For a young historian starting out twenty years ago, there were few subjects more politically incorrect than challenging the conventional wisdom that the corrupt administration of Richard Nixon had to go, or that the national media performed admirably in their coverage of a challenging and fast-paced story, or that, while it was traumatic for the nation, Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 showed the system worked—a phrase repeated many times since. I am inclined to challenge much of this conventional wisdom, in large part because this is the moment to do so given the passage of time and the new perspectives we have of both Watergate—the initial break-in took place on June 17, 1972—and the broader time period.
Today, we lack anything close to a definitive historic account of Nixon, or the Nixon White House years, or Watergate, or the Church Committee, or other intelligence investigations and reforms. If the chaos of the 1960s elected Richard Nixon, and the overreaction of the 1970s elected Ronald Reagan, what links their presidencies are the events of the 1970s—which are usually overlooked as some inconsequential interregnum trapped between a disorderly decade and the dawn of a new era.
I’ve been studying Nixon’s tapes—and those of his predecessors, going back to FDR’s installation in the White House of an RCA continuous film machine in 1940—for about twenty years. But I started with Nixon’s, at first to simply have fresh material for my dissertation, but then more broadly as I realized no one had mined them for anything close to their full historical value. To demonstrate how massive these 5,000 hours of presidential recordings are, even after twenty years of work I have manually transcribed perhaps only 10 percent of them—incidentally, more than anyone else, as far as I know. At my rate of transcription, about forty double-spaced pages per hour of tape, fully transcribed they might yield 200,000 pages of transcripts. There remain about 500 unrestricted hours of Nixon tapes today in a kind of archival purgatory with no clear timetable for release.
Too often, what passes for the history of that time period is not seriously researched. When it comes to Watergate, I can’t say it any better than historian and Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson has said it to me. 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, members of a younger generation demand a fresh history written for them, and we are in a proper frame of mind for a reconsideration of what we thought we knew.
Not so with Watergate. The history we have 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 exception to the usual process of historical inquiry?
Radically different times
Let me offer a few data points. Of the four great landslides of the twentieth century—FDR over Alf Landon in 1936, LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964, Nixon over George McGovern in 1972, and Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984—Nixon’s victory in 1972 by several measures was the most decisive. His national political map was redder than Reagan’s: 60.7 percent of the popular vote, versus 58.8 percent. Nixon won forty-nine states to FDR’s forty-eight. And in the Electoral College, Nixon won 96.7 percent of all electoral votes versus LBJ’s 90.3 percent in 1964. (Even Vladimir Putin won only 87 percent of votes in his latest re-election.) But even more remarkable than Nixon’s victory in 1972 was the swiftness of his decline. I know of nothing like it in modern US history. Polls showed a decisive reversal of the election result in fewer than six months. Mere partisanship or the typical political ebbs and flows do not fully explain such a reversal.
Consider, too, how different this era was. When the House of Representatives initiated impeachment proceedings against Nixon in the fall of 1973, the nation had not seen such a process in over a century, when President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act. How quaint the previous effort must have seemed after the experience of the 1960s. Unlike with Johnson, who was impeached in the House but acquitted in the Senate, the narrative regarding Richard Nixon was that he was uniquely criminal and must be removed from office. This narrative was not evitable but constructed, for there was no true historical precedent.
Journalists covering Watergate became celebrities, no longer simply reporting the news but starring in their own coverage, thanks to the innovation of anonymous sources. The term Watergate itself, especially its suffix “-gate,” became synonymous with sleaze and scandal. The special prosecutor was viewed as impartial. Judges didn’t seem interested in politics. Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the most significant congressional investigation, was portrayed as a simple country lawyer and constitutional expert pursuing the truth.
The narrative that Nixon was unique was so effectively constructed, deployed, and reinforced that many of the 61 percent who supported him in 1972 became convinced by it in less than six months—or did not have the inclination or ability to challenge it—and even those who worked for Nixon came to doubt the president they worked for, or at least to raise serious questions. It is clear to me that some of these former officials were not able to resolve their concerns by the end of their lives.
How do we know what we know?
Nixon was probably the most investigated politician in US history, although it’s possible he no longer holds that record. Journalists who had made their names, careers, and fortunes writing about Watergate relished the story—but only the 1974 version, as I came to learn. The millions of pages of records that have been opened for research in the thirty years that followed, as well as about 2,000 hours of Nixon tapes, were of no great consequence for those recognized as experts. New records and new context were inconvenient, and were either ignored or folded into conclusions established decades before.
Today, I challenge my students to consider certain questions when thinking about any historical subject: How do we know something is true? What context do we need? How do we deal with incomplete or conflicting evidence? I knew of no scholar working on the Nixon period interested in rigorously re-examining Watergate. Among other things, it would have been a career killer.
Recently, it dawned on me that for the first time in my life, Richard Nixon was no longer the number one political villain in US history. I saw that as a major shift that presented an opportunity for a fresh look at the entire Nixon period. The irrational Nixon critics—going back to the Alger Hiss era—are dwindling in number as they fade from the scene, and those who replace them have other things on their minds these days.
Let’s consider the hypothesis that there was a kind of Nixon derangement syndrome—not only in predictable places like his political opposition, but also among the establishment in his own party, cultural elites of all kinds, and especially the national media. And let’s consider that their derangement has left its mark on the history we have today. Nixon wasn’t chased from office by Democrats alone but also by Republicans, some of whom had never accepted him since Dwight Eisenhower and Nixon steamrolled their favorite candidate, “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft, in 1952. The Watergate era suggests that Nixon was not excessively partisan; he was not partisan enough. I assume 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. Nixon, however, was wholly unprepared and almost naïve about the 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. Nixon was an easy target, and always has been.
Even on the Republican side of the aisle, there was a joke during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for the presidency that if he wanted to pay a visit to his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., someone like Nixon would not have been permitted to use the front door at Lodge’s estate in Beverly, Massachusetts. And I’m not aware that Nixon ever did visit him there. Even today, with all that we’ve learned since, the temptation is too great to treat Nixon as something other than what he was: a serious politician respected by serious politicians. At the Reagan Library a few months ago to look at some newly open 1984 campaign records, I overheard a conversation between a docent and a museum visitor. Discussing Nixon, the docent, presumably responding in a way consistent with their training, said, “Richard Nixon did some good things, but also some really bad things.” I almost wanted to ask: Do docents say the same thing about Ronald Reagan? Is the same not true of all political leaders, and, if we are honest, even ourselves? Nixon wasn’t despised by his worst critics because he was what they said he was. He was despised because he was effective.
Only since Nixon’s death in April 1994 have we gradually acquired the perspectives needed to re-examine 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 that some of the investigators who accused Nixon of improper conduct engaged in improper conduct to get 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 politics. 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 criminal or civil proceedings—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.
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. If the guiltiest person deserves the fairest trial, we were deprived of the critical context needed to judge Nixon—not just the 61 percent 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.
