I was intrigued to discover last week that Garrett M. Graff has written a complete, updated history of the Watergate scandal. I’m sure it’s filled with things we’ve never heard about, which goes to show how inexhaustible a constitutional crisis can be for historians. Because Nixon recorded everything, there is more material than any one human can evaluate, but we live in a digital age where everyone’s communications are generally preserved. The January 6 mine will probably be several times more rich with unexplored ore.
Imagine if Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, had a cell phone, email and text messaging apps. How much easier would it have been to uncover the network of the Watergate conspiracy? That’s the problem for Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who has stopped cooperating with the congressional inquiry into January 6, but not before he turned over troves of digital records.
Immediately, we learned that three prominent on-air Fox News personalities, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade, texted Meadows during the insurrection at the Capitol and implored him to convince Trump to call off the attack. Of course, Trump ignored these entreaties for hours, even as dozens of police officers were injured, lawmakers and staff were threatened, and fatalities were occurring in the riot.
The typical reaction is to point to the difference between what these Fox News celebrities said privately to the White House and what they’ve said on the air in the months since. But truthfully, the hypocrisy of people like Hannity and Ingraham is not newsworthy. The damage they have to worry about will come from supporters of Trump and the insurrection. Their credibility as solid members of the club just took a big hit. For the rest of us, maybe it’s a relief to realize that they are capable of briefs bouts of moral conscience.
Mostly, I don’t care about this angle to the story because I don’t care about Fox News. They are what they are, and perhaps they’re getting worse. So it goes.
I might very well buy Graff’s new Watergate book because I find the story fascinating, but what matters is that Nixon was forced to resign and Congress passed a number of reforms in response to the scandal. That happened despite people not knowing all the details that Graff is only divulging now, nearly fifty years later.
We don’t need to know everything before we act. We need to know enough to prosecute people. We need to tell a narrative sufficient to inspire demands for reforms. When people study this fifty years from now, I don’t want them trying to explain how the main perpetrators escaped justice or, worse, came right back to power four years later.
With all the digital information that’s available, it should be an easier job than Watergate.
I think the failure to prosecute Nixon himself was the first major blow to the rule of law. Since then, we’ve come to accept that big players will not be held accountable.
History isn’t neat and tidy. Certainly there’s tons of political corruption at all times so it’s artificial to point to one event as the beginning or end of anything. Politics has always been a dirty business and selecting leaders has always been way more about brawn than brains. Humans are predisposed to want a strong man as their leader. With education and sophistication, people become more open to strength that appears in more refined forms. The strength of a thinker, a woman, a minority, etc. But there remain knuckle draggers for whom the biggest showing of bravado hits the mark.
Sadly, to Trump’s cult he represents everything they wish they were and can’t be. The more ignorant, vindictive, and brutal, the better.
I was living in DC during Watergate and even played a minuscule role in a tiny peripheral part of the outcome. There was no appetite for prosecuting Nixon. Had we done so he might well have not been convicted, and then we’re left with what would have looked like the shambles of a political revenge attack. Or he’d be convicted, in which case we faced the banana republic future of tit-for-tat political prosecutions.
The actions of the House Select Committee over the past 24 hours are perhaps the most encouraging sign we’ve seen all year relating to the attempted coup, because they show a group of politicians who understand that going after a president (or ex-president) is fundamentally a political act, and it requires good politicians using all their talents and skills if it’s going to succeed.
This is the lesson of Jimmy Breslin’s great Watergate book, “How the Good Guys Finally Won”. The hero, in Breslin’s telling, was House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill. O’Neill wasn’t a lawyer, or a judge. He wasn’t the smartest member of Congress. But he was a damn good pol, who knew how to read a room, how to put together a vote, how to tell a story, when and how to caucus, to negotiate, to agitate, and to compromise.
The House Select Committee not only moved (relatively) quickly to push a contempt resolution for Meadows, they also staged it so that three times in the past 24 hours (last night’s committee vote, this morning’s Rules Committee vote, this evening’s House vote) they told their story, and decorated it with juicy new details (texts from Trump’s family members, Fox News personalities, reporters, members of Congress) each time they told it.
Now, if they can keep that up through a few weeks of public hearings in the early part of next year, maybe we’ll start getting somewhere with this.
We badly need to prosecute Trump and his minions for their crimes. I do believe that this will likely lead to an end of Trumpism as the main republican identity and the party will fracture into several pieces if it happens. It might be the best thing that happens, given the circumstances, though it won’t be without significant turmoil.