Watergate was a vivid and compelling drama for most Americans.
But after a half-century of study, it is clear that no liberal Democrat would have been driven from the White House under the same circumstances. It is also clear that the biased, aggressive, and one-sided assault by parts of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches against President Richard Nixon bears striking similarities to the current war against President Donald Trump. (READ MORE: There Is Insanity — But There Is Also Love)
As we read today about various federal agencies — including the FBI and the CIA — trying to destroy Trump, first as a candidate and then as president, it is worth remembering that the most famous Watergate character, Deep Throat, was the third-ranking person at the FBI. He was leaking to two Washington Post reporters anonymously because he was angry that Nixon had not chosen him to lead the bureau.
Was Watergate a ‘National Nightmare’ After All?
Consider what happened in 1973 and 1974.
Nixon was the decisive winner of the 1972 presidential election — with 96.7 percent of the electoral votes and 60.7 percent of the popular vote. He was then driven from office. How could a man who carried 49 states (losing only in Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) be forced from the office to which most of the American people elected him?
Almost no one seriously asked that question at the time. We were made to believe Watergate was the equivalent of a Greek tragedy. Nixon’s hubris led to nemesis. His fall was supposedly a consequence of some fundamental violation of principles and personal failings. On Aug. 9, 1974, when President Gerald Ford was sworn in to replace President Nixon, he captured the national mood of the moment: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.” (READ MORE: The Bad Boys: Hunter Biden vs. John Dean)
Ford’s version of Watergate was simply false.
There was no national nightmare. There was no question about the Constitution working.
Everyone — including Nixon — believed that we had a government of laws.
Nixon proved this when he accepted defeat in 1960, graciously accepted defeat in California’s gubernatorial election in 1962, and then resigned from the presidency rather than go through a long drawn-out impeachment fight. He also believed that “here the people rule.”
I Too Believed in the ‘National Nightmare’
It was only when I began reflecting on the experience of the ongoing eight-year war against Trump that I began to rethink what I thought I learned about Watergate.
As I wrote in March to the Majority, I was there at the time. I was a first-time candidate in Congress who announced my bid before Watergate became so poisonous for Republicans that it made victory in 1974 incredibly unlikely.
Like many Americans, I accepted the media version of what was happening. As Howell Raines wrote in the Atlanta Constitution on May 31, 1973:
Watergate will not be mentioned in the new state Republican platform, but platform drafter Newt Gingrich will push for a “political integrity” plank and use it to whip the Democrats for alleged vote-stealing.
Gingrich, interim chairman of the 16-member committee which will write the platform proposals to go before Saturday’s convention session at Jekyll Island, believes that by facing the integrity issue state Republicans have a chance to wring some advantage from Watergate.
This was far from a unanimous view in the Georgia GOP in 1973. After all, in Georgia President Nixon had received 75.04 percent of the 1972 vote (881,496 votes). George McGovern got 24.65 percent (289,529 votes). I served as chairman of Nixon’s re-elect committee in the Sixth District of Georgia, and I knew how much support he had. Some of my friends rejected the idea of even mentioning Watergate.
As Raines reported:
Not everyone shares Gingrich’s enthusiasm for approaching Watergate even indirectly. Former GOP gubernatorial candidate Hal Suit says he would have to inspect closely the language of any integrity plank. Party Chairman Bob Shaw believes the 1,500-delegate convention is more likely to deliver a vote of ‘support and appreciation’ of the President.
Gingrich, a teacher at West Georgia College in Carrollton, says, however, that “Watergate is too big an issue to ignore. I think no group has been more stunned than Republicans that really do believe in law and order.”
Gingrich’s proposal, which he emphasizes is subject to his committee’s vote, is to bring up the integrity plank and then turn it on the Democrats.
I think it will go on to mention problems in this state like vote theft. My guess is that a Republican in this state must get 54 percent to win.
We believe a Republican loses 4 percent between voting and counting.
A year later, on July 5, 1974, David Broder wrote in the Washington Post that “Gingrich says his once strongly pro-Nixon Georgia voters ‘know it’s over’ for the President, and he spends most of his time voicing their frustration with ‘a Congress that will not act on impeachment or anything else.’”
