MAY 2, 2023 – Juxtaposed to denial of the undeniable results of the 2020 presidential election, the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon regime now looks comparatively tame. A deeper examination of the record, however, reveals the broader danger that Nixon posed to the democracy.
Without “White House Tapes”—voice-activated recordings of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations—might well have taken a darker course. Among those conversations, of course, were self-incriminating Watergate-related exchanges, which corroborated bombshell testimony given by John Dean, Counsel to the President. The evidence blew the case wide open and ultimately led down the one-way street of impeachment (the recommendation of the House Judiciary Committee) and Nixon’s ignoble resignation.
At the time, anyone paying attention asked, “Why would Nixon engage in such a self-incriminating practice as taping his conversations?” The better question, it turns out, was why would he have such conversations in the first place? During the Watergate Hearings many people were flabbergasted that “Tricky Dick,” as his detractors called him, would have created the very evidence that would bring him down.
Back when he owned a bookstore, one of my bookish brothers-in-law gave me for Christmas one year the 900-page book containing transcripts of Nixon’s Oval Office tape recordings. I have yet to read the volume in full. After all, I knew how the Watergate story broke and how it ended. I’ve read excerpts, however, not only about Watergate but about a raft of other issues, foreign and domestic, and that’s where the story gets scary. The transcripts make for fascinating reading, affording glimpses into the cynical and devious mind of “Tricky Dick” and his interaction with advisors and many other influential people of the times.
Today I learned that later this week on the campus of my alma mater, John Dean and historian Timothy Naftali will talk about Watergate and its effect on American politics ever since. The occasion is the 50th anniversary (this week) of Nixon’s firing of Dean. Naftali was the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and has an answer to the $64 question, “Why the tapes?” According to Naftali, Nixon wanted to create a record that would disabuse historians from assigning Kissinger credit for Nixon’s foreign policy successes. Unfortunately for Nixon, except for the infamous 18 – ½ minute gap, the portions of the tapes that corroborated John Dean’s incriminating testimony weren’t deleted.
It appears that Nixon neither approved the Watergate break-ins (the burglars entered twice) nor knew about them in advance. What brought him down was the cover-up, initiated by his aides and later actively sanctioned by the president.
What’s so frightening about Watergate, however, isn’t limited to Nixon’s abuse of power in the course of the Watergate cover-up. According to historians Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter, the editors of The Nixon Tapes – 1973, Nixon’s overriding concern had nothing to do with the Watergate burglaries. It had everything to do with keeping the wraps on what was effectively a shadow government in control of widespread domestic surveillance based on the 1970 “Huston Plan” (named after White House aid, Thomas Huston, who authored the report for conducting surveillance on so-called “radicals” (Nixon’s political opponents). When those abuses of power are taken into account, Nixon trumps the Duly Defeated as the bigger threat to American democracy . . . so far. If the Duly Defeated would be king to satiate his obsessive narcissism, Nixon aimed to be king to wield the dictator’s cudgel. Perhaps the distinction between the two is without a difference, but Nixon’s cynical contempt for democracy was more expertly honed.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
