It is 50 years now since Richard Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974, and resigned the office the following day. Nixon was pardoned by the new president, Gerald Ford, on September 8. It was a stunning fall for Nixon from his 49-state reelection in 1972, when he won nearly 61 percent of the popular vote — the most ever by a Republican and the third-highest percentage since the popular-vote presidential elections became a nationwide staple in 1828.
Nixon’s public-approval rating was 67 percent in January 1973, and 54 percent in April 1973. By October 1973, it was 27 percent, and it stayed below 30 percent for all of 1974, hitting 24 percent by the time he resigned.
Nixon himself is a vast topic, a mixture of talents and flaws so compelling he seems to have stepped out of a Greek tragedy and landed in Middle America. No less powerful a personality than Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1958 that Nixon “has one of the most magnetic personalities that I have ever confronted” and “has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere.”
Awkward and unlikeable as he could appear, he understood American voters. From the time he was picked as a vice-presidential candidate at age 39, he was on five national tickets that produced three landslides over at least 442 electoral votes, a victory by another 110-electoral-vote margin, and the second-slimmest popular-vote defeat in presidential history.
Growing up in the Reagan years, coming to adulthood under Bill Clinton, I never really understood how men such as Nixon and Lyndon Johnson could command large national majorities with unappealing personalities and a reputation for dishonesty. After the past decade of our politics, it is no longer such a mystery. In many ways, Donald Trump still lives in Nixon’s America. Joe Biden was already in the Senate for a year and a half when Nixon resigned.
For conservatives and our movement, Nixon — like Trump — was an occasional friend but often an internal enemy, one who could rally the Republican Party and its voters away from conservative ideas. He oversaw the high-water mark of big, liberal government on many fronts, even imposing wage and price controls. His appointment of William Rehnquist gave the Supreme Court its first real conservative justice since the 1930s, but he also appointed Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade. Nixon regarded domestic policy in general with cynicism; playing the global chessboard was his real interest in politics.
The Watergate scandal and the resignations of Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew (due to an unrelated tax investigation related to his time in Baltimore politics), had real and lasting consequences. In November 1974, Democrats added five governorships, 49 seats and a veto-proof majority in the House, and four Senate seats, which along with one independent gave them 62 senators in their caucus. Not coincidentally, they then rewrote the filibuster rule in 1975 to make 60 senators the threshold to close debate. They rewrote the budget rules in ways favorable to more spending that are still with us today. The 1974 midterms also launched dozens of long Democratic careers in Congress.
Whether the Watergate scandal was worth the president’s resignation depends on the time period whose standards you use. Today, many of the details have now faded from popular memory. The burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters looks in retrospect completely unnecessary, given the lopsided outcome of the 1972 election, and Nixon’s involvement in its coverup reflects not only the moral flaws of his character but also the irrationality of how his paranoia obscured his judgment. Character is destiny, and in Nixon’s case it was an especially forceful one.
Watergate looked like something new in American politics, but it turned out to be a road with no further stops. In the 60 years before 1974, presidents had gotten away with all manner of dirty tricks using executive power. Many of those dirty tricks were overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, who entered the Justice Department’s top ranks in 1917 under Woodrow Wilson and directed the FBI and its predecessor from 1924 until his death in May 1972.
Upon Hoover’s death, Nixon appointed a temporary director of the FBI, and the No. 2 job in the bureau fell to Mark Felt, who was secretly using his position for one more bit of D.C. knife-fighting as the “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Nixon believed, and not without reason, that many of the things that got his administration and White House in trouble had personally been done to him by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The post-Watergate era did not end the weaponization of the federal government against political enemies — it even gave us, in 1978, the independent counsel — but it did result in a lot of “reforms” (some wise, some imprudent) that made a dent for a while in the black arts of wiretapping and punitive audits.
Nixon was forced out because Congress was ready to throw him out. But the era when that could happen seems to have ended when Democrats rallied on a party-line basis around Bill Clinton in 1998–99, an approach adopted (if less unanimously) by Republicans in the Trump impeachments.
Even after seeing how Democrats forced an incumbent president of their own off their ticket two and a half weeks ago, it remains impossible to imagine a repeat today of the Republican (and Conservative, in the case of James Buckley) senators who walked into Nixon’s office and told him that he didn’t have the votes from his own party to hang on any further.
Democrats pushed Biden out solely out of fear that he would lose the election: They’ve left him in office and stopped discussing his mental and physical decline.
What did change as a result of Watergate and its end, far more than politics, was the national political press — and the urge for all the press to become both national and political. Newspapers in 18th- and 19th-century America were openly partisan, aiming to rally and champion their own side. This preceded the growing professionalism of foreign correspondents and wire-service reports of speeches and conventions as well as the sensationalism of crime coverage. It survived both.
The 20th century saw a shift to a press that considered itself above partisan politics and more a respectable profession than just a paycheck for drunks who could type. The advent of radio and TV raised the celebrity power of what became “the media.” Its power to shape public opinion was dramatized in a series of events — Edward R. Murrow’s reporting on Joe McCarthy, Walter Cronkite’s turning on the Vietnam War over the Tet Offensive — but it was Watergate that transformed journalism from an ethos of informing the reader and viewer to an ethos of affecting events.
Two newspapermen could bring down a president! (A Republican one, at any rate, who was an enemy of their class.) You could win prizes and fame and be played in a movie by Robert Redford! (Or at least Dustin Hoffman.) Media coverage would never be the same.
That, too, may be bygone by now. Today’s political press, its investigative resources sliced to the bone by budget cuts, has raged endlessly without effect against Donald Trump, while not even raising a peep at Kamala Harris not deigning to answer their questions. The funeral for the Watergate-era press was held when Carl Bernstein himself admitted last month that he’d been hearing, and not disclosing, for a long time that Joe Biden was in decline. The young rebels of the Washington press became, in the end, all the president’s men.