Standing in the Shadow of Watergate
“How did the ‘Nixon thing’ begin?”
At fifteen years old, this is the question I am most frequently asked, even more so than the dreaded, “Have you started thinking about college yet?”
Bewildered classmates, teachers, and church ladies alike all want to know one thing: how and why is a high schooler obsessed with a political scandal from a half-century ago? And what is so fascinating about the disgraced president at the center of it all?
Notwithstanding what I’ve just mentioned, I like to think I live a perfectly ordinary life for a guy my age. I play the guitar, ride the bus with friends, and spend too much time in my bedroom. To the outside observer, there is only one large elephant in the otherwise mundane room—the fact that over the past three-and-a-half years, I have devoted myself to studying the tumultuous Nixon years, but most specifically the infamous Watergate affair. I’ve read every book I can get my hands on, watched every movie (undeterred by any streaming service paywall), and listened to more hours of de-classified tapes and archived Senate hearings than I care to admit.
Sometimes I lay awake at night, American history’s only ever presidential resignation address echoing in my ears, and wonder why I didn’t just play a sport.
How on Earth did I get here? I’m asking myself right along with the church ladies.
I usually say that it “just kinda happened,” which is true, to an extent. But Watergate, if nothing else, is an overlapping series of slightly-dramatized mythologies. And thus, I submit my answer to the question I am asked about as often as Nixon was asked what he knew and when he knew it: how the “Nixon thing” began, what Watergate means to me, and why I still care, having lived through an age of far more offending political infractions.
I’d first like to say that my interest in Nixon does not come from any kind of political agreement. As a Socialist, in fact, I think I’d be hard-pressed to become any different in political belief than the notorious anti-Communist crusader. I live thousands of miles from the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, so it’s not as though at any point during my development I was exposed to a steady stream of subliminal Nixonian messaging.
I first heard the name Richard Nixon at seven years old. I’ve always had an interest in history, having been raised with unrestricted PBS access and my father’s nightly bedtime stories, which were something closer to a history lecture. So it was not out of the ordinary when on one spring night in 2018, my dad explained how tape left on a door in an office complex culminated in the downfall of a president. Richard Nixon faded to the back of my second-grade mind, but it was then that my fascination with the 37th president quietly began.
Fast forward through years in which my historical obsessions ranged from the JFK assassination to D.B. Cooper. By the time I was in middle school, the return of my fixation on Nixon was imminent.
One day in June, my dad showed me the strangest film I’d ever seen. “Do you ever feel like your brain just got put into a deep fryer?” reads one Letterboxd review of the two-hour film following two reporters and a rotating cast of scheming political operatives who the viewer never sees. It was the 1976 adaptation of All the President’s Men, and I was hooked, despite the fact that we had to pause every five minutes to ask things like, “Wait, who’s Haldeman again?”
The next day I rode my bike to the library to check out the book the film was based on. And so my obsession began.
Since then, I’ve made a pilgrimage to the Watergate complex and become known to my peers and teachers for, if nothing else, my interest in the scandal. At some point in my high school career, I became “the Richard Nixon guy” and have long since accepted my fate.
Nixon is dead, and he has been for two decades now. Fifty years on, America is so politically divided and inundated with scandals that Watergate looks elementary. Watergate doesn’t come close to the worst abuse of presidential power in the nation’s history. There have been far worse offenses, both before and after Nixon.
Maybe it’s nostalgia for a time I never lived—a time where justice, in the end, seemed to have prevailed. Justice didn’t prevail, though, because Nixon’s fleeing of the presidency didn’t resurrect the innocents senselessly murdered in South East Asia, the American boys who didn’t want to go and came home only in caskets. Two v-for-victory signs raised over the president’s head didn’t save those who would become victims of the brutal authoritarian regimes installed by the CIA under Nixon’s watch. Gerald Ford being sworn in didn’t free those given unjust sentences for non-violent drug offenses thanks to the legal travesty that was the War on Drugs. And that infamous September pardon didn’t heal the scars of the Nixon years, doesn’t absolve the suffering below the foundation of our country.
