How Watergate led to the collapse of Richard Nixon's presidency

As Fred Emery, says in his book, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and Fall of Richard Nixon, the break-in was the tip of the iceberg of lawless abuses of office on which the Nixon presidency was to founder. Nixon’s fundamental problem did not relate to the botched break-in. He almost certainly didn’t know of the operation in advance. But he knew his enemies could find a lot more to get their teeth into if they kept digging.

“His people had placed telephone taps on National Security Council staffers and on newspaper and television reporters in order to find and plug leaks,’’ wrote Nixon’s biographer Stephen E Ambrose. People working for Nixon had played dirty tricks on political rivals. There had been a break-in in an attempt to gain damaging information about Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Department of Defence study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam . The publication of a small portion of the Pentagon Papers had enraged a White House which was obsessed with secrecy. In the months after the botched break-in, Nixon felt trapped and tried to cover up.

Mr Emery wrote: “He dared not turn on those involved because they were either close to him or had been involved in secret illegal schemes done at his direction. To protect himself and his closest lieutenants, the president ran a conspiracy in which his oath and his office were abused and justice obstructed. Two years later, he was found out, squealed on by accomplices and most thoroughly convicted by the tapes of his own conversations, recorded secretly for his own use.”

The Nixon administration, in the face of tenacious reporting by Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and the dogged work of the US Senate’s Watergate Committee, died a slow death. Nixon declared that he knew nothing about the Watergate burglary, but former White House counsel John Dean III told the Watergate Committee that the president had approved plans to cover up the White House’s connections to the break-in. A former aide revealed that the president maintained a voice-activated tape recorder system in parts of the White House. After a torrid legal battle, President Nixon provided the relevant tapes to a special prosecutor and the recordings revealed that he had participated in devising a plan to cover up the White House connection to the Watergate burglary. The House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment. Before the full House could vote, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. The new President Gerald Ford granted a presidential pardon to Nixon for his role in Watergate. By the time of his death in 1994, Nixon had at least partially rehabilitated his reputation by playing the role of elder statesman during the dying days of the Cold War.

Half a century on, Nixon is still a divisive figure, but his critics cannot deny that he was one of the dominant figures of post Second World War global politics. Frank Dignan, a Practising Barrister, who has been a Senior Law Lecturer, at Leeds Trinity University, Leeds Beckett University and the University of Hull, said Nixon eased tensions with the Soviets and opened up diplomatic relations with China. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Safety Commission were both established under his Presidency.

“He was basically a centrist Republican,’’ said Mr Dignan. “His undoing was his paranoid personality - defensive, socially awkward, self conscious, insecure - which led to him condoning tactics which were clearly unlawful.”

Dr Rachel Williams, a lecturer in American History, at the University of Hull, said Nixon’s resignation probably represented the sternest test of the durability of the US Constitution since the American Civil War of the 1860s.

She added: “But it’s also really timely that we’re reflecting on Nixon’s resignation in summer 2024, given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Trump vs United States. The Supreme Court just ruled that the president has immunity from prosecution for “official acts” taken while in office.

“Until a few weeks ago, Watergate and Nixon’s resignation stood as a reminder that the President is not above the law – Nixon famously claimed in his 1977 interview with David Frost that “when the President does [something], that means it is not illegal” – the fact that he left office in disgrace seemed to confirm that he was incorrect in that assessment and had overstepped the bounds of his office. But were we to relitigate Watergate today with that 2024 Supreme Court ruling in hand, Nixon would surely argue that his decisions during the scandal fell into the category of “official acts” and should therefore be protected from immunity.

“So, we should remember Nixon’s resignation as evidence of how the constitutional position and power of the Presidency has changed over the decades and perhaps as a warning of the fragility of the checks and balances that are meant to regulate the powers of and maintain some sort of equilibrium between Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President.”

Nixon is often understood as representing a resurgence of conservatism in American politics that would eventually culminate in the Reagan regime. However, he doesn’t neatly fit Reagan’s model of conservatism.

Dr Williams added: “If you look at his record on Native American rights, on environmental protection, on ring-fencing and even expanding elements of the welfare state, it’s clear he doesn’t represent a clear ideological break from the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, either.”

“At best, his suspicion made him an astute judge of character and kept his inner circle honest – for instance, the mutual suspicion and even hostility between Nixon and his National Security Advisor (later Secretary of State), Henry Kissinger, made them a formidable pair, no matter what you think of the work they did together. But it also pushed him to clamp down on legitimate dissent, and ultimately set in train the circumstances that led to Watergate.”

“Even if he didn’t explicitly order the break- in – it’s pretty clear that he didn’t - he was ultimately responsible for fostering a culture where the Democrats had to be beaten, even if that meant hands getting dirty.

“Nixon was hardly alone among Presidents in being sensitive to criticism and monomaniacal in his pursuit of victory. He wasn’t even the first President to tape his Oval Office conversations. But when you put together the political upheaval and fragmentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the pall the Pentagon Papers scandal cast over the administration, and perhaps when you look back at Nixon’s career, especially the close defeat in 1960 (to John F Kennedy) after serving as Eisenhower’s Vice President, it becomes easier to understand how and why Nixon and his aides were able to normalise not just using extra-legal means to beat their opponents, but also seeing the FBI and the justice system as irritating impediments to their work.”

President Ford, who went on to lose the 1976 Presidential election, knew that to have any criminal proceedings against his predecessor dragged out would have overshadowed his administration and impeded any executive or legislative agenda.

“So the pardon was his way of trying to draw a line under the whole sordid affair and signal to the country that they should move on,’’ said Dr Willliams. “ It was an immensely unpopular decision at the time across the political spectrum, but I think in hindsight we can just as easily read it as an act of immense courage and personal sacrifice.”

Nixon’s resignation caused a massive loss of faith in authority among Americans. Combined with the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and the fallout of the Vietnam War it made people question whether the people in high office really had the best interests of the nation at heart, and whether the political systems established back in the 1780s were truly infallible.

Dr Williams added: “On the other hand, the fact that Nixon left office, Ford stepped up, and the wheels of state kept turning, proved that the office of the Presidency was bigger than any one man. The resignation seemed to prove that the system could survive bad apples and, one way or another, purge and reform itself. But I think there was an irretrievable loss of political innocence for the United States and a palpable suspicion of politicians and their motives that has persisted ever since.”