NOT THAT YOU ASKED
It's hard to believe that it has been 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in the wake of the multiple scandals known as Watergate. It's even harder to believe that, even now, there are people who defend him.
Watergate was a scandal like we had never seen before. There had been corruption in presidential administrations before, when Ulysses Grant and Warren Harding had been in office, but in those cases neither President himself had been involved, or was guilty of anything. Nixon, on the other hand, was involved in the cover up of the Watergate burglary from the beginning.
Another aspect of Watergate that made it different from previous scandals was how widespread it was. There was much more to it than just the burglary of the Democratic Party Headquarters. There was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and the planned break in of the Brookings Institution. There was the dirty tricks campaign during the Democratic Primaries, designed to make sure that the party nominated its weakest candidate. There was the laundering of campaign money through Mexico, the Enemies List, and the plan to use the IRS to get at those "enemies". That's just a partial list of what I remember. There may be much more that hasn't come to light yet.
There's no doubt in anyone's mind that Nixon was guilty of criminal behavior as President. There is also no doubt that Nixon planned on using the presidency in his second term to get even with everyone that he believed had wronged him throughout his career. The guy really knew about holding grudges.
Yet, despite that, there are still those who try to get even with Democrats for Nixon's fall, or try to downplay his crimes. In Time magazine John Dean reported that during the Clinton impeachment, some Republicans told him that, "This was for Nixon, this was to get even."
Cal Thomas wrote a column last week seeming to excuse Nixon for Watergate by pointing out that everyone now believes that Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 Texas Senate race, and that corrupt Chicago politics probably stole the 1960 Presidential election for John Kennedy. Is he implying that Nixon should get a pass just because he got caught and others didn't? By that logic we should just let everyone now in prison out, because there is bound to be someone out there who got away with the crime they are doing time for.
If you still cling to the belief that Nixon got a raw deal, consider this. Nixon committed far greater crimes and got away with them. In the fall of 1968 he sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War. He and Hubert Humphrey were in a tight race, and Nixon feared that a breakthrough on Vietnam would give Humphrey the Presidency. Nixon got word to the South Vietnamese, through an intermediary, to boycott the talks, by convincing them that if he won the election, he would get them a better deal. What they ended up getting was four more years of war, and we got thousands more dead soldiers.
Richard Nixon got away with no less than treason and murder. He committed those crimes so he could become President, and then tried to use the office to get revenge on his "enemies" both real, and imagined. Give him a pass? Downplay Watergate?
Hell, no.
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