After August 9, 1974, the long national nightmare that is the United States marched on, and We the People followed, not knowing what else to do. This nation as a whole has never been any better than the man at its helm. After all, it is the American public that elects such people into power.
Few figures loom as tall over the American popular consciousness as whoever sits in the office of the president. It has long been said the president reflects America—or that perhaps that the nation, after a deluge of headlines and soundbites, begins to mirror its commander-in-chief.
Nixon, with his obsessive paranoia and painful awkwardness, has fascinated the nation in a way that is not comparable to any other ex-president. We look back at Watergate like drivers slowing down to look at a bad wreck on the highway. I believe this fascination, at its core, is derived from how America sees its own worst instincts in the Southern Californian farm boy who grew up to become one of the most notorious villains in modern politics. We may not have organized any cover-ups, ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, or even cared to abandon the Gold Standard, but damn near anyone can relate to the insecurities and feelings of otherness that drove Nixon to the White House and, ultimately, to his downfall.
At the end of the day, when Marine One has disappeared over the horizon, and the verdict of history has been passed down, Richard M. Nixon represents the part of America that we try to ignore. When all is said and done, we are all Tricky Dick, inheritors of a nation marred by scandal fifty years ago.
That’s why I’ve read all the books, listened to all those hours of tapes. I still give a shit about Watergate because in the gravelly, remorseful voice of Richard Nixon, I hear the worst parts of this country: the echoes of an America that never was, the one we grew up reading about in elementary school social studies textbooks. Nixon was a man who strove to capture American idealism like lightning in a bottle. He was driven by his own uniquely-American demons to abuse the land’s highest office, ultimately revealing the ugliness below the hallowed surface of the Great Seal. For those far enough away from the margins of society, Watergate was the first time this nation’s government was proved to be not just untrustworthy, but immoral in principle and even downright criminal.
I dwell on Nixon’s 1968 campaign slogan: Bring us together. He did nothing of the sort, capitalizing on the division of the late ‘60s via appeals to the “silent majority” and thinly-vailed racism in the form of “law and order” rhetoric.
In today’s deeply divided America, in which all established rules of politics have been upended, we can no longer ignore the lessons of our past. Standing complicit as lawlessness comes to rule makes us no better than Nixon at his worst. The normalization of criminal behavior by government officials will not conceal the echoes of Watergate which still haunt our politics.
To move forward, America must learn from the lessons of its past, the scandal that brought down Richard Nixon among them. The nation must look to Watergate not as a long-since-finished tale of how the system works, but rather as a cautionary tale from fifty short years ago.
The Watergate break-in and cover-up is far from our history’s worst injustice, but Watergate stands out to me because Nixon did exactly what he promised to do: he brought America together. Watergate is one of the rare historical examples where the country came together and, unbridled by partisan loyalties, stood up and united in pursuit of the truth and in holding those in power accountable.
Today, America must be brought together to learn from the lessons of its past. Watergate is not a perfect guide on how to proceed, but history means nothing if we cannot learn from the shortcomings of those who came before us. We must ask questions sooner than the Senate Watergate Committee did. We must press for the truth while the bombs are still falling, while our neighbors are being taken off the streets, while there are men in power who believe their authority has no limits. We must hold our leaders accountable not only in defense of the Constitution but to defend our fellow human beings who suffer as a result of our government’s abuses.
In conclusion, having been born fifteen years after Nixon’s death, I care deeply about Watergate. To a member of my generation, Watergate is not the singular great triumph of the American system which prevented all future government corruption in the way that our textbooks made it out to be. Instead, the scandal is a warning, part of an incomplete roadmap for strange and unprecedented times, like Nixon’s and like our own. It’s a reminder from the past that the outrage of the American people can amount to political change, if enough of us press to hold the government accountable. And more importantly, that no man—president or otherwise—is above the rule of law.
Or hell, me being a teenager and all, maybe I just think it’s funny that he was called Tricky Dick.
