I recently had a stroke of luck. On September 21st, I needed to pick a new audio book to listen to, and I decided it was time I listen to “All the President's Men,” the book Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote about their discovery of the Watergate scandal. Three days later, on September 24th, Nancy Pelosi officially announced the House was beginning an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Since then, I've devoured “All the President's Men,” and a few notable movies about Nixon, and I've moved onto “The Final Days,” which details Nixon's last bit of time in the White House and the inside stories of the people who worked there. The parallels between Nixon and Trump are staggering, the differences between them are sometimes subtle but deeply revealing, and watching the news as I've learned the blow by blow of how Watergate unfolded has been an eye-opening experience. I started a document for myself with my own notes and comparisons so that I could compare the events while they were fresh in my memory, but given how much I didn't know going into learning all this, I thought it may be worth sharing. If you lived through Watergate, I hope you find this an interesting refresher, and if you didn't, I hope this can help you contextualize the historic events we're going through now.
(Full disclosure: this entire write up was originally shared on my Facebook, where it was written for. It’s been minimally edited, so I apologize that some of the stuff said here is likely very obvious to this audience.)
-What Nixon actually did:
In high school, I learned about Watergate the wrong way. My big take away was that people working for the president broke into democratic offices, Nixon covered up involvement, but tapes later proved he knew about it, and that forced him to resign. But the actual Watergate break in didn't matter that much, and Nixon only covered it up to stop other clandestine activities from being discovered. Given that I had such poor understanding of the events until recently, I think it's worth going into some specifics of the Watergate crimes before we continue. Nixon, his White House, and the Committee to Re-Elect the President engaged in large scale political espionage and sabotage. The term for much of this came to be known as “rat fucking.” It's hard to put all of the particulars into a paragraph without creating run on sentences, so here's a list of some of the things they did.
-Illegally break into and burglarize the office a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the individual who leaked the Pentagon Papers, in an attempt to find information to discredit him.
-Used government resources to bug the phones of at least 17 individuals for political purposes. Elements within the CIA, FBI, and the Justice Department provided illegal surveillance and research on political rivals. This came to be known as the Houston Plan.
-Rigged polls in newspapers and newscasts.
-Disrupted democratic campaign events by impersonating democratic officials and giving false information to venues, such as falsely postponing events, or making false requests that disrupted the events, such as ordering absurd amounts of food.
-Wrote fake letters in the democratic primaries in an effort to weaken democrats that Nixon viewed as threats against him. The most famous of these was the Canuck Letter, a fake letter published in a newspaper that purported to show a democratic candidate named Muskie disparaging Canadian Americans, who were a substantial voting block in the New Hampshire democratic primary. Similar work was done in news stories involving Muskie's wife, with false stories about her being a drunk. This made Muskie emotional in a speech, and certain papers reported that Muskie cried when defending his wife. The result was that Muskie's candidacy imploded.
-Fabricated false communications from democratic candidates by using their stationary.
-Planning to firebomb the Brookings Institute.
-Illegally extorting money from businesses and wealthy individuals by threatening to audit them through the IRS if they did not donate money to the Nixon campaign.
-Ordering the IRS to target specific individuals, such as people critical of Richard Nixon, for political purposes.
-Illegal payments of hush money to people involved in the Watergate burglaries. Basically, the organizer of the break in successfully blackmailed the president for almost the entire time between the start of Watergate and Nixon's resignation.
-Perjuring records of Nixon's conversations to cover up his knowledge of Watergate.
-Plant spies and saboteurs within anti-war protests in an effort to both keep track of them and ruin their credibility.
-Money laundering to hide how the secret fund for political espionage and sabotage was being spent.
Similarities between Trump, Nixon, and their respective situations:
-When Nixon was first accused of being involved in the Watergate cover up by Dean (the former White House Counsel who turned on Nixon), Nixon ordered his staff to dig up dirt on the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, in an effort to say that he was being selectively targeted - that the liberals had done much worse, and that it was hypocritical for him to be targeted when this was just how politics worked. In reality, Nixon was much worse in his corruption and election meddling, and it was sheer delusion that he was somehow better. I believe the parallel to Trump here does not need to be elaborated upon further.
