Does Watergate still matter?
Fifty years ago this week, President Nixon resigned the presidency in a cloud of scandal. What does this anniversary mean today? We asked nine thinkers—historians, political theorists, and journalists—to respond to this question. Today’s reflections conclude our forum.
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The tragedy of Nixon’s resignation
Richard Nixon’s resignation was not an act of repentance. It could have been. But it wasn’t.
Politically, of course, it didn’t matter if the president of the United States understood that what he’d done was wrong, legally and morally. America didn’t need him to identify with the biblical lost sheep, or lost coin, or lost son who could see his sorry state and say, “I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:18). The country just needed Nixon to acknowledge the crisis brought on by scandal and voluntarily step aside. Resignation was enough.
But writing Nixon’s religious biography—following the arc of his spiritual life as he labored for grace, trying and failing to feel worthy of God’s love—I couldn’t help but hope. For the sake of the story, I wanted him to have a full moral reckoning.
And my own faith teaches me to hope against hope for people to change. Augustine once preached that Christians ought to “prefer even vicious people to be cured rather than condemned.” He said those restless hearts who have found rest in God can, in fact, look around and see that “every day people who seemed to be good fall away and perish; and again, ones who seemed to be bad are converted and live.”
There was a moment where Nixon seemed to achieve some moral clarity. Leaving the White House on August 9, 1974, he stopped to talk to the staff. He told them they should be proud of their service. He said they should “never be petty.” And said, “always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Did he see that this described what happened to him? He was petty. He was easily wounded and refused to let go of his hurts. He was hated, sometimes vociferously. Yet it wasn’t unfair opposition that brought Nixon down, but his own response.
In 1971, Nixon instructed hatchet man Chuck Colson to look for dirt on Larry O’Brien, the head of the Democratic Party who organized and funded attacks on “Tricky Dick.” There’s a memo documenting this in the Nixon archives. Fifteen months later, a man hired by Colson had a crew of black-bag operatives break into the Watergate office complex to plant a bug in O’Brien’s phone.
When that went wrong, Nixon approved a plan to cover-up the White House connection to the burglary, offering a presidential pardon in exchange for perjury and obstruction of justice. That was recorded for posterity because Nixon had his own bugs—secret recording devices planted in the president’s offices not by his enemies, but at his instruction.
And then you destroy yourself indeed.
Nixon could have seen this, leaving the White House. Instead, he made a different choice, one that seems to me to be all too common in contemporary politics, a temptation that has its tendrils in all of us. Back in California, when Nixon’s wife asked him how he could endure the shame of his resignation, he said, “I just get up in the morning to confound my enemies.”
Fifty years later, Nixon’s resignation stands as a historical marker of his condemnation. But there is also this tragedy: It could have been his cure.
Daniel Silliman is news editor for Christianity Today. He has a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Heidelberg, in Germany, and has taught history and humanities at Heidelberg, the University of Notre Dame, Valparaiso University, and Milligan University. His latest book is One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation.
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Lincoln on the legacy of Watergate—and Trump
Fifty years ago the institutional machinery of the United States brought down Richard Nixon, despite his long prominence in national life and victory in two presidential elections. An independent press exposed evidence of wrongdoing; Congress launched investigative hearings; a unanimous Supreme Court that included three justices he appointed ruled that he enjoyed no immunity from turning over recordings that proved his obstruction of justice. Nixon resigned in the face of virtually certain impeachment and conviction, and a principle of accountability was affirmed.
In 2024, the institutional machinery of the United States is notably weaker. The press has fractured, its credibility weakened. Congress twice impeached Donald Trump but declined to convict him of crimes committed in plain sight and hearing. A divided Supreme Court that included three justices he appointed ruled that Trump was entitled to presumptive immunity from prosecution official acts, not specifying whether any of his behavior before or after January 6, 2021 fell into that category. Trump has established a precedent of executive power considered more important than accountability. The legacy of Watergate has been institutionally eviscerated, if not repudiated. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if encouraging renegades to overthrow the duly elected government of a democratic republic is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Watergate no longer matters.
What, then, does? Lincoln knew the answer. “Public sentiment is everything,” he said in his first U.S. Senate debate against Stephen Douglas in 1858. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”
The final bulwark of the republic is the people, who finally determine how—or whether—the institutional machinery of the nation, and efforts to rewrite the prevailing common sense, will work. This is something that Lincoln understood even as a young man. As he said when he was 28 years old in 1837, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
The presidential election of 2024 will be a referendum—not on Donald Trump, but on us.
