Five decades have now passed since Richard Nixon tendered his resignation as president on the morning of August 9, 1974, in the climax to the Watergate scandal. In announcing his resignation in an Oval Office speech the previous evening, Nixon said little about the scandal itself, instead highlighting his own achievements in bringing peace to the Middle East and reopening relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. He attributed his resignation to the loss of his political base in Congress. That was true: a few days earlier, a delegation of Republican senators had visited the White House to tell him that he had lost support in Congress because of Watergate and that he had little choice but to resign or be impeached. So it happened that a sitting president, elected less than two years earlier with 61 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes, was driven from office in a space of 18 months in a political spectacle that engrossed the public and still exercises influence over national politics.
Nixon may have been as surprised as the voters who cast ballots for him to watch as his electoral mandate dissolved, following attacks from, and maneuvers engineered by, many of his longtime critics, and as trusted aides resigned, turned state’s evidence, or were indicted. All told, nearly 50 members of his administration, including his attorney general and secretary of Commerce, were charged or found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, campaign finance violations, and other charges in connection with the multipronged matter known as “Watergate”—so named for the office building where five men associated with the Nixon reelection campaign were arrested in 1972 while breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Several served jail terms. Nixon resigned before he could be impeached and received a pardon from President Gerald Ford a month later before he could be indicted. Another scandal, separate from Watergate, drove his first vice president (Spiro Agnew) from office a year earlier. Among other consequences, Watergate more or less cancelled the results of the 1972 election, one of the greatest landslides in American history.
The official version of Watergate tells us that a few vigilant journalists, with assistance from public-spirited judges, the FBI, special prosecutors, and members of Congress, brought down a corrupt president, thereby preserving the rule of law in Washington and proving that the system “works.” The heroes in this version included Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were responsible for much of the original reporting on the scandal; Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI, who leaked confidential investigative reports to the two journalists (though this was not made publicly known until decades later); trial judge John J. Sirica, who pressed defendants in the Watergate burglary (under threat of long prison sentences) to implicate superiors in the Nixon administration, then turned over secret grand jury reports to the House impeachment committee as a road map for that investigation; Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, special prosecutors who pursued Nixon in court, successfully sued for access to his tape-recorded conversations, and thereby forced him to resign; and Senator Sam Ervin, chairman of the Senate select committee that investigated the matter and brought to light Nixon’s secret taping system, which the special prosecutor would use to seal the case against him.
This version of Watergate was first set forth by Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men (1974), their best-selling book on the scandal, followed by a popular movie (starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) with the same title. The two journalists continue to write and comment on Watergate to the present day, still advancing the same narrative, and now applying it to Donald Trump as an updated model of Nixon. Their portrait of Watergate has always been something of a caricature, a drama pitting heroes against villains, which conveniently ignored important aspects of the story that might have complicated the narrative.
Other authors have tried to fill in the cracks in the official story by pointing out, for example, that many of the figures leading the investigations into the White House were partisan Democrats with political motives in discrediting Nixon and forcing him from office. That was true of many of the journalists, including Woodward and Bernstein, who drove the story, and several of the lead investigators. Cox, for example, the first of the special prosecutors appointed to investigate Nixon’s role in the events, was a law professor at Harvard and a Kennedy loyalist appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson as a condition for Richardson’s confirmation in the Senate, and at the insistence of Senator Edward Kennedy, then a powerful member of the Judiciary Committee. Cox and his staff set out from the beginning to “get” Nixon, so to a great degree their mission consisted of investigating a person rather than a crime. Nixon had no knowledge of the burglary before it happened; hence, the charges against him, as against many of his aides, involved “process” crimes (perjury, destroying evidence, and so on) that arose out the investigation itself.
Nixon also posed a threat to the institutional order in the capital as he tried (as critics said) to centralize power within the White House by taking it away from bureaucrats in the Cabinet departments and independent agencies. He made plans soon after the 1972 election to create a “super cabinet” consisting of three or four advisors and Cabinet secretaries, who would oversee the traditional departments and report to Nixon’s chiefs of staff, John Ehrlichman and Robert Haldeman. Economic policy would be centralized in the White House under the Office of Management and Budget and pulled out of the Treasury Department. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, was put in charge of foreign policy, diminishing the role of the State Department. Casper Weinberger, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, was given a broad mandate to oversee domestic policy. Nixon went so far as to create his own investigative unit in the White House to identify critics within the government who might “leak” information to the press. This would ordinarily have been a job for the FBI, but Nixon did not trust the bureau to do it. This may have provided a motive for officials in the FBI, aware of these plans, to leak information on Watergate to journalists. Nixon’s plans were controversial in Washington and were widely criticized by members of Congress, who relied on their influence over the traditional Cabinet departments. As things turned out, Nixon had to shelve the plans when Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned in 1973 due to their own roles in the scandal.
