There’s that language of technocratic business efficiency and racial egalitarianism, the agenda of those now known to history as “Rockefeller Republicans.” Up here in the Northeast, we still have a few of their misbegotten children running around—Susan Collins, George Pataki, Christine Todd Whitman. Nixon was himself something of a Rockefeller Republican, an ideological opponent of the emerging conservativism of figures like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. His administration would go on to found the EPA and pursue détente with China. In other words, Nixon is—in his own weird 1970s way—not unlike Trump. He pitched himself as an outsider, courted Democratic voters with talk of law and order, and ran a campaign many would call racist. Yet, he was by no means doctrinaire for his party—looking more like the fading Rockefellers than the emergent Reaganites. He rode a tidal wave of dissatisfaction over riots, racial strife, and national pansification into the Oval Office. Sound at least mildly familiar?
As President, Nixon was a man of contradictions. He was tough on Communism (he came to prominence as a McCarthyite), yet relaxed relations with China as well as the USSR and ended the war in Vietnam. He enacted the “Southern Strategy” (letting Spiro T. Agnew rile up his base, but keeping himself fairly clean), but enforced the integration of schools. He devolved power to the states even as he enacted wage and price controls.
The real similarities, however, begin to emerge when we look at Watergate. On this topic, I recommend the podcast Slow Burn. It’s imperfect, but it does a great job of examining how the nation reacted to presidential corruption, or, more poignantly put, how it failed to react:
Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).
Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation. Some days it seems like our democratic institutions won’t survive, or that permanent damage has already been done. Pretty much every day, we are buffeted by news stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of highly stressful and very unrealistic novels.
The point of Slow Burn is to look back on the most recent time Americans went through this en masse, and to put ourselves in their shoes. (Slate)
It explores this feeling very well. What we see end up seeing is that very few Americans turned on Nixon right away. It took years—including lots of go-nowhere reporting and a failed investigation by House Banking Committee head Wright Patman—for Americans to lose trust in the president. People were asking “what about Ted Kennedy,” in reference to his supposed murder of his then girlfriend; people were saying “everybody does it!” John Dean’s testimony about malfeasance was not enough, even the knowledge that Nixon had recorded his conversations in the Oval Office wouldn’t do it. Nixon’s party and base only turned on him (and this after he trounced George McGovern in the 1972 election) once they heard the tapes, heard the president admit that he was, indeed, a crook. This all sounds a little too familiar.
Let’s take note of something here, something not often enough considered in the aftermath of Watergate—this was the death knell of the Rockefeller Republicans. The next GOP president would be Ronald Reagan, who certainly had no truck with tax raising, unions, social spending, and environmental conservation. A new form of Liberalism was triumphant, and Nixon’s corpse lay at the base of its Quaalude-showering throne.
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