Watergate lessons?
Where history might be leaving us on our own
Even before Donald Trump took his first oath of office for the U.S. Presidency in January, 2017, lots of people had started pulling out their old files and memories about the Watergate scandal that had taken place 45 years earlier in 1972.
Democrats, establishment GOP types and most of the media outside of the FOX News ring-kissers were giving odds on how soon Trump would get caught in his first presidential scandal. Well, with two impeachments, 34 felony convictions and a few rulings over sexual abuse and election tinkering still pending, all those bets have now been laid down. And the winner is ...?
Comparisons between Nixon’s Watergate scandal and the multiple transgressions of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lies and deceits to grab more and more executive branch power have never stopped. But many people — perhaps most — have forgotten, or never learned, the most important lessons from the Watergate scandal and how those lessons might help us now. Or not.
Just as the disputed election of 2020 was not about hanging Vice President Mike Pence, the Watergate scandal was much more than a late night burglary at the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party in 1972.
What marries the Trump and Nixon scandals in history is that both were attempts to block the “peaceful transfer of power” from one presidential administration to the next. Nixon’s transgressions were pre-emptive during his campaign to get re-elected. Trump’s efforts to block the results of a “free and fair” election took place after the voting with his arm-twisting telephone calls, 60 bogus court challenges and a “Stop The Steal” rally on January 6, 2021 that turned violent.
Both the Nixon and Trump cases shared Page One headline lies, campaign finance corruption, deployment of enemies’ lists and record-breaking cronyism and bribery. But the bottom line here is all about preserving America’s democracy and the blockage of an autocracy. It’s not about the petty crimes, lecherous personalities or even partisan politics. Ultimately, the lessons required are about our U.S. Constitution.
When trying to draw lessons from the two sets of scandals a half century apart, three subjects must be of primary focus. These are the courts, the co-equal legislative branch of government and the free press.
In the case of Watergate all three of these independent institutions were functional and did their jobs (for the most part.) In the latter case of Trump’s White House reign, none of the three are providing the guardrails, accountability or handcuffs required.
During the days of Watergate, we still had a Congress led by enough men of honor (yes, they were all men) and not by impure partisan persuasion or fealty to an imperial White House.
The Supreme Court was led by Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee and a loyal Eisenhower Republican. Burger administered the unanimous Nixon vs. United States decision in 1974 that opened the trap door to Nixon’s final resignation. And, even before The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became big celebrities, the press corps of that era already was a “no nonsense” zone full of hard questioners and healthy skeptics, seasoned from their experiences covering the official lies and government secrets of the Vietnam War.
Today, we have a Congress with a Republican Party that has been entirely taken over by Trump. We have a Supreme Court with a 6-3 anti-liberal majority and a feckless chief in John Roberts. A here-and-then comparison of the press and media requires just listing four names: Walter Cronkite and Woodward/Bernstein versus Sean Hannity and Wolf Blitzer. (Feel free to add your own examples.)
The Watergate Scandal
On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate office complex on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post published a brief one-column story about the crime without much detail. But a follow-up by two of The Post’s younger and more aggressive reporters, Bernstein and Woodward, found links to all five burglars to The White House and Nixon’s re-election campaign committee. They reported the police found “almost $2,300 in cash, most of it in $100 bills with the serial numbers in sequence and a cashed $25,000 check from the Nixon re-election committee.”
The Nixon White House went into immediate “denial and distancing” mode. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler called it a “third rate burglary attempt” with no White House employees “involved in this very bizarre incident.”
But Woodward and Bernstein filed more stories, covering the court hearings by Judge John Sirica where the five burglars, now known as the “Watergate Plumbers” pled guilty to conspiracy and wiretapping as well as burglary. All five men were sent to jail.
On the same day the Sirica guilty verdicts were reported, Nixon met in The White House with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. It was discovered two years later — and after a landslide Nixon victory to a second term — that Nixon had ordered Haldeman to launch a cover-up of the crime and investigations. He ordered Haldeman to “call off the FBI” and “let them know we play tough, too.”
These were days a full half century before the internet, emails and social media. But Nixon had installed a secret taping system in his office, and in the end, it provided the “smoking gun” that led to his eventual resignation.
