In pardoning Nixon, Ford sacrificed his chance of being elected in his own right and relegated himself to being the only American president in history not be elected to the Executive Branch (having been appointed vice-president upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew.) In giving up something as consequential as the presidency in doing what he beileved was right, Ford might have been the last hero to hold the office.
Watergate changed history in several ways. Were it not for Watergate, Jimmy Carter almost certainly wouldn't have been elected president. In the absence of a Carter administration, it's difficult to imagine Ronald Reagan being elected. Without Reagan, conservatism wouldn't have taken the turn that it has and there might actually be a party that stands for balanced budgets in Washington, other than rhetorically.
Nixon often spoke privately about starting a third party (which I'll refer to hereafter as "The Nixon Party") from the White House. It would have been composed of moderate Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. In Nixon's scenario, it's first presidential nominee would be John Connally, who he thought could have been elected in 1976. Connally was also Nixon's first choice to replace Agnew, but was convinced that he couldn't be confirmed by Congress.
Were it not for Watergate, the Nixon Party would have upended U.S politics. Never before had a third party been openly backed by the White House. Because President Nixon had built an unparalleled political organization, independent of the GOP, over his career ballot access likely wouldn't have been a problem and the public backing of an incumbent president that had just won 49 states and almost 61% of the popular vote would have been indispensable. With both the Democrats and Republicans split by the Nixon Party, it isn't at all hard to imagine Connally winning the presidency.
Of course, that all hinges on whether Richard Nixon was serious about starting a third party. As I'll address later, Nixon said any number of things that he didn't mean and never intended to be followed through on.
Much too much is made about the impact that Watergate and Nixon's resignation made on the presidency. Look at the the last ten years and ask yourself, "Does the presidency look any less imperial to you?"
George W, Bush circumvented acts of Congress with any number of signing statements (in fact, more than all of his predecessors combined) or the secret use of the Commander-in-Chief power that established a domestic wiretapping program in the National Security Agency that violated both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment. Bush also wrote his very own stem-cell research law by executive order. This past Friday, Barack Obama essentially rewrote immigration law the same way.
Congress meekly re-asserted itself after Watergate, but Iran-Contra blew those reforms right out of the water. From Reagan forward, presidents have gotten ballsy to the point that they don't have to ask to bomb anyone anymore. The Watergate reforms pertaining to executive power lasted not even a decade.
But the biggest impact of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon was on journalism. After All the President's Men, every semi-literate shitheel that was barely qualified for landscaping decided that they were gonna go to journalism school and bring down a president of their own. Which is how you wound up with a generation of people that were singualarly ignorant about history telling you that Watergate was singular in it's scope of evil, yet attaches the suffix "gate" to every scandal, no matter how inconsequential.
Everybody who knows how to spell their own name wants to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Unfortunately, not everyone has Woodward and Bernstein's story. And, as it happens, neither did Woodward and Bernstein.At least not completely.
Politics has nothing on journalism when it comes to arrogant self-justification, as we saw with "Woodstein's" incredibly self-congratulatory editorial in the Washington Post.
Forty years after the fact, no one can even agree about what Watergate even was, let alone what it actually meant. And because Americans are generally so proudly ignorant of their own history, they'll take as accepted wisdom what a couple of city desk reporters tell them it was.
My definition of Watergate is very strict and very simple. It is restricted to the initial break-in and the subsequent cover-up. And you know what? That's more than enough. The "smoking gun tape" of 17 June 1972 - five days after the break-in - which recorded Nixon ordering the CIA to interfere with the FBI's investigation was a clear obstruction of justice and therefore an impeachable offense which Nixon should have been removed from office for, had he not resigned first.
Woodstein's June 8 op-ed takes Watergate to the Theatre of the Ridiculous, including every objectionable, or even illegal, thing Richard Nixon did, and included it into the rubic of "Watergate" in a way that almost magnificently distorts history. Setting the tone for the liberal intelligentsia Watergate began not on June 17, 1972, but on January 20, 1969. From wiretapping staffers of the National Security Council suspected of leaking war secrets to various racist and anti-Semitic remarks, it's all Watergate, which is beyond silly.
