Nixon's Resignation, 45 Years On

Take a good look at this because something like it will never happen again

I have been obsessed with Richard Nixon and his times since I was young. I blame the box of my uncle's old Mad magazines from the early 70s that sat in my grandparents' basement. Through them I saw Nixon and Agnew skewered, but also glimpses of a not long ago world that seemed so much more volatile and interesting than the height of the Reagan years I was living through.

I was fascinated at how a man could be President of the United States and yet be so despised. In the 80s Mad was critical of Reagan, too, but the intensity of contempt towards Nixon was something deeper. Then, in doldrums of the summer of 1992 one TV network (I forget which) ran a special on the anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Seeing the story laid out there before me only interested me more, and my interest continued even as I went on to grad school studying nineteenth century Germany instead of America in the 70s (which is now my field of choice.) Books like Nixon at the Movies became my refuge from my dissertation research.

Back in 1992 Watergate was not the distant past, it was a thing that happened the day before yesterday, so to speak. Now, as my middle aged self hates to admit, the 1990s are now the day before yesterday and the 1970s are fading into the distant past. Because of the scandals around Donald Trump, that history has been resurrected. Watch MSNBC on any given night and you might see John Dean or one of the Watergate lawyers on to talk about the current president. All the President's Men has been on TV quite a lot in the last year.

I fear that these comparisons are creating a false sense of security. People who believe in the justice of the current political system MUST trust that the system will work, that good will triumph and evil will be rebuked. That helps explain the ridiculous cult in some circles around Robert Mueller, who was supposed to be the avatar of our institutions' worthiness. History is something that does work in the present, and the work of Watergate comparisons today has only fed complacency. If a corrupt president got taken down before, it will happen again.

It's not going to work out like that this time. I guarantee you that Trump will never resign. There is an outside chance that he could removed through impeachment, but only if the makeup of the Senate dramatically changes, which is highly unlikely. The comparisons fail to take into account the ways America has changed over the last four decades. Richard Nixon's party was in the minority in both houses. More than that, members of his party were more likely to put principle and the law above their devotion to their president. The current Republican Party is a gang of right-wing Bolsheviks who take a strict "end justifies the means" praxis to the extent where they suppress votes and gerrymander districts down to the city block.

Beyond having a majority in the Senate that will follow him to the gates of hell, Trump benefits from a vastly altered media landscape. Fox News (started by Nixon operative Roger Ailes) and other forms of conservative media have created an alternate reality where the president's crimes simply do not exist. His administration and Fox work hand in glove, forming the biggest and most effective state propaganda apparatus this country has seen since World War II. That media has also fed into the "all or nothing" mentality that now dominates the electorate. In our low grade civil war the other side can never be allowed to win, no matter the reason. In 1974 Republicans could admit that the president was a crook. To do so nowadays would be to impugn their very identity and so cannot be done. (Just think about how guns have become an extension of identity for conservatives, and you'll get my drift.)

Ironically, Watergate's "lesson" for those in power has mainly been that they will never be brought to account. Ford infamously pardoned Nixon for "any crimes he may have committed," robbing the country of justice and even a full accounting of what he had done. Future leaders understood the usefulness of "plausible deniability" so that they would not get caught. This is what saved Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal and Chris Christie during the Bridgegate scandal and Dick Cheney in the Valerie Plane affair (remember that?). Dubya started an illegal war on false pretenses that has killed thousands and he gets to paint in his mansion.

It's high time that we stop using Watergate's history as a way to praise our institutions. Instead we need to reckon with our failure to hold our leaders accountable since that fateful day in 1974.