-Nixon was famously brought down by recordings of his conversations. Before he was forced to hand over those tapes, though, Nixon attempted to get away with a long list of often ridiculous alternatives. Nixon instead offered transcripts which he heavily doctored, argued subpoenas were illegitimate, and even pursued a scheme in which he offered to let a respected democrat (with a known issue of hearing loss) listen to all the tapes - which were grueling to try to go through attentively to anyone who tried. Today, Trump is trying to argue that the written account of his conversation with President Zelensky is a sufficient account that we should all be satisfied with. If we had been satisfied with Nixon’s accounts of his conversations, we never would have caught him. There was a reason Nixon wanted us to be satisfied with how he chose to display events, and one can be reasonably certain that Trump is going about this the same way. People like to show you things that prove they're innocent.
-Both Trump and Nixon attempted to frame their detractors as purely partisan, and felt a great deal of self pity for the situations they felt they had been unfairly boxed into. Both Nixon and Trump also tried to say that real Americans didn't actually care about the scandals, and that only liberal elites in their ivory towers were the ones who cared about their supposed corruption. Both Nixon and Trump publicly attacked special prosecutors investigating them. And both described the news agencies reporting on their malfeasance as engaging in a “witch hunt.” Nixon's press secretary went after the Washington Post so hard that he was forced to eat his words and issue them a public apology when Dean finally testified before the Watergate Committee.
-Nixon's people did this more than Trump's, but both groups have been very careful in exactly how they issue public denials. Rather than address specifics, when attacked, both Trump and Nixon would describe the source as ludicrous, and characterize entire stories as wild works of fiction. The point of this is to attempt to publicly decry the actual stories while not using language that could later be shown to be an outright lie, which might land them with perjury and obstruction charges. The lesson here is to pay close attention to specific words rather than tone. If a press agent is saying that a story is absurd, ludicrous, or a fantasy, but is not saying categorically that it did not happen, chances are good that they are dancing around a dicey subject. When critics get something blatantly wrong, though, expect specific, categorical and over the top denials. One of the lowest points for Woodward and Bernstein's pursuit of the Watergate story was when they reported that an employee of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Hugh Sloan, had said in front of a grand jury that Nixon's Chief of Staff, Haldeman, was one of five individuals who controlled a secret, illegal slush fund that was used for political espionage and sabotage. The day this story was published, Nixon's White House launched a big public relations offensive in which they specifically denied that Sloan had given this testimony, and they accused the Washington Post of slander. The trick was that Sloan did not actually testify before the grand jury that Haldeman had had control of the fund, because the grand jury had never specifically asked him. It was a fact that Haldeman was one of the individuals with control over the fund, but the ability to specifically call out one piece of the story as false gave them enough to work with.
-Nixon's slush fund was the piece of information that linked the Watergate burglars to the White House, and was a major part of the story. Two of the other people with authorization to disburse money from that slush fund were former Attorney General Mitchell and Nixon's personal attorney, Kalmbach. And today, we see from Trump's call with Ukraine that he is using Attorney General Barr and his lawyer Giuliani to engage in less than ethical endeavors. I think there is a strong argument to be made that, if the president is going to actively and purposely break the law, his personal attorney and his Attorney General are positions is unequivocally needs to have on his side.
-Speaking of the Attorney General, the Justice Department under Nixon was where accusations against the president went to die. The FBI investigated Watergate and found numerous threads of illegality tied to but not necessarily intrinsically involved with the Watergate break in, and they passed their information onto the Justice Department, which then failed to follow up on any of it. At the time, many FBI agents were frustrated with this. The Justice Department also specifically limited the first Grand Jury investigation into Watergate, and hired lawyers who purposely did not ask important questions of witnesses (such as not asking Sloan who controlled the secret slush fund). Additionally, when staffers from the Committee to Re-Elect the President were interviewed for the investigation, it was handled in the CRP offices with a CRP lawyer present for every interview – an easy way to put pressure on the interview subjects to not say anything incriminating. The first investigations into Watergate were eventually completed discredited due to political meddling. Today, we saw that the Mueller probe wrapped up very quickly after Attorney General Barr took over, and we can suspect that additional threads that would have been followed up on were dropped. Barr also took the initiative in describing the findings of the Mueller probe in such a way Mueller disagreed with. We also see that the Justice Department received whistle blower documents alleging illegal activity from Barr, which were then kept hidden and not acted upon.
