I’m sort of getting the sense that Watergate and its results are romanticized in some circles, like Nixon had a 0% approval rating and was forced to resign by Democrats and Republicans in equal measure working together singing kumbaya for the good of the country. I sort of wonder if this is widespread, and if it’s harming expectations and such today.
So I thought I’d ask my Doper elders (heh) who remember all this firsthand. Obviously, there are many changes in government and society between then and now (not the least of which is conservative news and media), but I’d like to hear your direct impressions and comparisons of the DC and national reaction between Nixon and Trump.
I was there. Just out of the service and working, while all my roommates were in grad school. I arrived home each day to find them glued to the Watergate hearings.
Nixon had been elected to a second term during the investigations and the hearings seemed to go on forever.
If the current situation follows the same pattern, we are just getting started.
When during Watergate? In 1972, it was nothing, a two-bit story pushed by Nixon’s enemies. In 1973, the Watergate hearings were riveting daily television when watching such hearings were very unusual because C-Span and cable didn’t exist. The Saturday Night Massacre took place on Oct. 20, 1973. That, I think, was the major turning point. Nixon made himself look guilty: Presidents did not obstruct justice. Even so, it took another year of continual fighting until Nixon went down, having finally lost the leaders in his party.
You cannot compare Watergate and now. Two gigantic differences. One, the parties then had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. The world was not bipartisan, but each wing had allies in the other party they could talk to and work with. Two, only what is now called the mainstream media existed. They were trusted. Walter Cronkite was still the CBS anchor. No official propaganda streams reached the mass market. Media coverage made it obvious that Nixon was a crook. He had an enemies list and most of the names on it were journalists, but they stood equal to him.
Nixon started everything we see today. He called everyone opposed to him enemies, and went to war with them. He inaugurated the Southern Strategy, which made racism the official principle of the Republican Party. He personified hatred in his personal statements, many of which were caught on tape. He surrounded himself with unqualified toadies who primary skill was crushing others in his name. He had no personal friends, and no advisors to rein him in. He unleashed the world we live in and gave those who hated the Other permission to relish their perceived superiority. They’ve always been almost half the country, a minority that could easily reach a majority when the other half did not fight them every single second.
The one saving difference between Nixon and Trump that matters is that Nixon had no mass people skills and that is Trump’s only skill. That skill is far more important and successful in today’s changed media landscape. Everything else is too close to the same for anyone to back down an inch ever.
When he started his second term, before Watergate blew up, Nixon’s approval rating was 67%. As late as May 1973, more people approved than disapproved of his performance. By the end of 1973, his approval rating was around 30%. But he probably could have ridden out Watergate until it became known that there were recordings of his conversations and the Supreme Court voted 9-0 that he had to turn over the tapes. That was on July 24, 1974. The House Judiciary Committee voted the first articles of impeachment on July 27. By then Nixon’s approval rating had dropped to 24%. A few days later the tapes revealed the “smoking gun” that he was actively involved in the coverup of the original “third-rate burglary.” That’s when Republican leadership told him he would be convicted. Nixon resigned on August 9.
Truman also had dismal approval ratings in his second term, although I think they stayed above 30%, and they improved somewhat by the time he left office.
Even Nixon’s most hard-core supporters never had the fierce personal devotion toward him as Trump supporters have, though. Nixon’s style simply couldn’t come up with the level of righteous indignation that inspires that kind of response.
There are a lot of similarities between now and then, but the biggest difference is that Nixon was veteran politician unlike Trump who is serving his first term in public office.
Another big difference is that Nixon had tapes but thought he could keep them from going public. I bet Trump doesn’t have tapes. But they both seem(ed) to think they were too big to fail. Nixon was wrong and I hope Trump is too.
I was a kid then, but one important difference is that during Watergate, there was still a collective idea of citizenship. Even far right politicians still operated within the same set of accepted facts as the far left. Now, there is no shared reality, we are two distinct nations who are wrestling for control of a single national government. Victory by one side now represents an existential threat to the other side.
The damage being done now is far more profound than the damage of Nixon because we will not come together after Trump.
One thing to keep in mind is that hardly anybody actually liked Nixon. So there was no 35% mass of ultra-loyal supporters. Once his support started to fail it cratered. This hasn’t happened now and it seems to be unlikely that it will.
