This is an excerpt from Doomsday Scenario, the historian Garrett Graff’s Substack. To read the full post, click here.
Much of the recent revisionism around Watergate equates the “persecution” of Trump, and his many many many crimes, with the idea that somehow Nixon was also targeted by a “Deep State plot.” It’s clearly based on (a) a wildly simplistic and misguided understanding of what Watergate “was”; (b) a desire to hand-wave away both Donald Trump’s egregious corruption, abuse of office, and conspiracies to hold onto power and persecute his enemies; as well as (c) to promote the idea that presidents deserve to be above the law.
The latest DOJ interest seems heading toward some official apology or rebuke of the past prosecution, presumably as a way to excuse Trump’s behavior today and make clear how the Deep State has always wrongly persecuted presidents.
It’s all wrong—both historically and in the modern-day.
The Wall Street Journal [recently] wrote, “Mainstream scholars have long concluded that Watergate generated a genuine constitutional crisis and that Nixon, not those who investigated him, was guilty of a malfeasance which not only doomed his presidency but also led to overhauls that significantly curtailed executive power.”
Count me in the mainstream.
As the author of what I’d like to believe is the definitive “mainstream” account of the scandal, I think it’s worth remembering the full arc of Watergate and how it was much more than a burglary. I think most Americans still misremember, wrongly, that the whole prosecution was the burglary itself—if you ask the average American they’d probably tell you that the only people prosecuted were the burglars.
In reality, 69 people were indicted or charged with crimes stemming from the Watergate prosecutions—and 48 of those in the end pleaded guilty or were found guilty at trial. As I summarized the full scope in my book:
“Ultimately, multiple Cabinet officials would face criminal charges, an FBI director would resign and face prosecution, a congressman would commit suicide, and a CIA director would plead guilty to misleading Congress. There were secret hush money payoffs, threats of blackmail, layers upon layers of betrayals, an alleged kidnapping, and even a suspicious plane crash. There were rumors of high-priced call girls, allegations of the CIA and the Pentagon spying on the Nixon White House itself, and accusations of illegal donations from the Greek military junta. All told, 69 people would be indicted on charges stemming from the related investigations—including George Steinbrenner—and companies from Goodyear Tires and Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M found themselves pleading guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection. Nixon’s attorney general and commerce secretary were put on trial together, a case then dubbed the “trial of the century,” despite being all-but forgotten today. The careers of three consecutive attorneys general would be upended.
It was the largest, most egregious and far-reaching scandal in American presidential history—until the current era we’re all living through.
To me, the scandal worth focusing on now isn’t the events of Watergate or the reaction and reforms thereafter. The scandal we need to focus on as a country is that we didn’t engage in a similar post-Watergate era of robust reforms and oversight mechanisms after the first Trump administration. Had we been more aggressive in those post-Trump prosecutions, congressional and democracy reforms, we might have been able to prevent this second, increasingly unrepairable debacle.