-Famously, Mueller did not indict Trump in his report because of Justice Department policy stating that they cannot indict a sitting president. The memo that determined this policy was written during internal Justice Department discussions about how to handle the Watergate case. In some ways, this is a good decision. The presidency could not function if the opposing side could constantly bring up frivolous lawsuits and then force the president to take time out of their day to go be in court. And what would happen if the President straight up refused? It'd be almost impossible to arrest them. But, on the other hand, this policy prevents the President from being held to account for an awful lot of law breaking, and reading about the thought that went into the decision, it seems awfully like the Justice Department was just trying to avoid responsibility for what might happen if they removed the President and something terrible happened, like a collapse in diplomatic talks with important foreign entities. So neither Trump nor Nixon have been officially charged by the Justice Department, but importantly, both have also been named as “Unindicted Co-Conspirators,” which is a term that actually carries legal weight, and was Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski's secret weapon. Nixon had to contend with the case being brought against his White House by the Special Prosecutor and a Senate investigation at the same time. Nixon managed to maneuver into a place where he could force negotiation with the Senate investigation, and he released his edited transcripts to them in a massive public relations media campaign that was internally heralded as the end to Watergate. While the transcripts still contained deeply damning information, Nixon arguably successfully handled the media and put them out in the best possible light. He really thought he was going to be able to move beyond Watergate. However, Special Prosecutor Jaworski was not going to be satisfied with just the transcripts, and he had kept it secret from almost everyone that Nixon had been named as an unindicted co-conspirator – and the law says that unindicted co-conspirators can be legally compelled to give up incriminating information, such as, say, tapes of recorded conversations. When this news broke, it started some of the first serious conversations among republicans in Washington about how to start cutting Nixon loose – for the good of their party. We don't know if Trump's role as an unindicted co-conspirator has forced him to give up any incriminating information yet, but it's worth keeping an eye out for that.
-A key weapon in any president's arsenal against inquiry is executive privilege, which both Nixon and Trump have used copiously. Trump's use of it builds upon the foundation Nixon laid. Nixon was in somewhat untested waters, and used executive privilege to stop information from getting out relatively sparingly. Trump, however, is claiming executive privilege for everything he can think of, including people never employed in the White House, which is unprecedented. Nixon, however, took executive privilege too far, and was ultimately guilty of obstructing justice. Given what we saw in the Mueller report, and in Trump's behavior with Comey, Trump is also willing to go outside legal limits in order to stall and mislead investigations into his behavior.
-Trump has recently announced he is not going to be complying at all with the House impeachment inquiries. Naturally, this means that his compliance will ultimately be determined in court, just like how Nixon was ultimately forced by the Supreme Court to comply with the special prosecutor's demands for his tapes.
-One of the key values of the republican party is loyalty, and in these situations it works to their advantage. Nixon's White House was filled with people who were so absolutely loyal to the president that they refused to contemplate the idea that he was actually guilty. Trump demands loyalty from his staff in a similar way, and brands any deviation from such loyalty as treasonous. As the Watergate inquiries went on, Nixon's staff underwent what they described as agony as they were eventually forced to contemplate that their leader may not actually be innocent, but for a very long time, many still did their best to defend him, or get him off on a technicality. In the end, I would argue that this is the biggest danger the republican party poses to our democracy: that they will time and again allow personal loyalty, and their fear of being branded a traitor, to obscure their view of what is actually the correct, moral course of action.
Infighting and personal self interest is what ultimately brought Nixon down. As more information was revealed, some White House individuals were scared that they would be caught up in obstructing justice, and some were hung out to dry. A few viewed their sacrifice as a certain martyrdom, but not all of them did. Most famously, the organizer of the Watergate break in, Hunt, demanded repeated payments, ultimately more than $1 million, in order to buy his silence, and former White House Counsel John Dean outright refused to take the fall for the President, and his testimony in the Watergate hearings first linked Nixon to the Watergate crimes and cover up. I do not see a situation where Trump is brought down that does not also involve key members of his staff turning on him and testifying against him. One might think this would be easy to achieve, with the number of exiting Trump staffers who get out of the White House with an ax to grind against their former boss, but there are reasons that this hasn't happened yet.
Differences between Trump and Nixon that are advantages for Trump:
-By the time republicans abandoned him, Nixon was in his second term with a democratic majority in both the House and the Senate. The way the news was going, republicans, including the House and Senate minority leaders, ultimately decided that Nixon was disposable for the party. It's not as though losing Nixon was going to mean that they wouldn't be able to pass legislation they wanted – the democratic majorities already stopped that. And the party in control of the White House in a president's second term very often lost seats in congress, and it's exceedingly rare for a party to hold the presidency for more than two terms in a row. Ditching Nixon at that time was the best damage control the republicans of the era could get. Ditching Trump, however, is different. Republicans have the Senate to lose, and it's very rare in this day and age for us to have a single term president from a party that's only had the White House for four years. The battle for the Supreme Court is also on republican's minds, and they probably worry that ditching Trump right now might cost them the chance at locking the Court into their agenda for a generation, and Kavanaugh is still so new and controversial that he might even be targeted for removal if Trump left office right now. Additionally, shifting demographics point to a coming era of democratic resurgence, similar to the resurgence the republican party got in the era of Reagan. Staving that off for as long as they can is high on the republican priority list. Put bluntly, the republicans today can get more use out of Trump than the republicans of the 70's could get out of Nixon.