But things might change if the Mueller report should ever become public. It is still conceivable that the AG’s report totally misrepresented the report. After all, what were all those high-profile plea bargains all about? They were all pretty big fish and the only reason for a plea bargain is to catch a bigger fish. We might be at the equivalent of early 1973; who knows?
Exapno Mapcase has succinctly summed up my thoughts about the situations—notably the broad agreement on what standards government should be held to, and what constitutes knowable truth. But I’ll add an anecdotal reflection on the era: At the time, the three newsweeklies offered special subscriptions to high-school students, and government classes frequently required students to subscribe to one for “current events” discussions. The Texarkana, Texas, school board (and probably others) decided that Newsweek and Time were unfairly trying to hound Nixon from office, and decreed that U.S. News & World Report was the only newsweekly that could be used in the classroom.
Ironically, this edict was still in force for my government class when school began in Sept. 1974, even though there had been some, ahem, further developments in the Nixon presidency the previous month.
Just to keep these two things from getting elided, the existence of the tapes was revealed by Alexander Butterfield in his testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee on July 13, 1973.
From that point on, it was pretty much all a battle over the tapes. Nixon fired Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre (“Impeach the Cox Sacker!” was one of the best bumper stickers ever) over his subpoena of the first nine tapes, one of which was the June 20, 1973 tape that probably would have been the smoking gun if Nixon hadn’t erased 18.5 minutes of it. (We don’t know for a fact that Nixon did that, but come on. :)) And so forth.
That’s a major difference that can’t be overlooked. I don’t know what evidence federal investigators and prosecutors have in their possession at the moment, but as far as we know, there are no recordings, no tapes, except for Access Hollywood of course.
I don’t think Trump supporters necessarily ‘like’ Trump either. The difference is that Trump offers the shittiest people in the country access to influence the political agenda. He offers white nationalism a platform without any precedent in the post-civil rights era. He offers a similar platform to the most extreme of Christian fundamentalists. Nixon was a plutocrat’s best friend, too, but the difference is that Trump has the support of a party that is ideologically in alignment with plutocrats - so much so that they look the other way when a hostile foreign country tries to interfere in an American election. Trump also has the chance to fundamentally reshape the federal judiciary for the next 30 or more years, in a way that pleases the worst among us. So that’s the difference. Trump offers horrible people good things, and there’s no way in hell that those diehards are going to abandon him. In some cases - perhaps in numbers that will shock us all - they might very well take up arms to defend him.
Well, this too. I was gonna say, however, that over the course of 45 years or so the nation’s standards for behavior at the top have lowered and coarsened. A brash, TV’s hindquarters like Donald Trump may not have ever been taken seriously enough for the country’s top position in 1972 but today gets away with misdeeds far greater than Nixon ever committed.
I’m left wondering if we boomers had an important hand in that continuous lowering of standards.
The irony is thick here. Time magazine under Henry Luce had moved more and more conservative after WWII. Luce died in 1967, but the Time-Life empire was too huge to quickly change. *Newsweek *pitched itself as a hipper and more liberal alternative to Time, with enormous campaigns giving college readers cheap subscriptions, which is when I started getting it. U.S. News was staunchly conservative, but had a much lower circulation.
Even so, *Newsweek *was never a leftist magazine. No major leftist mass market magazine or newspaper or television outlet existed at the the time. The closest I can point to was Rolling Stone and real leftists would have to be scraped off the ceiling at my doing so.
Plenty of conservative outlets could be found. The New York Times was far to the left of most newspapers because it was basically centrist, and that may be overstating it. (Leftists used to hate the Times.) Virtually every southern newspaper was wildly conservative and so were many midwestern ones. The Los Angeles Times was notably conservative. Whatever remained of the Hearst and Gannett and several other old-time empires were conservative to the core. The McCormick newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere were much farther right than that. All the business magazines were corporate conservative.
There was nothing on the left to balance them out. A few little political magazines, a few outrage magazines (like Ramparts and Monocle), an occasional article in *Playboy *and Esquire, but no newspapers, no television, no reaching out to the mass audience. The mainstream media was mainstream and mainstream America was not leftist, as seen in Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972.
For Nixon to go down in such an environment says volumes about Nixon but very little about America.