For all of the two years between the burglary and his eventual resignation from the presidency on August 9, 1974, Nixon denied any prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in or the links to his re-election committee. Nixon attacked the “liberal” Washington Post and other media and he assured the Republican leaders in Congress that he was innocent. He took charge of winding down the Vietnam War, widening diplomatic relations with China and steering important policies to strengthen the domestic economy. He defeated his 1972 Democratic challenger George McGovern in the largest landslide victory in history.
But the investigative journalism of Bernstein and Woodard and others led to the naming of a Select Committee in the U.S. Senate to more fully investigate the Watergate affair and the mounting evidence of political corruption and a top-level cover-up.
The Watergate Senate Hearings became a high-ratings TV event. The committee had been formed by a 77-0 vote by the Senate. Folksy Senator Sam Ervin (D) of North Carolina was named chair. At one point, 85 percent of all the TVs in the country tuned into the daytime hearings. It was during the hearings that the secret taping system in The White House was revealed.
Nixon subsequently fought for the non-release of the tapes, but the unanimous Supreme Court decision (8-0) in Nixon vs. United States on July 24, 1974 ruled that the tapes had to be released.
Three days later, the House of Representatives voted in favor of three separate articles for impeachment. A week later, on August 7, three Republican Party leaders, senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, along with House leader John Rhodes, also from Arizona, visited Nixon in his Oval Office.
Nixon was told the Republicans did not have enough votes to block his impeachment and he should consider his resignation. One day later, Nixon submitted his letter of resignation to the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
“I have never been a quitter,” Nixon told the nation on the eve of his official resignation. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first.”
Aftermath of Watergate
In the immediate aftermath of the Watergate news scoops, congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions and disgraceful presidential resignation, the country turned away from the darkness of political scandals and campaign corruption. The tally from the Nixon corruption and cover-up cases included 48 indictments including jail terms for Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon’s two top aides, Hadelman and John Ehrlichman and his chief counsel John Dean. Also, several top staff at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) were sent to jail as well.
Incoming President Gerald Ford granted a full pardon to Nixon in hopes to move the nation’s mood and thinking beyond the shadows of one of the country’s darkest chapters. In the following Congressional election, a wave of young Democrats (“Watergate Babies”) were swept into office and built a Democratic majority that lasted for the next 25 years. The Democrats gained five seats in the U.S. Senate and 49 seats in the House of Representatives.
Congress passed new laws and reforms that included a new Independent Counsel office, a stronger Freedom of Information Act and a series of campaign finance reforms. Congress also passed a sweeping Ethics in Government Act that included a Presidential Records Act and a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA.)
All of these reforms for more transparency and accountability in our government should have spared the country from any future Watergate-style scandals or attempts to block the peaceful transfer of power in The White House.
Why didn’t they?
Why? Because most of the Ethics in Government reforms have been wiped out or overridden. Because our federal courts and federal Justice Department have become partisan on many benches, including at the Supreme Court. And, because our free press has been displaced by a biased media landscape full of alternative facts, unchallenged lies and willful disinformation. (If there had been a Nixon-supportive FOX News during Watergate, Nixon may have never been forced to resign.)
Ultimately, the lessons from Watergate will not protect us from a future crime to block the peaceful transfer of power. The original warnings by some of the Founding Fathers of 1789 that a populist despot could seize the fears and rapture of a MAGA-type mob are newly “alive and well.”
The Supreme Court has ruled that a U.S. president is immune from all prosecutions for any of his official acts, even up to, and including, jailing his political opponents or pardoning convicted J6 insurrectionists.
Trump can fire his FBI director or order the dismantling of an entire federal department or organization without repercussion or a binding court order.
Nixon asked his inner White House staff to launch efforts to cancel the broadcast licenses of NBC, CBS and ABC news. His plans were never carried out. But Trump is now suing those same networks into submission or compromise while Congress is now doing his biding to de-fund PBS and NPR, the nation’s non-commercial TV and radio news organizations.
Howard Baker was a Republican U.S. senator from Tennessee who was the ranking member of the Senate’s select Watergate Committee in 1973. In an interview in 1992 Baker looked back at the Watergate history. “I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing,” he said. “But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked.”
“…. More to it than I liked.” Hummm, hasn’t Donald Trump more than met this taste test by now?
— Rollie Atkinson
6-13-2025