.”
Opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s had already caused a rising number of people to lose trust in government.
In the years after Nixon’s resignation, the scandal inspired a reassertion of congressional authority and passage of new ethics laws, strengthened the role of the courts in restraining presidential power, and gave new prominence to the media as a public watchdog.
Over the past half-century, however, those institutions have taken many hits to their reputations, thanks in part to relentless attacks from Trump and his MAGA supporters. Trump’s 2016 victory came as he vowed to “drain the swamp” in Washington.
But it’s not just the former president’s base. A Gallup survey last year found that 8% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in Congress as an institution. Seventeen percent said the same about the nation’s criminal justice system.
“Faith in the system is essential,” Kassop said, “and it is really under strain right now.”
No one has tested the post-Watergate system more than Trump – the only former president to be convicted of crimes (in his hush money case in New York) and the only one to face criminal indictment, in four separate criminal cases − including allegations related to Jan. 6 and his hoarding of classified documents.
Trump was impeached twice, once for pressuring the leader of Ukraine to investigate Biden and again over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Former White House counsel John Dean, the key witness against Nixon back in the day, told CNN that Trump’s efforts targeting the results of the 2020 election were “much bigger than Watergate.”
Still, Trump, and many of his voters, have rejected the Nixon comparison.
In 2019, after Dean criticized Trump’s actions during the 2016 election investigation into Russian interference, the then-president told reporters regarding Nixon: “He left. I don’t leave. A big difference. I don’t leave.”
A brief history of Watergate
Nixon’s resignation capped the more than two-year Watergate scandal that, along with Vietnam, transformed the presidency and the politics surrounding it.
It began on June 17, 1972, with a break-in at the Watergate building complex along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., a failed attempt by the Nixon reelection campaign to bug Democratic Party headquarters.
Shortly after the break-in, Nixon inserted himself into an obstruction of justice case by talking with an aide about blocking the FBI investigation – a probe that would lead to discovery of all kinds of “dirty tricks” by the Nixon campaign during the 1972 campaign.
That discussion was captured by a taping system Nixon had installed for purposes of the historical record. In the summer of 1973, a special Senate committee revealed the existence of White House tapes that would shed light on the Watergate cover-up.
The Nixon tapes
Special prosecutor Archibald Cox, in charge of a grand jury investigation, sought to subpoena the tapes. Nixon refused to turn them over, claiming executive privilege shielded them from legal scrutiny.
On Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon fired Cox over the tapes dispute, an event forever known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Public and congressional pressure forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Texas attorney Leon Jaworski.
The House of Representatives, meanwhile, opened an impeachment inquiry. On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that Nixon be impeached.
The full House never took up impeachment; the die had been cast for Nixon.
Three days before the first committee vote, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes − one of which would include the “smoking gun” discussion of interfering in the FBI investigation.
After that tape surfaced – in an event unimaginable today – a delegation of Republican congressional leaders trooped to the White House to tell Nixon he could not survive impeachment votes in Congress.
Folding his hand
Nixon decided to make his speech on the night of Aug. 8, 1974, telling the nation his resignation would become effective at noon the next day.
Rather than apologize, Nixon said, “I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.”
Before leaving the White House on Aug. 9, Nixon spoke to staff members in a valedictory that included advice he had tended to ignore himself.
“Always give your best,” Nixon said. “Never get discouraged, never be petty; always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Fear factor
As with many stunning political moments, including the pro-Trump riot on Jan. 6, Watergate had its roots in an election.
Nixon and allies, having lost a very close election in 1960 to John F. Kennedy and won a very close election in 1968 over Hubert Humphrey, were somewhat paranoid about their chances of reelection in 1972.
Though Nixon wound up carrying 49 out of 50 states in 1972 against Democrat George McGovern, he and his allies engaged in activities that would land some of the aides in prison and lead to history’s only presidential resignation.
Not that election shenanigans have stopped.
Trump and aides continue to lob false accusations over the 2020 election, claims that contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and are part of criminal charges pending against Trump in Washington, D.C., and Georgia.
“Elections are not our finest hour,” said Tom Cronin, a political scientist and a co-author of the book “The Paradoxes of the American Presidency.”
The echoes of Watergate
In 1999, near the 25th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward published “Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate.”
“After more than 25 years of covering presidents, I am still surprised that his successors did not fully comprehend the depth of distrust left by Nixon,” Woodward wrote during the Clinton administration. “New ethics laws, a resurgent Congress and a more inquiring media altered the prerogatives and daily lives of presidents.”
The echoes of Watergate are constant.
The Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that presidents are immune from prosecution for “official” acts while in office. Critics of the decision said Nixon could have beaten the Watergate rap with that kind of legal precedent.
Ford’s 1974 decision to grant Nixon a preemptive pardon is still debated by historians, some of whom believe it inadvertently encouraged future presidents – particularly Trump – to test the boundaries of the law.
The pardon question may well surface again if President Joe Biden considers whether to pardon son Hunter Biden over his federal gun conviction – and if Trump is elected to a second term and put in a position to pardon himself over allegations against him.
‘A much more cynical turn’
It is doubtful Watergate would play out the same way today because of what Graff called “a much more cynical turn in American politics.”
Other experts agreed. Luke Nichter, who has edited books of Nixon tape transcripts and teaches history at Chapman University, said today’s students have similar reactions during classes about the Watergate scandal: What was the big deal? They have become inured to allegations of government corruption and deep partisanship.
Said Nichter: “Our current political environment is starting to make that political environment look quaint.”
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