WATERGATE'S 50 YEAR LEGACY

On the night of June 17, 1973, 24-year old Savannah, Georgia-born security guard Frank Willis, a high school dropout who had finally gotten an equivalency degree by joining the Job Corps, only to find his asthma kept him from keeping the good job he found as a result at the Ford Assembly Plant in Detroit, who was now a security guard in one of the most prestigious apartment complexes in Washington, D.C., stopped when he put his hand on the door knob of the door leading from the parking garage upstairs when it swung open without effort.

He looked down; there was tape wrapped around the edge of the door to keep it from locking shut.

He glanced around; there was no one in the garage. Someone must have been taking things up to their apartment, he decided. He ripped off the tape and closed the door.

Twenty minutes later, he came by again. The tape was back on the door. This time he knew something was happening. He stepped into the stairwell and headed up. At the second floor, he heard muffled voices. Stepping out of the stairwell, he saw shadowy figures down the hallway disappear into one of the office units on the floor.

Frank Willis knew his job wasn’t to go further in investigating all this. He retreated back down the stairs, went to his station out at the front entrance, and called the police.

Fifteen minutes later, a group of undercover officers dressed as hippies, who had been on another case in the vicinity and got orders to check out what was probably not a problem, due to their proximity to the Watergate Complex, arrived. Frank Willis took them up to the floor where he’d seen the men, and down to the door they’d disappeared through.

On the door was the words “Democratic Party National Committee.”

The cops went inside. They heard movement and called out for whoever was in there to stand up with their hands raised.

They were amazed when six men rose from their hiding places, hands raised.

No one knew it at the moment, but they had all just stepped into a Completely Different Reality from that which they had occupied moments before.

As William Galston of the Brookings Institution put it, “We have been living for nearly half a century in the world that Watergate made.”

While the scandal made us a nation of compulsive TV watchers a year after it happened and eventually forced the first and so far only resignation of a president is now taught in schools as a dark chapter in history, it is far more than that. The legacies of Watergate have shaped the conduct of politics and public attitudes toward government ever since.

That this anniversary comes in the week when another Congressional special investigating committee is bringing to light evidence of a crime that is so enormous, so profound, that it makes Watergate - long the measuring stick of how bad a political crisis can be - look like children at a Sunday School picnic in comparison, is proof that the real lessons of Watergate were never learned. Judge Luttig was right to call January 6 the greatest threat to the continued existence of the United States as a democratic constitutional republic in its 246 year history.

In company with the Vietnam War, Watergate marked a Before and After dividing line between Old and New, taking the American people from a time in which we trusted our government to be a force for good to a time where that trust was broken and never truly restored.

The path from Watergate to January 6, 2021 isn’t a straight line, but it is clearly visible to anyone who looks. The links between former president Richard M. Nixon and former president Donald Trump - from their personal ruthlessness to their win-at-any-cost politics - are clearly identifiable.

Their presidencies have played out differently in the historical record. Nixon resigned amid impeachment proceedings in which it was clear there was a bipartisan Senate majority in favor of his conviction. Twice-impeached, Trump served his entire term because of the stubborn willingness of men who should have been thought better than he were willing to overlook all evidence of his unprecedented criminality, and vote to keep in office. Despite that, despite the evidence now public of his deep involvement in planning and orchestrating the only coup ever attempted against the American government, he may seek another term and actually win it, despite the public knowledge of the truth about his complete unfitness for any public office.

That this is so is testament to a more deeply polarized electorate, erosion in the strength of democratic institutions, and most importantly the transformation and radicalization of the Republican Party into a clear and present subversive danger to the continued survival of a constitutional democratic republic.

The aftermath of Watergate, along with that of Vietnam, changed the way reporters and government officials interact with each other. A more adversarial relationship has existed ever since.

The era spawned reforms that failed to work, from campaign finance to the operation of intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, the revelations of the Church Committee regarding the crimes of the CIA from the day of its founding did not lead to a better, more open government. The Supreme Court has set it as a goal to make the influence of money even more powerful than it was in 1972, even more unaccountable than it was then, to declare that money is speech and bribery is campaign politics.

Both major political parties were affected in ways that continue today. A Republican Party seen at the time as irrecoverably broken reconstituted itself with a more anti-government ideology and prevailed over the Watergate reformers only six years later. The Democratic Party, led by the big class of 1974 “Watergate Babies” began a transformation away from the lunch-pail coalition of White working-class voters, toward a more diverse coalition that now is dominated by highly-educated coastal elites, seen as increasingly out of touch with much of the rest of the country, unable to keep the fire in their bellies from Watergate.

In the Watergate investigations, the indictments and convictions of Nixon administration officials, the impeachment articles passed in the House Judiciary Committee, and Nixon’s resignation all combined into an event that shattered the confidence and idealism of previous decades. Combined with the loss of belief in “America’s mission” created by the lies and mendacity of the Vietnam War, it is like there are two different countries: America Before Watergate and America After Watergate.