-One of the biggest tragedies of Watergate is how used to corruption the American people became afterwards. We are jaded in a way that we were not during the Nixon administration. Certain elements of what Nixon did would still be shocking today, but not all of them, not by a long shot. Thus, it's much easier for republicans to try to argue that politics are just inherently corrupt, and that it's unfair to hold Trump to standards democrats supposedly aren't held to. And then there's the sheer number of scandals the Trump administration gets into almost daily. There's a lot of fatigue surrounding scandal news, and it's harder for things to catch our attention because of it.
-Trump inherited the part of the republican party that thought Nixon's only sin was showing weakness, the republicans who thought what Nixon did to take down the hippies and the liberal establishment was not just not that bad, but justified. Just look at Roger Stone – he's been trying to get Trump to run for at least thirty years, and Stone was such a fan of Nixon that he has a tattoo of Nixon's face on his back. It's also not hard to find stories on republican news sites berating Trump's conservative critics for contributing to the weakness that they say has been holding them back. It's going to be much harder to get these republicans to turn on Trump when they honestly think that Trump hasn't done anything wrong.
-Similarly, Trump is not acting furtive or ashamed about his dealings with Ukraine. This openness makes it much easier for republicans to argue that Trump is justified. Humans have a bias that weights secret information – we tend to think that if someone worked hard to keep something secret, that must mean that this information is very important. In Nixon's White House, Nixon kept an absurd number of secrets, and this fed an internal aura of suspicion. No one who knew what when, but they generally agreed that what had happened in Watergate was bad. This contributed to many of them eventually turning on each other. But as long as Trump is being open and bold about his crimes, there's no reason for internal suspicion. Because everyone knows what they were up to.
-Nixon eventually got so fed up with one of the Watergate Special Prosecutors that he fired the prosecutor, his Attorney General who initially refused to fire the prosecutor, and that Attorney General's successor who refused to fire the prosecutor. This came to be known as the Friday Night Massacre, and it was a public relations nightmare for Nixon. Trump has the benefit of seeing what Nixon did before him that did and did not work, and Trump (or at least his advisors) know the benefits of forcing officials to resign rather than outright firing them, like what happened with Jeff Sessions.
-In the Nixon Watergate investigations, the Grand Jury that named Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator kept much of their dealings under wraps, and eventually sent their classified report straight to congressional investigators. Trump and his staff, probably most importantly Barr, have thus far managed to keep such details away from Congress, which was probably easier to do since there was not an official impeachment inquiry running at the time that the Mueller report was released.
-Lastly, due to the rise of the internet and certain conglomerates buying up news organizations, our media consumption is much more polarized than it was during Watergate. Today, republicans can get their news exclusively from Redstate, Breitbart, and Fox, among many others, and none of these outlets are carrying fair stories detailing the current impeachment process. I've been checking on them throughout this process, and for the most part, they only run stories about the impeachment in order to attack it. We hear a lot about the liberal bubble many democrats have ensconced themselves within, but there are large swaths of our country where republicans simply do not hear at all from unbiased news sources. It is much, much harder to convince the republican faithful of today to believe their president did something immoral than it was during the Nixon era. And it was pretty hard to begin with even then.
However, that's not to say that every difference between Trump and Nixon is a boon to Trump. There are many key differences that are going to hurt Trump in the end.
Differences between Trump and Nixon that are bad for Trump:
-For all of Nixon's faults, none of his Watergate Crimes purposely involved strengthening or covering up crimes for foreign adversaries, and they certainly didn't involve any accusations of foreign interference in our elections. Trump can say his conversation with President Zelensky was perfect all he likes, but it is very easy to understand how foreign involvement in our elections could be disastrous.
-Before the Watergate scandal, Nixon's White House was widely considered to be a tight ship with a very competent leader, who had won the last election with over 60% of the popular vote. Even Trump's staunchest defenders, however, admit that he's rough around the edges, and sometimes speaks without thinking. When people needed to convince the public that Nixon intentionally broke the law and was deeply corrupt, they needed to work very hard to overcome public perception. Dean and his lawyer specifically took time to lay the groundwork for it before Dean's hearings. There is not nearly such a barrier to overcome with Trump.
