Perspective: As Watergate’s 50th anniversary nears, Woodward and Bernstein write that they thought Nixon defined corruption. Then came Trump.
President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.
Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.
says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted. By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history.
With the onset of the campaign, Hunt and Liddy were moved to the Nixon reelection committee to quarterback spying and sabotage operations. Meanwhile Gordon Strachan, the top political aide to White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary, who was like a son to the president, hired Donald Segretti, an old college friend and former Army lawyer, to implement sabotage efforts.
Muskie and his staffers were spooked. At a rally in New Hampshire, standing on the back of a truck, the candidate expressed how upset he was by published slurs on his wife, Jane. A gossipy editorial published by conservative William Loebin the Manchester Union Leader, headlined “Big Daddy’s Jane,” had suggested that the senator’s wife drank, smoked and liked to tell dirty jokes.
Haldeman added, “This tendency to strike too hard … reflected a belief in, and too great a willingness to accept, the concept that the end justifies the means.” In other words, Nixon believed that his political survival was a “greater good,” worth subverting the will of the people. At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, as the presidential vote count solidified Biden’s path to victory in the electoral college, Trump told the nation and the world: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
“You’ve got to return to Washington and make a dramatic return today,” Bannon told him, according to reporting in Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, ““You’ve got to call Pence off the f---ing ski slopes and get him back here today. This is a crisis,” Bannon said, referring to the vice president, who was vacationing in Vail, Colo.If Republicans could cast enough of a shadow on Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, Bannon said, it would be hard for him to govern.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, was shocked when he read the memo that the White House had sent to him. Alternative electors would be major national news if it were true. He had heard of none. Lee had launched his own investigation, and spent two months talking to Trump and White House officials and calling representatives in Republican-controlled legislatures. There were zero alternate slates.
After Pence departed that evening, Trump invited a group of his press aides into the Oval Office. He had opened a door near the Resolute Desk. It was about 31 degrees outside, and cold air streamed in. Trump was oblivious to his shivering aides and instead seemed to bask in the cheers of his supporters outside.
Twitter and social media posts lit up with threats of violence. I’m going to kill this person. Shoot this person. Hang this guy. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said. Our conclusions come from covering Nixon and Watergate for half a century. And from reporting on Trump for more than six years — Woodward in three books ; Bernstein as a CNN reporter and commentator, analyzing Trump, his behavior and its meaning from 2016 through this year. Bernsteinin November 2020 that 21 Republican senators were contemptuous and disdainful of Trump in private, despite regularly voicing their support for the president in public.
Haldeman said he and Mitchell had a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be jeopardized if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation. “I realized that many problems in our administration arose not solely from the outside, but from inside the Oval Office — and even deeper, from inside the character of Richard Nixon,” wrote Haldeman.President had to be protected from himself. Time and again I would receive petty vindictive orders,” Haldeman wrote about Nixon. One was, “the press is barred from Air Force One … Or, after a Senator made an anti-Vietnam War speech: ‘Put a 24-hour surveillance on the bastard.’ And on and on and on.
The question hovers: Why would two men who held the highest office in the land engage in these assaults on democracy?interview In his apartment, he offered us whiskey and pulled out his daily diary that he had dictated for years to his secretary. He began reading his entry for Aug. 7, 1974. The so-called smoking gun tape had been released two days before that date, showing that Nixon had asked the CIA to have the FBI curtail its Watergate investigation on bogus national security grounds. It was clear that Nixon was going to be impeached and formally charged by the House of Representatives. The question was the Senate.
More than a year earlier, the Senate launched an extraordinary bipartisan investigation of Watergate, voting 77 to 0 to set up an investigative committee. After an hour of Trump defending his request to Zelensky, Trump’s media director, Dan Scavino, joined the interview. Trump asked that Scavino open his laptop and show a clip of the president’s 2019 State of the Union speech. Instead of Trump’s words, hyped-up elevator music played as the camera panned for extended shots of members of Congress watching and listening to the president.Trump was watching over Woodward’s shoulder and was agitated.The camera stopped on Sen.
“I’ve got it in my wallet here,” he would reply, pulling out a folded, dog-eared piece of paper summarizing the Supreme Court decisionin 1915. The justices had ruled that a pardon “carries an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it.”In 1977, just three years out of office, Nixon gave a series of televised interviews to the British journalist David Frost. Nixon was paid $600,000.
In a later book in 1990, “In the Arena,” Nixon intensified his denials, claiming it was a myth that he had ordered hush-money payments.