Readers who have followed this little place on the internet highway for years know I’ve been a Richard Nixon history buff for decades. Today we had sunshine after two days of rain, so while I was outside with a book and coffee, James opened a door and said, “You will not believe what I am about to tell you.” During the Donald Trump years, this is sadly the opening to many a conversation. But, in this particular case, James was most correct. I could not believe his news.
There are bad ideas, there are ridiculous ideas, and then there is the weird insistence that America should somehow reopen the case of Watergate to determine whether poor, misunderstood Richard Nixon and a bevy of defendants were the victims of an historic injustice. At this point, I cannot say with any degree of confidence that the Trump forces will not seek to declare that Al Capone was merely suffering from number transposition challenges, thereby negating his tax evasion convictions.
So, how did we get to the point that James needed to alert me to news about Nixon?
Former Richard Nixon aide and revisionist historian Geoff Shepard delivered a two-hour presentation at DOJ headquarters titled “Watergate As Lawfare”. Shepard claimed that Watergate special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski engaged in improper ex parte meetings with judges and withheld exculpatory evidence from defendants.
While it’s easy to see why Shepard has every reason to feel good about his role in government, revisionist thinking is never the proper route to pursue. From those who sought to recapture Southern pride after the North defeated the treasonous Confederates following the Civil War, or how Russian President Putin seeks to change maps and rewrite books about the USSR, so too does the rewriting of Watergate look crazy.
As someone who has spent decades reading Nixon biographies, memoirs, transcripts, campaign histories, and Watergate investigations, I’ll offer a downright radical suggestion: Watergate happened. The crimes occurred. The evidence existed. The convictions were real. The guilty pleas were not a collective hallucination. This is not an ideological matter. It is a matter of history.
Period.
The strange new effort to portray Watergate as some sort of prosecutorial overreach has little to do with Richard Nixon and everything to do with Donald Trump. The argument is that if Nixon can be transformed into a martyr after half a century, then Trump can be portrayed as the latest victim of a supposedly weaponized justice system. In this weird telling, history becomes less a record of facts than a bag of convenient parts to rearrange for contemporary political convenience. As a man who has spent more time reading about Nixon than any other president, I find this latest effort purely absurd.
The problem is that Watergate is perhaps the worst possible place to attempt such revisionism. The burglary occurred. The cover-up occurred. Administration officials lied, obstructed, and attempted to misuse federal agencies. Nixon’s own recorded conversations helped establish the facts. The evidence was so overwhelming that members of his own party ultimately concluded his presidency could not survive it. Over the past 20 years of Caffeinated Politics, I’ve made more than one post about each of the above items.
One can admire Nixon’s foreign policy achievements (as I do), appreciate his formidable political skills (as I do), and recognize his immense intellect (which I do) while also acknowledging that Watergate was a huge disgrace. That he was a seriously flawed individual. Watergate, in totality, was a huge umbrella of events and deeds that, at its foundation, was a series of crimes that rose to a constitutional crisis.
What makes this exercise at the DOJ especially absurd is the underlying assumption that every legal proceeding Republicans dislike must automatically be illegitimate. By that standard, history becomes nothing more than a partisan customer service desk where inconvenient facts can be returned by angry white men bent on revenge and retribution.
Watergate does not need reopening. It does not need reimagining. It does not need a director’s cut. The rule of law was not a scandal. Rather, the rule of law functioned exactly as designed.
The truly remarkable thing is not that Shepard has concocted an avenue to make money by relitigating Watergate. What is remarkable is that he and Trump’s goofballs at the DOJ do not recognize that the majority of the nation has not forgotten Watergate history. Fifty-plus years later, the facts remain stubbornly intact, no matter how many partisan hacks working for Trump would prefer otherwise. Watergate was not a witch hunt. It was a crime spree. And history has already reached its verdict.
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