-In “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin argues persuasively that one of Lincoln's most admirable traits was his knack for turning enemies into friends. Candidates who ran against and beat Lincoln often supported him later, all three major candidates for the republican nomination who ran against Lincoln in 1860 ended up in Lincoln's cabinet, and one of Lincoln's most loyal subordinates, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, first met Lincoln by essentially firing him from the biggest law case Lincoln had ever been involved with. Well, Trump is the opposite of Lincoln here. Trump has a habit of turning friends into enemies, including Rex Tillerson, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, John Bolton, Jeff Sessions, and Sean Spicer. It's hard to imagine that, sooner or later, Trump won't turn the wrong friend into an enemy. And the number of leaks that come from the White House should be a reasonable indication that this well underway.
-As was mentioned earlier, both Trump and Nixon adopted attitudes of self pity, and claimed their democratic predecessor had done much worse than anything they'd ever done. Nixon's accusations though, were more subdued, and sometimes even had a point. In the previous administrations, the FBI had illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr, and that's something that certainly deserves to be criticized. Trump is in office after President Obama, though, and Obama had probably the cleanest presidency of the modern era. As such, Trump has turned to easily disproved and transparently paranoid conspiracy theories. Pizzagate, the Birther Conspiracy, claiming the Clintons killed Epstein, and Crowdstrike are some good examples of this insanity. Trump's die hard base might buy them, but behind the scenes, it's deeply off putting to many republican officials. As said before, republicans have more use for Trump today than they did for Nixon in the 70's, and so not many republicans are coming forward to criticize Trump – but the number who would be personally eager to turn on Trump given the chance is much, much higher.
-Mentions of Watergate and rulings made in that era are already coming up in court cases between the House lawyers and the Justice Department – and the legal precedents do not favor the Trump administration. A bit more history first. Though it was not called such at the time, executive privilege was first used by George Washington when he refused to give certain internal documents to congress. In his refusal, George Washington noted that the only legitimate way to subpoena such documents would be in an impeachment inquiry. From then on, it was assumed that impeachment inquiries would give Congress a massive amount of oversight power, and Watergate court cases bore this authority out. For example, Judge Sirica, who presided over many of the Watergate trials, decided that a normally secret Grand Jury report (the one in which Nixon was named a co-conspirator) should be turned over to Congress to aid in their investigation of President Nixon. According to CNN, on October 8th, 2019, a Justice Department lawyer arguing against providing the full Mueller report to Congress attempted to contend that, while the decision Judge Sirica made was not wrong at the time, the Watergate grand jury decision by the court may have resulted differently today – to which the judge responded “wow,” and “The Department is taking an extraordinary position in this case.” Even with a Supreme Court stacked in favor of republicans, it is hard to imagine that they would rule against precedents set during Watergate.
So what does all this mean? Well, I think there should be three main takeaways.
-Much like Star Wars movies, history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but there are times it rhymes. This does not guarantee the same outcomes, however. Just because Nixon was removed from office doesn't mean that Trump will be brought down for corruption – we must work for it. Educating ourselves, organizing, protesting, and encouraging our public officials are all important things we can do that will influence how history moves forward now. Nothing is inevitable.
-The fact that such similar events have happened within republican administrations in the last 50 years is something worrying that we should take note of. I would never argue that democrats are an inherently good political party, and democrats know how to have a massive scandal as well as any given political group, but I would say that the fundamental moral foundation for the current republican party has deep flaws that need to be fixed in order for them to be a worthy party in our nation. Loyalty is a wonderful value person to person, but it has a tendency to distort ethics when used for large groups of people. Democrats do not have loyalty as quite such a bedrock principle within their party, and so you'll see them kick people out much faster. While there is still argument about this, you can see how that happened with Al Franken, and even Bill Clinton is being shunned as a pariah among many young liberals. Republicans must be less afraid of personal disloyalty, or disloyalty to their party, and must be more concerned about the fundamental, long term consequences that arise from not holding their own to account.
-Those who don't learn from history are definitely doomed to repeat it. If we had more historical literacy as a nation, I think we would have been better prepared to see this coming. History is a FASCINATING subject, but if you watch or read much of our news today, you might think we as a nation came into being last week. Much of our news is delivered to us devoid of context, and that leaves us vulnerable to the same mistakes of our predecessors. I'm not sure how to help with this, but I think it's something we should keep an eye out for. Let's find the first chance we get and grab hold of it.
