https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3U4MhKDxcw

So what kind of president was Richard Nixon?

Mostly bad. The good would be achieving a ceasefire in Vietnam (which proved temporary; the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam two years later and the Democratic-controlled Congress did nothing about it) and going to China. (Because, as Spock put it in one of the Star Trek movies, only Nixon could go to China.)

Nixon also did the statesmanlike thing by resigning before the House of Representatives was about to impeach him. Nixon resigned after Republicans in Congress told him he was about to get impeached, and he was probably going to be convicted and booted out of office. (Which brings to mind the quote apparently misattributed to Winston Churchill about doing the right thing after all other possibilities are exhausted.) It’s impossible to imagine, say, Barack Obama resigning for any reason (or, for that matter, anyone else in American politics who has any chance to become president), and certainly Bill Clinton didn’t resign even though it probably would have made Al Gore president into the 2000s.

Nixon gets credit for making inroads with the Soviet Union, though I’m not sure that’s something worth applauding. By the end of the decade, the U.S. was looking second-rate compared to the Soviets, and Gerald Ford’s successor as president, Jimmy Carter, was impotent. It took one of Nixon’s challengers in 1968, Ronald Reagan, to decide, and have the fortitude to stick with, a radical strategy: “We win, they lose.” And if you think Vladimir Putin is bad today, imagine him with everything the Soviet Union had, including numerous puppet Warsaw Pact governments.

On the other hand, no one could ever accuse Nixon of being a small-government conservative. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Environmental Protection Agency began under his presidency. It’s not that workplace safety and the environment aren’t important, but the EPA is one of the biggest detriments to the economy that exists in this country, and OSHA isn’t anyone’s idea of bureaucratically sensible either. Worse were Nixon’s 1971 wage and price controls to stop inflation, which succeeded only in delaying it and the resulting recession until after the 1972 presidential election. That also made it Ford’s problem, and then Carter’s to a much greater extent. We can also thank Nixon, if that’s what you want to call it, for the 55-mph national speed limit.

For those who don’t know what Watergate was about, the Washington Post summed it up succinctly:

What Richard Nixon did that was wrong was to surround himself with a group of aides who were unaccountable to anyone but himself, whom he empowered to use the authority of government to break into any place they wished — an opposition party’s headquarters, a political opponent’s psychiatrist’s office — to further Mr. Nixon’s political interests and personal animosities. Then he and they lied about it and further tried to employ the intelligence agencies of government to concoct an alibi for them; they paid people to lie in federal court about their involvement. And for almost two years, with great contempt for the public and also, incidentally, for their own political supporters who went out on a limb for them, they kept lying — using the White House Oval Office to lend majesty to the criminal cover-up.

 

Watergate was a cancer on the country for numerous reasons. If you think I’m going to defend for any reason people like John Dean (who has spent the years since castigating conservatives apparently to atone, which means he missed the point of Watergate entirely), John Erlichmann and H.R. Haldeman, you’re wrong. Everything about Watergate, in fact, proves the worldview of small-government conservatives — when the stakes in elections are too high, politicians will do literally anything to get elected and stay in office, including blatant disregard for the law. (And Nixon was supposed to be the law-and-order president.) That’s true whether the Watergate Hotel burglary and resulting cover-up was about winning the 1972 election, or, as suggested here yesterday, about covering up the run-up to the 1968 election.

Watergate launched the journalism careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, though it also prompted some people to get into journalism for the wrong reasons — becoming a media rock star instead of, you know, doing the job you were hired to do. Ronald Reagan was already in the GOP limelight in the early 1970s, but the 1974 and 1976 losses helped make Republicans think that maybe the Democrat-lite approach wasn’t the right approach for the party. It also served to either inflate, or deflate every national-level political scandal since then, as if _____gate was either (1) “the next Watergate!” or (2) not as bad as Watergate. (Nixon was about to be impeached when he resigned. Bill Clinton was impeached, but the Senate decided that lying to a grand jury really wasn’t a big deal. Barack Obama has decided that federal laws are things he can ignore when he feels like it.)

There are no do-overs in elections. Had Nixon not been the GOP choice in 1968, and hadn’t been president in 1972, who would have been a better choice? New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t any more conservative than Nixon. Reagan had been governor of California for two years. (And who knows if Reagan would have even gone into politics had Nixon not lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race. Reagan enacted an odd kind of revenge by beating George Brown, the man who beat Nixon.) Democrats were extremely torn about Vice President Hubert Humphrey; antiwar Democrats looked at him as Lyndon Johnson without the drawl. George McGovern was the captive of every Democratic special interest group, and the 1972 nominating process couldn’t have gotten Franklin Roosevelt elected. Jimmy Carter may not have run for president at all had it not been for Watergate. And then there’s the racist George Wallace.

Well, there is one way Watergate could have been avoided. Americans should have voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964.