The next time you can spare an hour and a half of your time, watch How the Deep State Took Down Richard Nixon, which is streaming free for a short time period at warroom.film. The documentary is hosted by journalist Michael Patrick Leahy, and it is based on extensive research by Geoff Shepard, a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked on the Nixon administration’s Domestic Policy Council and was later part of Nixon’s Watergate defense team.
But Watergate was, in the words of historian Paul Johnson, a “media putsch,” what Shepard calls a “coup.”
Shepard has written three excellent books revealing the plot to destroy the Nixon presidency, and in the film he and Leahy lay out 12 due process violations that doomed the Watergate defendants and Nixon’s presidency. And they compare what happened to Nixon more than 50 years ago to what happened to Donald Trump between 2016 and 2024. Nixon lacked the financial resources, alternative media, and political support in Washington to defeat what Leahy and Shepard characterize as a legal coup d’ etat. Trump needed all three to stay out of jail and return to the White House.
Most Americans have been taught in school and by the media the version of Watergate as told by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their stories for the Washington Post, their book All the President’s Men, and Hollywood’s dramatic movie starring Robert Reford and Dustin Hoffman as a pair of courageous journalists who uncover a sinister conspiracy allegedly covered-up by President Nixon and his closest advisers.
In the movie version, Hal Holbrook plays the mysterious figure that Woodward and Bernstein called “Deep Throat,” who provides clues for the intrepid journalists to follow in uncovering the “scandal.” We have since learned that “Deep Throat” was Mark Felt, then the deputy director of the FBI who was angry that he was passed over by Nixon to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI Director.
The gospel according to Woodward and Bernstein received its first blow with the ap...