Pursuing the Spirits of our Forebears

A reminder that Watergate and its characters are not so historical.
By Kamron M. Spivey

Hugh Haynie, 1974

Americans adorn their offices with portraits of former presidents and leaders, maintaining the adage that “those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it.” Rather than expecting advice from the long-dead heroes of an oil painting, however, Americans should turn to the still-active commentary of not-so-historical figures. 

Take Watergate, for example. Sure, the 1970s seem distant: millennials and younger generations have no memory of it, and those who do may have tried their best to forget it. 

But of the forty Watergate conspirators indicted or jailed, several have lived through the Trump Administration. They have witnessed another Republican of “the silent majority” rise to the presidency and bind his administration to damning criminal allegations.

These Watergate figures, of whom many history books have been written, have themselves written many books about political scandals: some even in response to Trump. 

John Dean comes to mind, through his frequent political commentary. A bona fide crook, the former White House counsel to President Nixon served four months in prison after testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973. That testimony, and everyone since, implicated the 37th president and his top officials without restraint. 

Having finished his history of Watergate—and having outlived the bigger names of the Nixon Administration (Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Tricky Dick)—Dean has sort of become the authoritative source for executive scandals: a title he often reminds his readers of.

An experienced commentator during both Clinton- and G.W. Bush-era scandals, Dean found ample opportunity during the Trump Administration.

In a 2017 article with the Los Angeles Times, Dean stated that Trump “just doesn’t know anything about the job, and it shows.”

Nixon, meanwhile, was unquestionably suited for the presidency. His political career began as a Congressman from California in 1947. He served as a Senator and Eisenhower’s Vice President. He lost bids for the White House and California governorship, only to return for the presidency in 1968. His 1972 electoral victory carried every state but Massachusetts. It is no small feat that more votes were cast for (and against) Richard Nixon throughout his career than anyone else in the twentieth century.

A self-described “outsider,” Trump could not even boast a majority of the popular vote in 2016—the most disparate of the five times that has happened in history.

“Nixon was an institutionalist,” Dean said in a recent interview with Business Insider. “He wouldn’t attack the FBI or Department of Justice in a blatant and blind way that Trump is. He knew those people,” Dean responded following the FBI raid of Mar-A-Lago. 

Dean has long believed that Trump was (and is) a dangerous challenge to the federal institution. Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey was “basically confessing obstruction of justice,” Dean told the Los Angeles Times in that same 2017 interview.

Not everyone came to the same conclusion as Dean, however. And special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation declined to formally conclude whether the president obstructed justice.

But obstruction has been only one of many scandals affixed to the Trump Administration. The key lies in discerning which scandals are valid and which ones are “backward-looking obsession[s],” to quote President Nixon.

Donald Segretti, who served four months in prison for distributing illegal campaign literature intended to smear Nixon’s Democratic opponents, ought to know a lot about partisan showmanship. In an interview in July 2022, he said that the Watergate hearings were “more of a political show than the Jan. 6 hearings, which are much more of a factual presentation.”

Of course, presentation of information is key. And while Dean and Segretti were once loyal to the Grand Old Party, their views (or the party’s views) have understandably shifted over fifty years. It is also impossible to assess what the deceased Watergate convicts would have thought of Trump, while not every living convict compared Trump’s misdeeds to their own.

Perhaps, then, it is most suitable to hear what those who reported on Watergate have to say, as their fundamental objective—to inform the American people—may surpass a politician’s.

Still working for The Washington Post, where he broke the Watergate story in 1972, journalist Bob Woodward has written the last three of his twenty-one total books on Trump. 

Ever critical of Trump, Woodward amended his view in a recent Post op-ed, “Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger.”

We must recognize, however, that Woodward—like Dean—is trying to sell a book and catch a headline. The former president neglected to unleash nuclear Armageddon, as such sensational warnings from Woodward might suggest.

But this fear of Trump has been around since before he won. And it is a fear that likens him to Nixon, who inherited a very real possibility of fallout upon ascendancy to the global throne.

That returns us to comparing one resigned president to a twice impeached one. But where lies the similarity between Dick and Don if you don’t retrospectively cite the latter’s presidential scandals?

Republican Congressmen from the 1970s, like William Whitehurst, truly admired Nixon and still respect his civil rights record, fiscal decisions, and foreign policy. “[Watergate] was a tragedy for the nation,” Whitehurst said.

But a group of thirty Republicans, including Whitehurst, wrote a letter against Trump’s 2016 nomination, citing seven character flaws they judged “highlights the unacceptable danger in electing him to lead our nation.”

Mind you, these were speculative claims for a man who had not yet won the election. In 2020, Whitehurst joined twenty-three other Republicans to the same effect.

Enough Americans clearly did not listen to Whitehurst et al in 2016. Maybe they were vainly channeling the advice of some historical personage on their mantle instead of hearing the explicit warnings Woodward and Watergate convicts were telling them. 

Since Trump took office, several characters from the Watergate tragedy have passed on, replaced by the characters and convicts of new scandals. Will Americans listen to them next time, or will it take another fifty years?

[This opinion was written for Professor Bob Strong’s Presidential Scandals course in Fall 2022.]

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