Debating the Past

The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, 5/e

Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Crisis of Authority

Where Historians Disagree – Watergate

Thirty years after Watergate–the most famous political scandal in American history–historians and others continue to argue about its causes and significance. Their interpretations tend to fall into several broad categories.

One argument emphasizes the evolution of the institution of the presidency over time and sees Watergate as the result of a much larger pattern of presidential usurpations of power that stretched back at least several decades. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., helped develop this argument in his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, which argued that the belief of a succession of presidents in the urgency of the Cold War, and in their duty to take whatever measures might be necessary to combat it, led them gradually to usurp more and more power from Congress, from the courts, and from the public. Gradually, presidents began to look for way to circumvent constraints not just in foreign policy, but in domestic matters as well. Nixon's actions in the Watergate crisis were, in other words, a culmination of this long and steady expansion of covert presidential power. Jonathan Schell, in The Time of Illusion (1975), offered a variation of this argument, tying the crisis of the presidency to the pressure that nuclear weans placed on presidents to protect the nation's–and their own "credibility." Other commentators (but not any serious historical studies) go even further and argue that what happened to produce the Watergate scandals was not substantively different from the normal patterns of presidential behavior, that Nixon simply got caught where others had not, and that a long-standing liberal hostility toward Nixon ensured that he would pay a higher price for his behavior than other presidents would.

A second explanation of Watergate emphasizes the difficult social and political environment of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nixon entered office, according to this view, facing an unprecedentedly radical opposition that would stop at nothing to discredit the war and destroy his authority. He found himself, therefore, drawn into taking similarly desperate measures of his own to defend himself from these extraordinary challenges. Nixon made this argument himself in his 1975 memoirs:

Now that this season of mindless terror has fortunately passed, it is difficult– perhaps impossible–to convey a sense of the pressures that were influencing my actions and reactions during this period, but it was this epidemic of unprecedented domestic terrorism that prompted our efforts to discover the best means by which to deal with this new phenomenon of highly organized and highly skilled revolutionaries dedicated to the violent destruction of our democratic system.*

The historian Herbert Parmet echoed parts of this argument in Richard Nixon and His America (1990). Stephen Ambrose offered a more muted version of the same view in Richard Nixon (1989).

Most of those who have written about Watergate, however, search for the explanation not in institutional or social forces, but in the personalities of the people involved, and most notably in the personality of Richard Nixon. Even many of those who have developed structural explanations (Schlesinger, Schell, and Ambrose, for example) return eventually to Nixon himself as the most important explanation for Watergate. Others begin there, perhaps most notably Stanley I. Kutler, in The Wars of Watergate (1990) and, more recently, Abuse of Power (1997), in which he presents extensive excerpts from conversations about Watergate taped in the Nixon White House. Kutler emphasizes Nixon's lifelong resort to vicious political tactics and his longstanding belief that he was a special target of unscrupulous enemies and had to "get" them before they got him. Watergate was rooted, Kutler argues, "in the personality and history of Nixon himself." A "corrosive hatred," he claims, "decisively shaped Nixon's own behavior, his career, and eventually his historical standing."

*From RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978). Copyright 1978 by Richard Nixon. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Richard Nixon.

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