Abstract
Watergate destroyed the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Entailing far more than the cover-up of the botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) offices on June 17, 1972, it was the generic name that encompassed all the serious crimes and misdemeanors of the Nixon White House. From early 1973 until Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, to avoid almost certain impeachment, the nation was shocked by the steady stream of revelations about the misconduct of the president and his men. Time magazine called Watergate “America’s most traumatic political experience of this century.” Looking to declare an end to this sad episode in the nation’s history, Gerald Ford offered this assurance on the day he took office as Nixon’s successor: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”1
David Frost: “Can [the president] decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation…, and do something illegal?”
Richard Nixon: “Well, when a president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Exchange in the Nixon-Frost television interview, 1977
“The president is always right.”
Justice Department attorney Steven Bradbury, in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 2006
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Notes
Time, August 19, 1974; Gerald Ford, “Remarks on Taking the Oath of Office,” August 9, 1974, in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [APP] (Santa Barbara: University of California), www.presidency.ucsb.edu.
Widely recognized as the best study of Watergate is Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (New York: Norton, 1992).
More accessible for those new to the subject are: Michael Genovese, The Watergate Crisis (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999)
Keith Olson, Watergate: The Presidential Scandal That Shook America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
For a good journalistic account, see Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Random House, 1994).
The best historical study of the Nixon presidency is Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
The same author has also edited a comprehensive collection Melvin Small, A Companion to Richard M. Nixon (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
For contrasting assessments, see Michael Genovese, The Nixon Presidency: Power and Politics in Turbulent Times (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990)
Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Andrew Rudalevige, “George W. Bush and the Imperial Presidency,” in Mark Rozell and Gleaves Whitney, Testing the Limits: George W. Bush and the Imperial Presidency (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 245–246
Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: Free Press, 1990), ix
Edward Corwin, The Presidency: Office and Powers (New York: New York University Press, 1957), 29–30.
Quoted in David Nather, “New Handshake, Same Grip,” CQ Weekly, December 17, 2007, 3702.
For discussion, see Michael A. Genovese and Lori Cox Han, The Presidency and the Challenge of Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2006).
Peter Irons, War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005)
Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown, 2007).
Michael A. Genovese, Presidential Prerogative: Imperial Power in an Age of Terrorism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
John Owens, “Bush’s Congressional Legacy and Congress’s Bush Legacy,” in Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, Assessing George W. Bush’s Legacy: The Right Man? (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 51–78.
Cato, “Letter V,” New York Journal, November 22, 1787, available at www.constitution.org/afp/cato_05.htm.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), x; Genovese, Presidential Prerogative, 8.
See, in particular, James Pfiffner, Power Play: The Bush Administration and the Constitution (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008).
Despite being one of the most written about presidents, Nixon still lacks a definitive biography. To date, the best remains Stephen E. Ambrose’s three volume study, Nixon: the Education of a Politician, 1913–62, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–72, and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, 1989, and 1991).
Conrad Black’s mammoth tome, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Invincible Quest (London: Quercus, 2007) is the best of the pro-Nixon biographies.
For those seeking a short biography, consult Iwan Morgan, Nixon (London: Arnold, 2002).
The best of these is Vamik Volkan, Norman Itzkowitz, and Andrew Dod, Richard Nixon: A Psychobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
For a review of the genre, see David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003), chapter 6.
Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 5.
See, for example, Victor Lasky, It Didn’t Start with Watergate (New York: Viking, 1976).
Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, 273; C. Vann Woodward, “The Conscience of the White House,” in Woodward, ed., The Responses of the President to Charges of Misconduct (New York: Dell, 1974), xxvi.
Arthur Schlesinger, “The Imperial Presidency Redux,” in Schlesinger, War and the American Presidency (New York: Norton, 2005), 46–47; Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency, 7.
Olson, Watergate, chapter 9; Robert Johnson, Improbable Dangers; U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (New York: St Martin’s, 1994).
For Nixon’s Vietnam policy see: Robert Schulzinger: A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998)
Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: Touchstone, 2002).
Charles W. Colson, Born Again (Old Tappan, NJ: Chosen Books, 1976), 41
Leonard Garment, In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 471.
Ambrose, Nixon: Triumph, 361–362, 367–369; Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (London: Hutchison, 1987), 453–456.
David Frost, “I Gave Them a Sword:” Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 183. In his memoirs, Nixon also asserted that critics who called the scheme repressive and unlawful “did not face the exigencies of a critical period in which the President, whose paramount responsibility is to ensure the safety of all citizens, was forced to consider measures that would undoubtedly be unacceptable in more tranquil times.” See RN, 475.
Quoted in Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1990), 660.
For a discussion of the case, see David Rudenstine, The Day the Presses Stopped: The History of the Pentagon Papers Case (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
H. R. Haldeman with Joseph diMona, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), 115.
For the transcript, see Stanley I. Kutler, ed., Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), 7–8. This collection provides edited transcripts of 201 hours of Watergate tapes, released in November 1996. Nixon, and then the Nixon estate after his death, had conducted a legal battle against release of the recordings. However, as a result of the suit brought by Stanley Kutler and Public Citizen, a binding agreement was struck with the National Archives and the Nixon estate providing for eventual release of 3,700 hours of tapes.
Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, 111–116; Krogh quoted in C. L. Sulzberger, The World and Richard Nixon (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 368.
Larry Berman, The New American Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 174 (this also produces the full enemies’ list on p. 279); Kutler, Abuse of Power, 150.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), chapters 29–32
Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (London: Hutchison, 2000)
Tip O’Neill with William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 281.
Stanley Kutler, ed, Watergate, The Fall of Richard M. Nixon (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1996), 50; Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, 277–278.
John Dean, Blind Ambition (New York: Simon Schuster, 1976), 146.
Stephen Ambrose, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 148–149; Alexander Haig with Charles McCarry, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World (New York: Warner, 1982), 348.
Elliot Richardson, The Creative Balance: Government, Politics, and the Individual in America’s Third Century (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1976), 38.
Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, Jr., Stonewall: The Real Story of the Watergate Prosecution (New York: Bantam, 1974), 161.
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Sc Row, 1990), chapters 5–7.
Gerald Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper Row, 1979), 178.
Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 37–38.
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© 2012 Michael A. Genovese and Iwan W. Morgan
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Genovese, M.A., Morgan, I.W. (2012). Introduction: Remembering Watergate. In: Genovese, M.A., Morgan, I.W. (eds) Watergate Remembered. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011985_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011985_1
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