What if the Watergate break-in had never been discovered? The story never broke? And Nixon had remained president until January 1977? How would history have gone differently?
No Betty Ford Center?
< Represses desire to post plot of Watchmen >
That assumes that Spiro Agnew’s shenanigans also never came to light. Is there a reason to suppose that in the absence of a Watergate scandal, the scrutiny that was placed on his actions at the governor of Maryland would not have been brought?
ETA: that’s in response to Dr. Qadgop.
The Basques would have gotten into the drug and alcohol rehab business? 
I think it could have affected politics greatly.
Let’s not forget, Nixon was no conservative - he was a very moderate Republican, and the ascendant conservatives within the party did not entirely like or trust him. While they respected Nixon’s anticommunism, they didn’t like certain of his domestic initiatives nor his foreign policy decisions based on what he termed “realism”.
This was happening independently of a Democratic Party that was self-destructing. The party that had a violent and confrontational convention in 1968 had an even more wrenching political process in the years after - one that left McGovernites ascendant, centrists like Scoop Jackson isolated, and the party poised to take only a single state in 1972.
Without Watergate, there is no possible way a Democrat could have captured the White House in 1976. Let’s not forget, Carter won only narrowly in what can only be described as the best possible circumstances. And without Nixon out of the way, and a failed Carter Administration to run against, Reagan’s final push couldn’t have been completed and the conservative revolution finally reach its primary goal.
So, no Watergate means that until the late 1980’s at least, we would have had a Republican Party dominated by moderates in the Nelson Rockefeller, Arlen Specter, and John Heinz mold who would have dominated politics at the presidential level and made inroads at the congressional level. They likely would have kept conservatives in the coalition as junior partners. On the other side, Democrats would have been dominated by doctrinaire liberals who had trouble winning elections, at least at the presidential level, and moderates in that party would have felt marginalized. That is what actually happened, and it isn’t likely that that would have changed much.
The Democratic Party has not nominated a “doctrinaire liberal” for POTUS since McGovern.
Personally, I think the conservatives would have made a bigger push. Reagan tried to take the 1976 nomination from Ford but Ford held on due mostly to the strength of his incumbency. With Nixon as the ineligible incumbent, there wouldn’t have been any obvious moderate to head off the conservative faction of the party. Reagan would have gotten the nomination and probably beaten Carter.
I agree to a great extent with Mr Moto’s analysis of Nixon and the Republicans – though Rockefeller was in fact a liberal. I suspect, however, that the conservative wing of the Republicans would have eventually found a voice in the inner circles of the GOP, though not as strong or dominant a one as resulted from Reagan’s Presidency and the “Revolution of '94.” Needless to say, I disagree with his analysis of the Democrats (there are times I think his definition of “doctrinaire liberal” is “anyone to the left of Ann Coulter” ;)).
“Watergate” was an entire pattern of conduct grounded in the very nature of the man Nixon was. For his presidency not to have broken down in such a scandal, he’d have had to be a different person entirely, and the question is meaningless.
Then assume for the sake of argument that Watergate was successfully covered up and never become public knowledge.
Former Senator Fred Thompson (R. - TN), who rose to prominence as minority counsel on the Watergate Committee would not be considering running for the presidency of the United States in 2008, but he might be an actor anyway. His first role was playing himself in the movie Marie (1985).
Some thoughts of my own, in rough chronological order:
Spiro Agnew still resigns, due to his conduct in Maryland. I am not sure who would receive the Vice-Presidency if this happens (Ford is a contender, but there are several others, including John Connelly).
The Republicans still lose seats in the 1974 elections (I don’t think that they would have broken the pattern), but their losses are not that large in the House, and, in the Senate, they might actually end up having a net gain of seats (the Reps only lost four Senate seats in 1974, and they came within 5% of winning in five seats they lost). I also believe that Houston Flournoy would have probably beaten Jerry Brown for Governor of California.
I have no clue who either party nominates for President in 1976, but I don’t believe that Carter would have been the Democratic nominee (with no Watergate, his chief source of appeal would have been meaningless), and Ford is also out if he doesn’t become Vice-President. The Republican nominee wins, though probably not in a landslide. No idea about House results, but the Republicans probably save seats that they lost in our timeline in Ohio, Tennessee, and (possibly) Nebraska.
Where it really becomes interesting (and where I’ll stop to pose this as a question to the board at large) in in the events that occur in the late 1970s in our timeline. What occurs differently in this world than in our own, and how those that affect elections starting in 1977/1978?
I think that mostly it would have affected how the media approaches politics. Up until Watergate, “warts and all” media reporting didn’t really exist. I suspect that minus Watergate, the government would be a lot slimier than they are able to get away with these days. (Though it could be argued that it’s just made people care less about what the government does.)
One article on the topic:
One question is what the last two years of the Nixon administration would have been like. Nixon would have faced events like the fall of South Vietnam (along with Cambodia and Laos), the OPEC oil embargo, the 1975 recession, the Mayaguez capture, the State Department bombing, the Helsinki negotiations, the CIA hearings, the swine flu epidemic, the Beirut riots, Viktor Belenko’s defection, and possibly two additional assassination attempts. Plus the rise of Disco.
You had me going for a minute there, Doc. In the unlikely event that your post wasn’t a whoosh, and for the benefit of any one else who might not know, ETA is a new SDMB acronym, usually intended to mean Edited To Add.
Basques. Heh.
Likely, escalating violence & unrest on college campuses.
In my view, at the time and in hindsight, Nixon was pretty smart and had a good idea of how to produce pragmatic solutions.
What surprized me then, and still surprizes me, is that he got caught and that such a big deal was made of it.
The USA would have been spared two spectacularly incompetent presidents which would have made a radical difference to our current World situation.
Chorus: ‘The King is an the all-together, the king is in the all-together’
Sometimes I think that the POTUS is too important to be selected by the USA
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford may never had gotten to work together.
For purposes of the OP, we’re not assuming Nixon never played or sanctioned dirty tricks. We’re assuming he never got caught, which is not unreasonable. Only a random fluke led to the Watergate burglars being caught and the story breaking.