Altered vistas, unexpected hope
Fifty years ago this week, President Nixon resigned the presidency in a cloud of scandal. What does this anniversary mean today? This is the second day of our three-day forum, as nine thinkers—historians, political theorists, and journalists—offer their reflections in response to this question.
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The screen-mediated presidency
Watching President Nixon’s sixteen-minute resignation speech, I find myself trying to read him. His face appears large, as if he’s just across a table from me. Some of the time he’s looking down at his typewritten text. When he looks up, all sorts of interesting things happen on his face: a wry smile, a stern lowering of his left eyebrow, an emphatic shake of the chin, a resolute gaze forward as he delivers a line he considers especially important. He often blinks when looking up from the page. But do I see extra flutters of his eyelids just before and after he says the words “as I leave the presidency”? Despite everything else I know about him, I wonder whether I see in his face evidence of dignified self-restraint or moral gravity.
Although I try to read him, I can’t. But as long as I watch, I can’t stop trying.
Somewhere around one-hundred million Americans watched that speech on television when it was broadcast on August 8, 1974. Nixon’s resignation seems like the culminating moment in the development of a phenomenon already well underway at that time and now so familiar that we risk taking it for granted: the transformation of the presidency into an institution to which Americans relate primarily through images on screens. The media that had connected earlier generations of Americans to their presidents—word-of-mouth networks, political party caucuses and conventions, newspapers, radios—were, with Nixon’s resignation, definitively eclipsed by the experience of fixing one’s eyes on the electric glow of a flat panel.
Our screens—televisions, computers, smartphones—pretend to allow us to read plainly what we are in no position to read plainly; they invite us to expect an intimacy that public life cannot in fact provide. The screen-mediated presidency fosters illusions about the president, tempting us to believe that we are equipped to judge a president’s character and fitness for office more astutely than we really can. But a deeper danger, it seems to me, lies in how the on-screen presidency shapes our conception of political life as a whole. Simulating immediacy, screens suppress our attention to their function as mediating mechanisms.
The more we depend on screens to mediate our political relationships, the less prepared we are to notice or appreciate the political roles of mediating institutions per se. Politics as lived through screens trains us to experience the most crucial media of political life—organizational memberships, public forums of discourse, representative institutions—as either uninteresting, because they don’t promise immediacy, or frustrating, because they don’t attain it.
Achieving a genuinely political and citizenly common life would have to involve resisting, in some manner, the miseducation we have gotten from our screens. I am not sure what that resistance ought to look like. But to reflect on the moment, fifty years ago, when the screen-mediated presidency made its big breakthrough seems a good way to begin.
Geoffrey Kurtz teaches political science and urban studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). His recent essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic and Public Seminar.
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Teaching Watergate and the Nixon-Frost interviews in the Age of Trump
Watergate has been one of my favorite topics to cover while teaching the U.S. History survey. Students know it was a big scandal, are aware it led to Nixon leaving office, but very few know the details of what happened.
By the time we get to the Watergate lecture, my students have already learned about the rest of Nixon’s political career. They meet him as Eisenhower’s vice president, watch him in the Kitchen Debate, see him sweat in his televised debate with John F. Kennedy, trace his political strategy as he pulls in the Silent Majority, and understand why he won reelection in a landslide victory in 1972 with 60.7% of the popular vote.
The story of Nixon’s career, however, does not match what students know about his legacy.
“Wasn’t he the president who got impeached?” they ask. That cognitive dissonance creates great anticipation for the Watergate lecture. Unraveling the story of the burglary (complete with Chapstick bugging devices!), the cover-up, the investigation, and the aftermath is a lot of fun. I end my Watergate lecture with a short video clip.
It is this last pedagogical flourish that has traditionally brought out the biggest reaction in my students and helped them to fully understand why Watergate indelibly changed the political landscape of the United States. In 1977, journalist David Frost filmed a series of interviews with President Nixon and managed to disarm the former president enough to get him to speak candidly about the Watergate scandal. Infamously, this led to Nixon defending his illegal actions by stating, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal . . . by definition.”
