Nixed by Watergate
In the modern age, when people think about the Nixon presidency, Watergate stands out. Most don’t often have any other strong associations with Nixon; however, Nixon had a unique presidency, impacting how America operates even today. Leading up to the break-in night, Nixon had been elected in 1968 for his first term and hoped to be able to complete a second. The Committee for the Re-Election of the President (now famously known as CREEP) was created for the betterment of Nixon and his campaign. Yet, this body ended up leading to his downfall. On June 17th, 1972, five members of CREEP went to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters in Washington in hopes of gathering information that would benefit the Republican campaign; they tried to bug important rooms, but they then got caught. While the perpetrators were tied to Nixon through CREEP, there was no available evidence that Nixon had ordered the break-in or the consequently illegal activities. However, as time went on, investigators found that Nixon had kept tapes in the oval office, which was ironic since Nixon had initially found fault with the recording system used by his predecessors but then decided to have some reinstalled in 1971. While Nixon tried to cite executive privilege to keep the tapes confidential, the United States Supreme Court’s holding in United States v. Nixon rebuked that argument. Although Nixon did not conceive the break-in, he tried to cover it up, therefore lying to the general public. While historians overwhelmingly agree that Nixon would have been impeached for this cover up, he avoided that indignity through leaving office instead, becoming the only president to resign while in office.
Nixon and the Watergate era, to me, show how people latch on to a part of a president’s story rather than the whole. There are two sides to Nixon’s presidency: (1) what the general public remembers, i.e. Watergate, and (2) all the president’s accomplishments before the incident on June 17, 1972. People now group Watergate and Nixon together, but many citizens are unable to define what actually happened—they just know it was bad because of other people’s negative connotations when discussing it.
This whole situation (Watergate, cover ups, threatened impeachment, resignation, and subsequent replacement) was highly publicized, and like nothing the nation had seen before, and thus this debacle left an impression on the public, making them less trusting of the government overall from that point forward. Although most people associate Nixon only with Watergate, he did far more than engage in a damaging scandal during his presidency, though many people in today’s day and age only seem to recall the scandal and do not dig deeper into the beneficial things he did for the nation during his career in public service.
In 1968, after serving as a United States senator and vice president to Eisenhower, Nixon was elected as president after running against Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. Over the next 2,026 days as president, Nixon contributed to enriching the country both in foreign and domestic policy. The United States was in the midst of the Cold War, and Nixon used that to his advantage. He, along with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, practiced triangular diplomacy, moving towards a détente. America improved relationships with both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, with China’s opening up more to the U.S., leading to Nixon’s visit to the PRC beginning in 1972, starting an ongoing trend of engagement for these two nations. In addition to the USSR and PRC, Nixon also changed the course of the war in Vietnam, for he was a proponent of Vietnamization, which was based upon giving ARVN more help while withdrawing American soldiers. “Peace with Honor” was Nixon’s way of having the U.S. leave the war, without calling it an outright surrender and pullback. Not only did Nixon implement crucial foreign policy, but he also enacted several key domestic plans:
signing Title IX into law, making sex-based discrimination in federally funded programs such as education illegal,
creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which helped consolidate intergovernmental department conservation efforts in an efficient way.
signing the 26th Amendment into law (effectively lowering the voting age to 18), and
advocating new federalism, which gave more power back to the states, in opposition to the previous cooperative federalism; indeed, Reagan later famously utilized new federalism with his government plans of giving more power back to the people since he thought “government is the problem.”
Therefore, many of Nixon’s plans, whether foreign or domestic, combined to make Nixon a very influential president, both at the time (with moving troops out of Vietnam), and currently (with amendments and agencies). However, the average citizen does not think of Nixon and recall one of his accomplishments—they almost all think of Watergate.
Therefore, Watergate demonstrates how people remember highly publicized spectacles instead of a whole story. Though Nixon tried to cover up the Watergate Scandal and was dishonest with the public, people should not define his whole presidency by a single event. Researching the good and bad of a president—or anyone with notoriety—is vital in this day and age. While Watergate is a fun point of discussion and a major turning point in Nixon’s presidency, let alone life, it is not his whole story. Watergate should not overshadow the other decisions Nixon made in his political career, whether they be good or bad decisions in one’s eyes.
