Watergate Revisited

Was Nixon shafted by the Washington establishment ?

Amid the excitement of the Olympic Games a significant anniversary passed by last Friday, August 9^th with little to no public comment or reportage.

On that day in 1974 Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37^th President of the United States, resigned from office amid the ongoing revelations of what became known as the Watergate scandal.

The narrative at the time, and mostly in the half century since, is that Nixon knew all about the burglary in that Washington DC hotel and apartment block. What’s more he authorized a cover-up of the Watergate break-in and  of  other activities planned by the notorious Committee to Re-Elect the President, otherwise known as Creep. After revelations he had a low-tech recording system in the Oval Office, and that he’d refused to hand over the tapes of the recordings, there were plans afoot to have him impeached in Congress.

So the President jumped before he was pushed.

But fifty years on is it time to re-evaluate what really went on. Did Nixon suffer because of  crazy ideas by some of his underlings that he knew little or nothing about? More significantly and seriously, was he a victim of a corrupt prosecutorial and judicial process deep inside the Washington establishment, an establishment with strong Democratic Party ties that didn’t want a popular Republican in the White House?

Let’s go back a few years. Nixon, who served as a senator and then as Vice-President to Eisenhower for most of the 1950s, finally achieved his ambition when he won the 1968 Presidential election. It was narrow win in the popular vote – 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent over Hubert Humphrey - but comfortable enough in the Electoral College (EC) 301 to 191 with Alabama Governor George Wallace, the third candidate, winning five states and 46 EC votes.

In his first term Nixon became enormously popular, especially because of the number one issue of the time. He reduced the number of American soldiers in Vietnam from 500,000 to 50,000. He also opened détente with the Soviet Union, started US relations with China when he met Mao Tse-Tung and opened the Environmental Protection Agency, the first time a US government agency took matters of pollution seriously.

The result in the 1972 election was a landslide. With 60.7 percent of the votes in his contest with Democrat George McGovern, and 520 of the 538 EC votes it was one of the most one sided election results in US Presidential history.

Yet just 20 months after his second inauguration in January 1973 Nixon flew off in a helicopter from the White House lawn in disgrace. How could one of the most popular Presidents in US history fall from grace so quickly?

In the 1972 Electoral College, Nixon won a staggering 49 out of the 50 states. He lost the popular vote only in Massachusetts, home of the Kennedys and always a Democrat stronghold. Nixon also lost  Washington DC. There were only 3 EC votes but a lot of powerful Democrat figures who weren’t happy with the result lived in the capital.

Just why Nixon’s second term collapsed so spectacularly  is now the subject of a new documentary Watergate Secrets and Betrayals: Orchestrating Nixon’s Demise. It’s based on the research of Geoff Shephard, a graduate of Harvard Law School, then a young lawyer on Nixon’s White House staff, who went on to have a highly successful legal career in the insurance industry.

Shephard was a Nixon supporter but he’s first and foremost a lawyer who wants justice and honesty in society. What Shephard found as he researched the papers of Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski was behaviour involving Jaworski and Watergate trial judge John J Sirica which was both illegal and immoral.

There are public records now which show Jaworski and Sirica held secret meetings before the trial to discuss evidence, without the defence involved.

The documentary, and a fascinating two hour discussion between Shephard and broadcaster Tucker Carlson, shed new light on what was the greatest political story of the 20^th century.

It was a story that always fascinated me. I was living in the US as a high school student when the break-in at Watergate happened on June 17^th 1972. Back in New Zealand I devoured news coverage of the hearings and court cases during 1973 and into 1974 before the dramatic resignation on August 9^th 1974, fifty years ago last Friday.

I loved the book “All The President’s Men”  written by the two Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who broke and then reported the story throughout, and then the movie of the same name that followed in 1976 starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.

The work of Woodward and Bernstein is credited with inspiring a generation of young journalists worldwide to become intrepid investigative reporters. Yet their impact, the quality of their research and their political motives in reporting the story are under scrutiny in both the documentary and the Carlson/Shephard interview.

Watergate is important because public trust in government and institutions reduced significantly as a consequence of the scandal. That loss of trust spread around the world, including to New Zealand. Half a century on, that trust has never recovered and is unlikely to - ever.

Above all, Watergate is a cracking good yarn and about lies, deceit and corruption. But this new material poses the question – who were really the crooks?

For those of a certain generation, devour these two video items and then ask yourself, is that how I remember Watergate fifty years ago?

I don’t.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1821593377164419377

www.watergatesecret.com