A Gallup poll conducted after the interview was broadcast showed that seventy-two percent of the public still thought Nixon was guilty of obstruction of justice. Each semester, when I show my students the video clip with that Nixon quote, they visibly react. Gasps and laughs can be heard throughout the classroom as they marvel at the audacity of a president thinking he was above the law.
Now, on this fiftieth anniversary of Watergate, I wonder if this clip will ever get the same reaction again. The July 1, 2024, Supreme Court decision on Trump vs. United States states that while unofficial acts of the president are not immune from the law, “The nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” The Court then leaves it up to lower courts to decide which acts are to be considered “official” or “unofficial.”
This controversial decision has already been used as political dynamite, with President Donald Trump’s lawyers making it the basis for a request to overturn his recent “hush money” felony convictions and promoters selling t-shirts declaring, “I’m Voting for a Convicted Felon” at the Republican National Convention.
This leads me to question how I will frame the story of Watergate in future semesters. What has always been a fairly straightforward tale of arrogant leaders overstepping the rule of law in order to stay in office suddenly seems fraught with modern political implications. Will my conservative students still gasp when Nixon claims he wasn’t breaking the law? Or will they see him as a victim of a misunderstanding of the Constitution, a precursor to Trump? Does the story of Nixon explain the final downfall of the “establishment” Republicans of the 1970s, as I have always taught? Or does it begin the narrative of the party’s trajectory towards Trumpism?
A lot depends on what will happen during the rest of this 2024 presidential election. But whether the Republican or Democratic nominee wins in November, the Frost/Nixon interview will never play quite the same way again.
Adina Kelley is a historian of religion, gender, and culture. She received her Ph.D. from Baylor University and is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Eagle Scholars Honors Program at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul.
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Out of the ashes
Not quite eight years after Richard Nixon resigned as president of the United States, his one-time “hatchet-man” Charles Colson began a commencement address by referring to that event. He was speaking to the 1982 graduating class of Wheaton College, whose president, Hudson Armerding, had only recently announced his retirement. Colson: “One concern is the fact that Dr. Armerding announced his resignation right after I agreed to be here today. Well, I’m accustomed to that; it seems to happen to presidents I associate with.”
Thereafter, the speech, which I was privileged to witness as a junior member of the Wheaton faculty, eschewed the witticisms that regularly feature in the genre. Instead, it showed how a political debacle like Watergate could precipitate not just hand wringing but a change of heart coupled with a change of direction.
Colson, quoting Solzhenitsyn, did give his personal testimony (“Bless you, prison”). He also took several minutes detailing his view of contemporary life (“desperately seeking certainty in the midst of confusion and hope in the face of disillusionment”). But most of the address enjoined Christian believers to move beyond “pious and self-centered . . . sanctuaries” to engage “the sick, hungry, and hurting people where they are.”
He ended with eight specific injunctions for the graduates.
The first implored them to take their stand on Scripture—but as augmented by how “the great Christian scholars” through the ages had understood and applied the sacred text. Another quoted Dorothy L. Sayers on the imperative to remember the essence of Christianity: “the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and the gate of death.”
He also warned the graduates to “never, never confuse piety with righteousness.” Yes, personal piety was important, but “when God speaks of righteousness, He is speaking of justice, caring for the widows, the orphans, the oppressed.”
Colson’s appeal to “seek first the kingdom of God” led on to words even more timely now than in 1982: “We’ve had a tradition in America of equating God and country, Old Glory and the Rugged Old Cross; it’s a popular notion that we Americans, so richly blessed by God, are His chosen people. This is a dangerous heresy. Never make the Gospel of Jesus Christ hostage to the political fortunes of any man, party or kingdom.”
Colson’s eighth and final injunction was to “take Jesus as your model—reach out to identify with the most unlovable, those hurting inside, many sick and despairing in ghettos, in prisons. These are the people who have never come into our churches. And without your going to them, they never will.”
Now in another day of political dislocation, the memory of how a crisis from fifty years ago recentered the life of Charles Colson—and through him recalled Christian believers to a faith active in love—may inspire hope at this even more precarious time.
(My thanks to Emily Banas, Wheaton College archives, for providing a transcript of Colson’s address.)
Mark Noll is retired as a historian who taught at Wheaton College and the University of Notre Dame. His books include America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006), and, most recently, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911 (2023).