Though Watergate took down several members of his administration, it could not have reached Nixon without the White House tapes that provided the evidence that he had participated in the “cover up” of the links between the Watergate burglars and the White House and his reelection committee. The tapes implied, on two occasions, that Nixon approved payments to Howard Hunt (one of the burglary masterminds) to buy his silence, and that he approved a request to the director of the CIA to call off an FBI investigation into the sources of funds used by the burglars.
Absent the evidence from the tapes, Nixon might not have been impeached in the first place, and certainly could not have been convicted in the Senate. He might have destroyed the tapes at the outset, when no one outside the White House was aware of them, but he did not do so because he did not believe that investigators would gain access to them. He was wrong about that: the Supreme Court ruled that the tapes had to be released because they contained evidence that prosecutors wished to use in ongoing trials against other defendants in the scandal. If Watergate is cast as a drama with heroes fighting villains, then it was also one in which the ultimate target cooperated mightily in his own undoing.
Watergate was a pathbreaking and precedent-setting event that created momentum for reforms in government and set in motion new political currents, many still with us today.
Watergate was one of the developments that led to the conservative takeover of the Republican Party in 1980, when Ronald Reagan captured the party’s presidential nomination. Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 discredited conservatives in the GOP because it seemed to prove that they could never hope to win a national election. Republicans nominated Nixon in 1968 as a moderate alternative and renominated him in 1972; his overwhelming reelection victory appeared to seal that case once and for all. Conservatives were not happy with Nixon because he endorsed several domestic initiatives favored by Democrats, restored relations with Communist China, and generally followed Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy of realpolitik. But, unexpectedly, Watergate discredited Nixon, and similarly discredited the idea that conservatives had to defer to moderates in order to win national elections. That belief took another blow in the 1976 election, when Ford, Nixon’s moderate successor, lost narrowly to Jimmy Carter. Reagan came close to knocking off Ford with a primary challenge in 1976, raising the Watergate issue and calling out Ford’s support for the Equal Rights Amendment and the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. Those events, including Watergate, empowered conservatives in the party. The party’s so-called moderates never recovered the influence they had in the Nixon years.
The rise of the independent counsel, known previously as the special prosecutor, is one of the obvious legacies of Watergate. The Ethics in Government Act, approved by Congress in 1978, was a far-reaching reform package that included provisions regarding campaign finance and set forth procedures for appointing independent prosecutors in cases in which the Justice Department could have a conflict of interest, or may appear to have such a conflict. The two parties have bickered since then over both the propriety and legality of these appointments, Republicans mostly opposing them, with limited success. Those independent counsel provisions in the Act lapsed in 1999; in response, the Department of Justice issued new rules for their appointment, and these remain (mostly) in effect today.
More than 40 years on, the independent counsel seems to have evolved into a regular feature of Washington politics. Special prosecutors were appointed to look into the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan years and the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, appointed to investigate Iran-Contra, indicted Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, for obstructing his investigation. He announced the indictment five days before the 1992 election, essentially handing the election to Clinton. Bush, in retaliation, pardoned Weinberger and five others charged by Walsh in that episode. More recently, Robert Mueller, former director of the FBI, was appointed special counsel to look into Russian interference in the 2016 election; John Durham was appointed to review the origins of the FBI’s investigation into that issue; Jack Smith was appointed to investigate charges that President Trump and other aides sought to interfere with the counting of electoral votes after the 2020 election; and Robert Hur was appointed to look into President Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents. Among these, only Smith’s investigation continues.
Some signs suggest that the federal courts may rein in the independent prosecutors because of their very public interventions into the political process, as occurred in 1992 and more recently in the prosecutions of Trump, current standard bearer for the Republican Party. If the courts move in that direction, it may be because judges see that the institutionalization of the independent counsel is linked to the now widespread practice of turning political differences into criminal charges and of reversing election results through criminal proceedings in the courts—as first happened in Watergate and now seems to happen regularly.
Watergate opened a new chapter in national politics, in which a new set of players signed on as active participants in the political fray in Washington, mostly on the side of Democrats. As the scandal developed, Nixon found himself besieged by a series of coordinated assaults from the press, the Justice Department and the courts, congressional committees, and law enforcement agencies in the capital of the kind that had never previously been directed against a sitting president. Nixon protested that other presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, had done many of the same things he was accused of doing—but to no avail. Once activated during the Watergate episode, these new participants developed into permanent features of the Washington scene. The Washington press corps, once relatively professional in its conduct, developed into an openly partisan operation whose leading figures pursued Republican administrations at every opportunity while turning a blind eye to malefactions committed by Democrats. The FBI, formerly quite conservative and protective of its own reputation under director J. Edgar Hoover, now appears to intervene regularly into political contests via announcements of new investigations, mostly to benefit Democrats.