Jim Cullen teaches history at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich Connecticut. His books include The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation and Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century.
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Hiking to the tune of Watergate
Raising two very active boys, my wife and I discovered early in our parenting journey that our sons’ energy could be productively channeled into outdoor activities undertaken together. From family bike rides to community fun runs, from mountain hikes in national parks to treks through the hardwood forests of our home state, our boys have been game for it all with one condition: that you entertain them with a good story. And this is how my sons grew up hiking, biking, and running to a soundtrack of American history lectures.
Today these little boys are teenagers and have heard all of my American history lectures. And while they no longer require the distraction of a history lecture to power their way up a mountain or run a half-marathon, they will occasionally still humor me on a family hike and request one of their favorites from my catalog. Far and away the story my sons ask me to revisit most often is one that concluded fifty years ago this week when Richard Nixon resigned: Watergate.
Half a century on, it’s easy to understand why the fall of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal holds my sons’ interest enough to warrant multiple retellings. Dirty tricks, Operation Gemstone, bungling burglars, hush money paid through cloak and dagger, a secret taping system in the White House—the twists and turns of the Watergate plot are fascinating enough in their own right.
Add in the personalities involved in the scandal and you have a story worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster. Gordon Liddy, the mustachioed architect of the Watergate break-in who regularly boasted that he could kill a man with a pencil. Mark Felt, the FBI’s number two man whose snub for the bureau’s top spot transformed him into “Deep Throat,” the secret source Bob Woodward tapped to unravel Watergate’s knots. Alexander Butterfield, the dutiful yet conflicted Nixon aide whose televised testimony before a Senate committee rocked the nation by confirming the existence of those secret White House tapes. And, of course, Nixon himself, growing ever more isolated, ever more brooding, ever more compromised, as Watergate spun out of his control.
No wonder my boys never tire of hearing about Watergate. It’s a gripping political yarn that began with the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers and ended with Army One ignominiously shuttling Richard Nixon off the White House lawn.
The day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, his successor, President Gerald Ford, assured Americans that “our long national nightmare is over.” Ford’s utterance is typically used to mark the end of the Watergate tale. But what if he only had it half right?
What if Nixon’s resignation is best understood not only as the end of an era now passed, but also as the origin story of our own time? This question is one I will be exploring with students in a class I’m teaching on Watergate this fall. Was Nixon’s resignation simply the bookend to the most dramatic political scandal in American history? Or did his departure from the White House fifty years ago mark the beginning of the political culture we’ve inherited and live with today?
Nixon’s duplicity and deceit (inexplicitly preserved on tape for all to hear) came to light as Watergate unfolded, and it shattered Americans’ trust in their elected officials. How much have we ever recovered? The words “lying” and “politician” go together today like peas and carrots. Nixon’s downfall birthed a new generation of investigative journalists, an army of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins doggedly vying to uncover (and often exaggerating) government scandals at every turn.
Sounds like the nightly fare on cable news networks today, where exposing the corruption, hypocrisy, and dishonesty of politicians (at least those politicians of the other party) is treated like a national sporting event. After his resignation (and pardon), an unrepentant Nixon declared that illegal acts were not illegal if a president performed them. Just last month, the Supreme Court seemingly vindicated Nixon’s view in its ruling on Presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. As I’ve prepared this class for the fall, I’ve often felt like I was prepping for a course on current events rather than history.
Told correctly, the fall of Richard Nixon is an entertaining political tale that can keep even the most unmotivated hiker moving along a trail. Yet in important ways, Watergate—the culture it fostered, the questions it raised, the precedents it set—is still very much a part of our world today. I hope my students this fall are as entertained by the story as my sons have been over the years. But I hope they also come to recognize that we still live in a world Watergate helped create.
Rusty Hawkins is a Professor of Humanities and History and Dean of the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. He and his family live in Marion, Indiana.
The author and his sons, probably talking about Watergate.
Top image: Robert Knudsen/Nixon Library. For his final meal in the White House as President, Richard Nixon requested cottage cheese, pineapple slices, and a glass of milk.
Great collection of articles to round out the forum!