Garrett M. Graff, author of the book “Watergate: A New History,” (which you should buy and read) describes the effect of Watergate and the events surrounding it thus:

“The Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate fundamentally rewrote the relationship between the American people and their government, and caused a collapse in the public’s faith in those institutions that our nation’s leaders are still struggling with today.”

There’s a graphic on the Pew Research Center website that charts the decline of trust between citizens and government.

It begins in 1958, when 73 percent of Americans - large majorities of Democrats and Republicans - said they trusted the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.”

In the fall of 1964, despite the assassination of President John F. Kennedy a year earlier, trust of the government to do what is right “most of the time” peaks at 77 percent.

By 1968, the end of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, even with Americans violently divided over Vietnam in the wake of Tet and shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy that Spring, the line heads down, but there is still a majority that trust the government to “do what is right.”

The line goes down steeper over the next six years. By the end of 1974, after Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s pardon, only 36 percent of Americans say they trust the government.

In 2022, just 20 percent of Americans say they trust their government to do the right thing all or most of the time.

The decline in trust has affected every institution. Lawyers, university professors, the press, and most especially, the government. At the same time, Americans continue to see a role for government and say it is not doing enough for many groups.

One irony of Watergate is that democracy worked, from the actions of government institutions to the public’s response. The process that took down Nixon was driven by an extraordinary level of civic engagement, on the part of leaders of both parties, all of who believed in and supported the system. But while the system worked, the revelations about just how vast the Watergate conspiracy was provided an ugly view of the use and abuse of power. The Judiciary, the Senate, the Congress, the House Judiciary Committee, the press. Everything worked. And the result was that people ended up with a very bad taste in their mouth.

Three months after Nixon resigned and two months after he was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, the 1974 midterm elections dealt a seemingly devastating blow to the Republican Party. The election produced a huge new class of lawmakers, 90 in all, including 76 Democrats in the House who became known as the “Watergate babies”. The political reforms that came with the arrival of the “Watergate babies” was seen at the time as the greatest changes in the way business was done in Washington since at least the New Deal if not long before.

Change was in the air so much, was so pervasive across the country, was so likely to result in achieving the goals I had been fighting for over the previous nine years, that I accepted the job offer from my professor of political science at San Francisco State, Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Robert H. Mendelsohn. I went out and bought suits and cut my hair and went to work with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. A year later it took me to Sacramento to work for Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. There was a passion for reform.

The result in Washington was a more open and transparent House of Representatives, but also a more cumbersome legislative body. Today, every Congressmember is an independent actor with access to the media and big money for many; if motivated to do so, they have the ability to frustrate leadership.

California, however, is always on the leading edge of change. That same year that I arrived in Sacramento, people were beginning to complain about the rise in the cost of housing and the rise in property taxes that accompanied it. Willie Brown had a solution that would reduce the burden for homeowners while maintaining commercial property rates. He needed the governor’s support to corral the wavering members of his 2/3 majority. Governor Brown was too busy promoting “small is beautiful” and visiting Africa with his rockstar girlfriend. The 1976 election saw a Democratic victory in Washington, but a loss of that majority in Sacramento. Two years later, frustrated voters would enact Proposition 13, which stood Brown’s ideas on their head. 45 years later, commercial property provides less than 20 percent of property tax income, and local government has been prevented during all that time from facing up to the problems of education, homelessness, and everything else that contributes to our contemporary malaise.

We Democrats did it to ourselves.

In 1979, the House of Representatives voted to allow C-SPAN to televise House floor proceedings, despite the doubts of House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. About too much openness. An obscure Georgia Republican congressman, elected in the mid-terms that produced that decision, Newt Gingrich, would use that “reform” and the new ethics reforms, to create a rise to power over the next 16 years that in 1994 drove Democrats from control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

In 1974, Congress amended campaign finance laws after revelations about the abuses of money by Nixon’s reelection committee. The law capped how much an individual could contribute to candidates and how much federal candidates could spend, created partial public financing through matching funds in presidential campaigns and established the Federal Election Commission.

In 2010 the Supreme Court gave corporations and other outside groups the authority to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence campaigns with the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision which opened the flood gates of super PACs and independent committees and the use of “dark money” that has now effectively killed campaign finance reform.

Two important congressional reforms were the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act passed in 1974, which set up a new process for federal budgeting by lawmakers, created the Congressional Budget Office and was intended to limit the power of the president to override decisions made by lawmakers on how to spend the government’s money; this was the result of Nixon “sequestering” Congressionally-allocated funds. The War Powers Resolution was enacted in 1973 over Nixon’s veto in response to Vietnam, with the intent of preventing future presidents from engaging in military conflicts without having consulted Congress in advance.