Sillier still, Woodward and Bernstein imagine the scandal as not one, but five separate "wars." I'll have fun with each.
1. The war against the antiwar movement:
This argument is almost delusionally dishonest, in so far as it utterly ignores historical precedent (as do most of Woodstein's imagined Nixon "wars.")
Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.”You can't even argue that this was the genesis of Watergate. The Huston Plan - while violently illegal - only sought to expand the participation to other agencies of the FBI's already illegal activities.
Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations.
If Nixon is guilty of a High Crime or Misdemeanor in the Huston Plan, it would be stupidity. Everything that the Huston Plan would have accomplished was already being done under COINTELPRO, which was first authorized during the Eisenhower administration. As a matter of fact, the Huston Plan was proposed a year before COINTELPRO was exposed. The Church Committee determined, after Nixon's resignation, that the CIA was unlawfully interfering with the anti-war movement before Nixon was sworn in as president.
COINTELPRO was already intercepting mail, as was the CIA, and "black bag jobs" had been carried out going back as far as the Wilson administration during the Palmer Raids. We also know that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, through Bobby Kennedy's orders, were wiretapping scores of American citizens without a court order, including Martin Luther King and some guy who was writing a book about Marilyn Monroe.
Anyone that knows anything about J. Edgar Hoover knows that the Huston Plan was already being carried out. Edgar just didn't want to share the spoils with the CIA and military intelligence. More importantly, he didn't want those operations controlled by anyone other than him.
Nixon's biggest mistake was that he brought all of these illegal activities into the White House, which took away the plausible deniability his predecessors enjoyed.
Woodward and Bernstein make much of Nixon's repeated orders to break into the Brookings Institution. Yet no action was ever taken on it. If one assumes a "criminal presidency", one would also assume that this order would be carried out.
However, Chief of Staff H.R Haldeman, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser John Ehrlichman and National Security Advisor (and later, Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger all have written that Nixon often gave orders that they knew to ignore. And they did. Regularly. The most persuasive evidence of this is that Brookings never actually was broken into.
Having said that, things took a decidedly darker turn when Nixon took the recently departed and superhero to the Christian Right, Charles Colson into his confidence. Whenever Nixon told Colson that something needed done, it got done.
Forty years later, no one knows who ordered the Watergate break-in Because Nixon had everything he said during that period taped (and because it made no sense), we can be pretty sure that he didn't. But Colson is as good a suspect as any.
2. The war on the news media: Nixon's reaction to the Pentagon Papers was hardly new. Indeed, subsequent presidents have gone further. Ronald Reagan was convinced by Ed Meese and Bill Casey that Cabinet members should be regularly subjected to polygraph examinations because of leaks. It was only when Vice-President George Bush and Secretary of State George Schultz threatened to resign over it that President Reagan dropped the matter.
Woodward and Bernstein spent over half of this section going on about Nixon's anti-Semitic rages, never once noting that his fury over the leak was instigated by Henry Kissinger.
The Pentagon Papers were commissioned by Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, as a study of where the Vietnam War went wrong. Therefore, they incriminated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, not Nixon's. Nixon was intitally thrilled to have JFK and LBJ's dirty laundry spilled all over the front pages of the New York Times. Kissinger, however, was secretly negotiating the China opening and the SALT talks with the Soviets, and he knew that having U.S secrets out in the open could destroy both.
Why would you include four paragraphs of anti-Semitic quotes that had little or nothing to do with the press in a section on a war on the news media? Is someone suggesting that the media s controlled by Jews? If so, who?