Clearly, I shared the same general view of Watergate as most Americans at the time.
The Media’s Role in Watergate
It was hard to not believe the “bad Nixon” theory. Congressional hearings were relentlessly focused on looking for smoking guns. They had a presumption of guilt built into them. Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee came up with the now-famous formula: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” The structure of the question implies there was something dangerous or illegal that Nixon did or knew about. It set up a psychology of presumed guilt. (READ MORE: Henry Kissinger, RIP)
The sheer scale of the effort to get Nixon was daunting. The investigative arm of the executive branch created a special task force. A grand jury was empaneled. A federal judge decided to make his career by maximizing the persecution of the Nixon team. The District of Colombia venue was almost as anti-Republican in 1972 as it is today (78.1 percent voted for McGovern versus 21.56 percent for Nixon). It was practically impossible for any Nixon appointee to have a jury that was not overwhelmingly hostile. (The same is even more true today. In 2020, Trump won just 5.4 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C.)
The natural hostility of the D.C. venue was amplified by the constant bombardment from the Washington Post and the rest of the media. In many ways, Watergate was the crisis in which major newsrooms began to assume the power to define what was happening — and what would be permitted to happen.
The overwhelmingly liberal and anti-Nixon news media reinforced the sense that we were on the edge of a national disaster from which we had to be saved. In fact, in the media mythology, a large part of that salvation came from two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — and their paper, the Washington Post.
When you watch All the President’s Men and see Robert Redford as Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, Jason Robards as the editor Ben Bradlee, and Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat, you are drawn into the romanticized version of how it all happened. The glamour of the book and movie, the thrilling sense that a courageous newspaper had stopped a potentially dangerous leader, and the drama and mystery of late-night meetings in garages, all gave every would-be American journalist a new sense of self-importance.
Seeing the News as ‘Something to Be Made’
Symbiotic patterns in the liberal establishment began to solidify and emerge. Joe Califano, President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for domestic affairs (who helped build the Great Society bureaucratic structure) was the attorney for the Democratic National Committee and the Washington Post. It made for great efficiency in destroying President Nixon.
The news was morphing from something to be covered into something to be made. Woodward and Bernstein spawned two generations of reporter-crusaders who had to be anti-authority, anti-government, and anti-conservative to be accepted into the model newsroom that grew out of the Watergate experience.
The Washington press corps rapidly developed a symbiotic relationship with the bureaucracies, lobbyists, and politicians it was supposed to be covering. Selective leaks, slanted information, and hit pieces began to be the currency of the news media realm. As long as the targets were conservative or Republican, they were fair game.
Any serious questioning or challenging of this new journalism and its alliances had to be stopped. Challenging the new media ethos was defined as an assault on freedom of the press — and therefore on democracy itself.
For half a century, in this environment, it seemed absurd to challenge the perceived wisdom of Watergate as a morality play. Nixon was a perpetrator of something terrible, and the Congress and judiciary were honest and courageous allies of the media who, together, saved the nation.
After the relentless corruption of the bureaucracy, the media, and the justice system in their allied war against Trump, the case can be made that Ford’s “national nightmare” was exactly backward.
The real violation of our constitutional system came from the forces who set out to destroy a president who had carried 49 states and received 60.7 percent of the vote. That achievement left the activist feeling vindicated and morally superior. When combined with their success in the Ford administration to undermine and destroy the South Vietnamese government (and guarantee a North Vietnamese Communist victory) the alliance between Washington’s elite against the American people grew stronger, bolder, and more arrogant.
The network of elite universities, senior bureaucrats, key elements of the news media, and activists in the Justice Department and judicial system mobilized to drive Nixon out of office. It then grew for decades — with constant efforts to reinforce and protect its members in every institution.
Given what we have learned in recent years, it is worthwhile to revisit Watergate in detail. Many of the same tools, networks, and, in some cases, people that drove Nixon from office are still there.
The same elites have an even more aggressive, powerful, and arrogant assumption that they have the right to lie, redefine the truth, and protect themselves over the will of the American people.
Look at the total efforts to destroy Trump and consider how far they’ve come since Nixon and Watergate.
This is the 13th installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here, the eighth here, the ninth here, the 10th here, the 11th here, and the 12th here. For more commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.