Unfortunately these have proven themselves ineffective. Presidents have routinely ignored these requirements, and a compliant Congress has offered minimal resistance. In place of Declarations of War, which the War Powers Act wanted to reinforce if the country engaged in military action , there have been “Authorizations to Use Military Force” that are little different from the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, stretched beyond original recognition by both Democratic and Republican administrations to cover our imperial misadvantures.

Congressional budgeting has gone exactly nowhere in a time of polarization, with the majority of government operating on short term Continuing Resolutions. An actual Budget Act has become so rare it was celebrated when passed last year - not that it did any good in getting the Build Back Better act and other administration initiatives passed.

The 1978 Ethics in Government Act set new financial disclosure requirements for public officials and put restrictions on lobbying by former officials. The act’s Title VI created the system for the appointment of special prosecutors by the attorney general to investigate allegations against executive branch officials.

The Church Committee’s investigation of the CIA has perhaps had the most effect, as minimal as that actually is. As a result of the committee’s findings, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were created, with prescribed rules for consultation for any covert activities and requirements for presidents to sign official findings to authorize covert activities. Unfortunately the biggest result was the rise in anti-government conspiracy theories.

Watergate effectively killed the Nixon wing of the Republican Party, personified by politicians like Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney. The rise of Reaganite “movement conservatism” despite being through dead in 1964 when, led by Barry Goldwater, went down in defeat to Johnson, rose anew as a result of the discrediting of the “eastern establishment,” and it effectively ended the era of New Deal liberalism. After Watergate, the Republican Party, which had moderate, liberal and conservative wings, became a fully-fledged Conservative Party by the end of the Reagan Administration.

The “Watergate babies” in the Democratic Party saw the transformation of the party after the defeat of George McGovern in 1972, to the point where Gary Hart’s near-victory over Walter Mondale in 1984 pitted the old Democratic Party, tied to powerful labor unions, against a newer Democratic Party more oriented to rising forces of technology and to issues such as the environment and globalization.

Watergate also changed journalism. It became a glamorous profession with the examples of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The result, however, was not the change expected by those who saw the entire era as an opportunity for progress. Younger reporters learned - like the congress members they covered - that road to professional success was getting one’s name in the public view by making accusations of wrongdoing or corruption. “Media stars” were non-existent before Watergate, other than CBS’ Walter Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America” to the point that after he came back from visiting Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and came out against the war, his opposition was a major factor in Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election. “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite....”

The atomization of media eventually allowed Roger Ailes to create the media he had originally told Nixon in 1972 that he needed: a media institution that was allied to the Republican Party and dedicated to the party’s success. Fox News is that today, to the point where Sean Hannity was a public advisor to Trump while holding his position as a Fox “news” personality.

The polarization we deal with today did not come to flower with Gingrich’s victory in 1994. Nixon’s campaigns in 1968 and 1972 were divisive and polarizing: race, law and order, and cultural wedge issues were consciously used to create cleavages in the electorate.

Nixon and Trump are more alike than anyone wants to admit. In the self-pitying nature of their personalities, the venality exhibited during their presidencies, the demonization of their opponents, Trump is merely Nixon without guardrails. Nixon sought to undermine the Constitution to assure that he would win the 1972 election, then covered it up, for which he paid the price of forced resignation. Trump worked to undermine the Constitution to overturn an election he lost in 2020 and didn’t try to cover up his efforts. Nixon, in the end, was old-fashioned enough to still believe in the system, which is why it worked; had he not cooperated and done as ordered by the courts, what we know as Watergate would have a much different history, one much more like the times since January 6, 2021.

Graff’s book cites an early moment when the Ervin committee lawyers were warned by Nixon White House lawyers that any officials called to testify would decline to answer the panel’s questions. The response from one committee attorney was to say anyone who did that in a public forum would be ruined personally and professionally, and the White House reversed itself. Trump’s White House routinely refused to cooperate with congressional investigations and did so with the support of Republican lawmakers. No one who engaged in this behavior has suffered any personal or professional loss. People who were photographed at the January 6 insurrection use those photos to establish their bonafides as new, “real” Republicans, and over 100 of them (so far) have won primaries to run for local, state and federal offices, where they promise to make sure there is no defeat of the movement in 2024.

The presidency of Donald Trump is the culmination of what started with Watergate. Today, in a time of increased distrust in government, weakened institutions, greater partisanship supported by a more polarized electorate, a fractured and more politicized media, and a Republican Party more ruthless than ever and with a stronger anti-government ideology, politics have virtually ground to a half. Trump seized on all of this to become president, to exercise his powers in office and to attempt through a coup against the government to stay in office after he had lost the 2020 election.

As president, Trump exposed the real weaknesses and dysfunction of all these institutions. The question now is, can we find a way to rebuild after 50 years of destruction?

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