Nixon’s plans to centralize power in the White House led to reciprocal efforts to insulate executive departments and agencies from excessive presidential control. Congress gave the FBI director a ten-year term of office designed to straddle presidential terms. Presidents were barred from leaning on the IRS to gain incriminating tax information. They were discouraged from reaching too deeply into executive departments, especially the Justice Department, which sought to conduct investigations free from political influence. It turned out that these reforms—if that is what they were—operated mostly to the benefit of one political party, since the overwhelming proportion of civil servants in Washington identify as Democrats. They already lean in that direction and need no additional prodding to do so. Those measures did not prevent the IRS under the Obama administration from targeting conservative groups in applications for tax-exempt status. Nor did they prevent Eric Holder, President Obama’s attorney general, from declaring that his job was to function as the “wing man” for the president. President Trump, meantime, was advised that he was not permitted to exercise political influence over the department.
Watergate appears in a different light today because some of its key features were reprised in the campaign to drive Trump from the White House. The playbook in the Watergate affair consisted of simultaneous and reinforcing moves from the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, special prosecutors, congressional committees, journalists eager for salacious political information, and rival campaign operations. Many of the same forces were brought into play in the maneuvers to get rid of President Trump, almost as if his opponents were hoping they might catch him in a cover-up that they could exploit.
Several aspects of the Trump investigations mirrored Watergate. Some involved the FBI and Washington journalists, active in both episodes.
Shortly after the 2016 election, FBI director James Comey sent investigators to the White House to interview Michael Flynn, Trump’s designated national security advisor, in regard to conversations he had had with Russian officials. The FBI used that occasion as an opportunity to charge Flynn with lying to the FBI, which led to his departure from the Trump team. The FBI also used the discredited Steele dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, as the basis for requesting a FISA warrant to monitor Carter Page, one of Trump’s junior foreign policy advisors, and for pursuing a broad investigation into links between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. The FBI justified the FISA application by reference to an article published by Michael Isikoff, a veteran Washington journalist. Isikoff reported that Page had visited Moscow during the campaign—though he took this information from the Steele dossier itself. FBI officials were aware of the dubious origins of the dossier but used it anyway to justify their investigation into claims that Trump and his aides worked with Moscow during the presidential campaign.
Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, pressed Jeff Sessions, Trump’s newly confirmed attorney general, to force his recusal from investigations involving Russian election interference. When Sessions finally did so, the career official taking over the investigation appointed an independent prosecutor to look into the matter. His appointee, Robert Mueller, once director of the FBI, loaded his staff with partisans determined to drive Trump from office by developing damaging information that could be passed along to Congress as a “road map” for impeaching the president, as happened with Watergate (since the president could not be indicted). The two-year investigation yielded no such road map, notwithstanding the investigators’ best efforts, because there were major differences between the two episodes: while Watergate involved some real crimes, the case against Trump was based on a carefully crafted hoax that could not withstand legal scrutiny. It may not have mattered: Democrats in Congress soon found new grounds to justify an impeachment inquiry.
The Trump investigations demonstrate that Watergate, though 50 years behind us, still reverberates through Washington, and the nation. It reshaped the parties, empowered independent prosecutors, insulated executive departments from political influence (mostly from Republicans), politicized the capital, and activated the press as a “watchdog” over government, though (again) mostly over Republicans. It led to reforms in ethics, financial disclosure, and campaign finance that (unintentionally) opened up new opportunities for investigations and, in turn, retribution against political opponents.
Pushback against the Watergate legacy is evident in efforts to curtail independent prosecutors and partisan “lawfare,” conservative attacks on the politics of the nation’s capital, and Trump’s current presidential campaign, supported in great part by voters who believe that they have been shut out of influence in Washington and (inferentially) that Watergate promoted political rules that reward insiders. The Supreme Court recently broke new ground in ruling that a president is immune from criminal prosecution for acts undertaken while carrying out the core powers of the presidential office. That opinion may partly reflect a recognition of the lawfare that a Democratic administration is waging against its Republican opponent. It is, in addition, an opinion that works against Watergate sensibilities in regard to presidential conduct and accountability. It’s a worthy question whether the current justices would have ruled as their predecessors did in 1974’s United States v. Nixon regarding the White House tapes. Today’s Court might have permitted Nixon to keep those tapes, in the belief that Watergate represented a form of lawfare against an elected president.
For all these reasons, it is fair to say that, while the Watergate legacy remains with us, it is now being contested in many ways, and from many different directions.
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