Sorry, Richard Nixon

Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon laid down the presidency of the United States, a casualty of the Watergate scandal.

The era of Watergate was one of sweeping political reform. In 1970, Congress reduced the once-awesome power of committee chairs and opened committee work—until then usually closed from public view—to greater public scrutiny. In 1971 and in 1974, Congress passed far-reaching campaign-finance laws. In 1975, Congress launched its first thorough investigation of intelligence agencies; in 1977, that oversight was made permanent in the form of the House and Senate intelligence committees. In 1978, Congress adopted ambitious conflict-of-interest rules for the whole federal government. Along the way, the Department of Justice launched hundreds of investigations into corruption within state and local government. One of those probes led to the downfall of Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, for acts committed when he was the governor of Maryland in the 1960s.

For a long time, those reforms seemed the most enduring consequence of Watergate. But at the 50-year mark, that view looks complacent and mistaken. The truth is, the reforms didn’t stick. Some of them are formally defunct; others were simply disregarded. The more open congressional committees have degenerated into buffoonish theater, exiling the real work of Congress to informal dealmaking that is nearly as secret as in the days of almighty committee chairmen such as Wilbur Mills, who almost single-handedly ruled the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, and James O. Eastland, who dominated the Senate Judiciary Committee for two decades until 1978.

Watergate-era campaign-finance laws remain on the books, but their main effect is merely to complicate the rules, because federal-election campaigns are, more than ever, funded by huge donations from secret donors. As president, Donald Trump defiantly ignored conflict-of-interest rules by allowing tens of millions of taxpayer and donor dollars to flow to his personal businesses. Nobody successfully made much of a legal or political issue out of it. The intelligence committees still exist, but their credibility and utility suffered serious damage when unscrupulous Trump partisans in the House abused their power to protect their party leader from embarrassing revelations.

[John Dean: Nixon would have loved the Court’s immunity decision]

Maybe most enduringly, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have made convicting state and local officials of public-integrity offenses all but impossible—even as some of the justices themselves accept gratuities worth millions of dollars from wealthy admirers. In many other ways, large and small, American politics in 2024 has shrugged off the reforming instincts of the 1970s and reverted to pre-Watergate norms of nontransparency.

Indeed, under the complex holding of the Supreme Court’s recent immunity decision, President Nixon would have had a plausible claim to executive privilege over the Watergate break-in and the cover-up. We still don’t know what the Watergate burglars were looking for: If Nixon could have asserted a halfway-credible claim of an official purpose for the break-in, he himself would have been immune from both possible prosecution and, very likely, impeachment—and no evidence from any criminal investigation could have been used against him.

Or put another way: As president, Trump committed crimes against the Constitution far more dangerous than the Watergate break-in when he incited and abetted the violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. He was impeached, yes, but he was not forced to quit, and his party rallied around to keep him in office until the end of his term. Trump’s appointees and allies on the Supreme Court have now fenced him off further from potential prosecution. He has reclaimed the Republican presidential nomination and may yet reclaim the presidency.

[Hunter S. Thompson: He was a crook]

How did Trump get away with it when Nixon didn’t? That’s not really a story about Trump or Nixon. It’s a story about all the rest of us.

During Watergate and after, Nixon’s defenders again and again raised points that today we’d call “what-aboutism.” His men broke into the Democratic National Committee in 1972—so what? Lyndon B. Johnson’s men almost certainly bugged Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane in 1964. The John F. Kennedy administration authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. for its own political reasons. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration surveilled Charles Lindbergh when the famous aviator led the America First Committee and contemplated a presidential run in 1940.

Did Nixon try—albeit unsuccessfully—to obtain the tax returns of political adversaries? Well, Roosevelt successfully ordered the Internal Revenue Service to investigate opponents such as William Randolph Hearst, Huey Long, and Charles Coughlin.

Nixon operated a clandestine unit inside the White House—the so-called plumbers—to trace and stop officials who leaked to the media, you say? Under previous administrations, the FBI acted as a giant government-plumbing agency, surveilling troublesome journalists such as Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Indeed, a probably core reason for the exposure of the Watergate break-in was that the long alliance between Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover faltered after 1971, for complex reasons, obliging Nixon to use amateur investigators for the Watergate burglary and other black-bag jobs that, under past administrations, the FBI would have conducted for the president.