My personal favorite part of this retarded section is the following;
“The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.”We now know from independent historians and Nixon's own then-secret grand jury testimony that Moorer himself was spying on Nixon through Yeoman Charles Radford on Kissinger's NSC staff, which might go a long way in explaining Kissinger's reaction to the Pentagon Papers leak. Irony practically enveloped the Nixon White House.
3. The war against the DemocratsJohn Mitchell was never convicted of approving Gemstone, which Woodward and Bernstein never point out. But even if they take Magruder's word for it, there's still no evidence that Nixon approved it.
Nixon had the Oval Office, his Executive Office building office, all of his phones, and his vacation homes in California and Florida wired to tape recorders that recorded everything. Unlike FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon's taping system was voice activated. Most of the principals on the tapes either didn't know, or had forgotten, that they were being taped. But there's still no direct evidence of presidential knowledge of either Gemstone or the Watergate break-in. And there are over 3,400 hours of those tapes.
Going to extremes to prove an already-thin case of a "war against the Democrats", Woodward and Bernstien pull out Donald Segretti. Segretti, unlike Nixon, wasn't even disbarred for his political shenanigans. He was the Republican Dick Tuck, the only difference being that no one knew what the Kennedy campaign was guilty of until decades after Kennedy took a bullet to the noggin. Of course, that's not to say that Tuck was involved in stealing the 1960 election in both Texas and Illinois, although that happened, too.
If you have to go down the ranks so far as Segretti to prove a "war", you essentially have no proof at all. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of the Kennedy and Johnson's misuse of the IRS to audit Republicans, including Nixon himself.
4. The war on justice: This is the hardest to argue against, in so far as Nixon actually was personally guilty of this. The "Smoking Gun" tape couldn't be clearer in his intention to obstruct justice. That itself was enough to warrant his removal from office, although President Clinton's directly and with foreknowledge lying to both a federal judge and a separate Grand Jury wasn't.
We know that between the August 1, 1972 tape where Nixon told Haldeman that "They (the Watergate burglars) have to be paid" and the March 21, 1973 conversation between Nixon and John Dean in which the President said that he knew where a million dollars of "hush money: could be gotten in cash that the burglars were indeed paid.
The "war on justice" is the only one in which Woodward and Bernstein make a clear and convincing case in their entire article.
Their last "war" is, far and away, the silliest of all.
5. The war on history: This is dishonest and best and retarded at worst. Moreover, it's hypocritical.
Woodstein make much of Nixon's denials of responsibility for Watergate, but there's nary a mention that Bill Clinton's legacy relies on the same assertion that "I made mistakes, but did not commit a crime." But both did, and there's evidence in both cases. With Nixon, there are the tapes. In Clinton's, DNA.
The fact is that most presidents are at war with history. Read almost any presidential memoir and you'll see just that. Reagan's and Clinton's come to mind most immediately. No one that I'm aware of thinks that Jack Kennedy would admit to being the Champion of Presidential Felonies had he have lived to write his.
The difference is the evidence. FDR, Kennedy and Johnson were very selective in what they recorded doing. Nixon, stupidly wasn't. He recorded everything, which, as he put it, "gave them a sword."
However, we now know about virtually all of the crimes committed by the United States government under the Wilson, Roosevelt. Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan and Clinton administrations. There have been several actions under the second Bush and Obama administrations that, while not openly criminal, are certainly impeachable.
Richard Nixon isn't the Gold Standard of Presidential Corruption because what he did was unique. Far from it. He has his place in infamy simply because he did what he did in a short period of time, because he was caught, and he was dumb enough to record it all.
But Nixon didn't lie directly to federal judge or a grand jury. Nor did he sell weapons to a terrorist state and give the spoils of those sales to another terrorist group, several time zones away. He also didn't order the wholesale wiretapping of the American people without warrant or the execution of U.S citizens absent due process of law. Those crimes occurred well after Watergate. And they continue to this day.
No, if there a war on history, it is being waged by the American people against themselves. If you don't hold your leaders accountable today, you shouldn't count on history doing it for you.
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