Nixon accepted big secret donations? So did Johnson throughout his Senate career. Until 1971, it was not just legal but also normal for large donors to make their donations in wads of untraceable cash. How much did Johnson’s reelection campaign spend in 1964? Who gave how much to finance that spending? We have only the haziest idea of the answer, and that’s only because of the work of independent analysts. The presidential campaign itself disclosed almost nothing.

[From the May 2008 issue: E pluribus Nixon]

Watergate became a scandal because political norms in the United States dramatically shifted. What had once been acceptable ceased to be acceptable. Exactly why this shift happened is a profound and fascinating question, to which there may be no one single answer. As Americans moved from cities to suburbs, they rejected the loose-and-easy corruption of the old urban political machines. As educational levels rose, so did expectations of government integrity. The civil-rights movement sparked critical questioning of many familiar but unjustifiable practices. The Big Three television networks that provided most Americans with their news in the 1960s and ’70s were less partisan than newspapers had been (or than cable news would later be)—and were more eager to investigate wrongdoing. Then, too, the Vietnam War discredited the public’s ready deference to authority of the earlier Cold War era.

However that historic period of reform happened, Nixon was caught like the loser in a game of musical chairs—and the expected place of safety was snatched away from him.

Now it is unhappening. Standards of political morality that tightened in the years before and after Watergate have loosened. Trump did not start the trend, but he benefited from it and accelerated it.

As a candidate for president first in 2016, Trump felt obliged still to pay lip service to the post-Watergate norm of releasing tax returns. He pretended that he intended to, claiming that he was prevented from doing so only by an IRS audit. In 2016 and early 2017, he promised: to leave his business, to initiate no new deals, to hand over management control to his sons, to refuse any new international deals, and to donate any foreign-source profits to the U.S. Treasury. One by one, these pledges were repudiated or ignored, as Trump tested and discovered how much he could get away with.

A lot, as it turned out. Trump visited his own properties, ignoring conflict-of-interest principles against using his office for self-enrichment. In September 2019, his vice president, Mike Pence, journeyed from one side of the island of Ireland to the other in order to book his party into a Trump-owned hotel on the Atlantic coast. On at least 40 occasions during the Trump administration, Air Force crews who stopped in Scotland to refuel traveled 20 miles each way to stay overnight at a Trump golf resort.

[David Frum: The souring of American exceptionalism]

Trump also bent administration rules to obtain a top security clearance for his son-in-law, who served as his unofficial secretary of state and went on to negotiate for himself a highly unusual $2 billion investment deal with Saudi state funds just months after the administration ended. Any one of these incidents would have been an administration-shaking event in the 1970s or ’80s, even in the ’90s or early 2000s. The old rules were sloughed off in the 2010s, and by the 2020s were barely remembered.

On the evening of August 8, 1974, the night before his resignation became effective, President Nixon spoke on television. He began: “In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the nation.” The next day, his successor, Gerald Ford, appealed to the same idea of nation and national unity. “As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.” This is music we’re little accustomed to hearing anymore. Nixon never summoned his supporters to invade the Capitol to save his job; the leaders of his party would not have defended him if he had.

American society in the 1970s was at least as polarized as now. In fact, it was much more violent: Protest groups, mostly left-wing, detonated some 2,500 bombs in an 18-month period in 1971–72. The political system atop such social turmoil, however, functioned as an effective restraint and counterpoint. Politics was there to make things better, when they might be worse. The Watergate-era reforms stand as a high-water mark of that hope for better.

Maybe it was always unrealistic to expect the good-government intentions of the 1970s to endure long. In one of his essays, a century or so ago, H. L. Mencken remarked upon the American “national genius for corruption.” For brief periods, Americans will experiment with moral zeal—Prohibition was one such moment; #MeToo was another—then jettison those experiments as too much trouble.

From today’s vantage point, the post-Watergate reforms look like another of those jettisoned experiments. We can honor the attempt on this strange anniversary with an ironic salute to Richard Nixon, a president who might have gotten away with it, if he had been luckier in his timing.