The Rest Is History - 107. Watergate: Part 2

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Despite his overwhelming lead in the polls, President Richard Nixon’s paranoia leads to the criminal actions of the Watergate scandal. In this second part of our mini-series, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland explore the unravelling of the conspiracy and its consequences for US politics. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. This is the second part in a two-part special on the Watergate scandal. In the first part, top historian of modern America, Dominic Sandbrook, futilely attempted to deal with the whole topic in a single episode. We went through the life of and career of Richard Nixon and then we started on the countdown to the the break into the Watergate complex to

bug the democratic is it party convention it's a democratic national committee party yeah so they're basically democratic party headquarters yeah okay and so they they've been the people doing that have been caught red-handed nixon has said we've got to try and cover it up this will be the smoking gun and now dominic we can get back to the action and the countdown to what will be ultimately nixon's resignation but i'd like to to kick off with a question from stephen wills who asks when did nixon know the game was up and was there any chance he could have stayed so that's the kind of the context for what over the next what is it year and a half nixon's attempt to stop this from destroying his presence well first of all um i never really

intended to do it in an hour i was lying when i i always thought it would take two episodes i mean if we could do two episodes on Thermopylae and Salamis without even mentioning Thermopylae and Salamis in the first episode, we could definitely do two episodes on Watergate. Now, when did Nixon know the game was up? He's not going to know the game is up for two more years. I mean, in the first episode, somebody asked, you know, why is Watergate so resonant?

Why is everything... I mean, it's partly because it goes on so long. So, June 17th of June 1972, You know, why is Watergate so resonant? Why is everything? I mean, it's partly because it goes on so long. So, 17th of June, 1972, is when the second burglary happens that is detected and the burglars are caught. So we talked about that last time. The 23rd of June, 1972, is when Nixon says to his chief of staff on tape,

we have to basically abuse our powers, get the CIA to stop stop get the fbi to stop the investigation stop it going higher up and then what happens really interestingly is kind of nothing for six months or more so the in which time he wins he romps home in the election and as i said last time he celebrates by sitting on his own, listening to music in his sepulchral gloom and writing on a pad about all the nasty things that people will say about him. So he's very bitter.

He's actually really bitter after he's won this election. You described him as a Shakespearean figure. And I suppose that sense of you know absolute crushing success victory affirmation while at the same time you've got this scandal which is like a kind of little hint of dry rot absolutely in the wall that's that's exactly slowly spread and spread and spread and nothing he can do that's exactly right one of his aides later on john dean who will come to um describes that he says to nixon at one point there's a cancer on the presidency and it's growing and it's actually not a bad image it's something's very small almost imperceptible at

first a nothing story but as you say it's going to grow and grow and grow and consume him so november 1972 he wins this crushing landslide. January 1973, he is inaugurated for the second term. And they get peace in Vietnam, which they've been waiting for all this time. So it looks OK. And all this time, they have been paying off the burglars, by the way. They have given them, I think, something like $430,000. Have the burglars not been arrested? Yeah, they've been arrested, but they need to be told...

Someone's got to pay their legal fees. These are not rich men. So someone has... Right, and also, are they being paid to keep quiet about it? They're being basically paid to keep quiet. They're described as loss of earnings, because loss of earnings through being in prison. Yes, exactly right.

But in January 1973, so at the same time that Nixon's having these tremendous triumphs, they are convicted, obviously, because they're caught red-handed, and they're going to be sentenced in March 1973. So the question for Nixon is, if they keep quiet, and if nobody really digs into this he can probably get away with it but all it takes is one of them to break or it takes is somebody to start really following the money and so on and he'll be in trouble now the washington post the woodwood

carl woodward no carl bernstein rather and bob woodward uh have been writing about following the money trail. They have an informant in the FBI called Deep Throat, who turns out to be the... OK, I think we've got a question. Oh, very good. Can somebody ask who came up with the name Deep Throat? I don't actually know who came up with it.

I did know, but I've forgotten. So Deep Throat is a porn film from the early 1970s. And the guy is Mark Felt. He's the deputy FBI director. He's not a friend of the White House. The funny thing is, actually, there's this huge sort of hullabaloo when it turned out to be him. But actually, the Nixon White House had always known he was leaking to the press. So it's actually not that great a story.

There's all this stuff that Woodward and Bernstein kind of rather ham up in their book about how they signaled in with flower pots on windowsills and kind of ringed i mean that's very very much the sense you get from all the presidents yeah for all the presidents men but actually the woodward and bernstein thing is not the thing that brings nixon down at all what brings him down um probably you could arguably the moment is um well here we go it's it's it's a period of of two two three days really in march 1973 so on the 21st of march the white house council that's the white house lawyer a man called john dean who's a young clean-cut kind of republican a classic kind of party political hack who's basically you know worked his way up and got his job he goes in he's been handling the cover-up for nixon and he goes in and he says this thing about there's a cancer on the presidency he says basically a lot of people have perjured themselves

saying they don't know anything they don't know where it goes and we're going to run into trouble because soon the burglars are going to be sentenced sent to prison we're going to have to find more money for them and possibly money for other people if this goes up the chain and there's this dreadful conversation again on tape uh he's nixon says how much do you need and dean says um we'll need a million dollars in cash very austin powers and nixon says a million he says a million dollars i know where that can be gotten. Which is kind of very, it's very incriminating. So at that point, they have the first conversation. How far, who are we going to lose?

Oh, we'll lose him and him and him. And at that moment, John Dean, this White House lawyer, can feel the kind of chill on the back of his neck because he thinks well I've been the guy who's orchestrating this cover yes yes maybe they're going to come for me and this is actually where the social mix of the Nixon White House I think is really interesting and important because I said in the previous episode lots of these people are outsiders and self-made men they have a lot to lose and no real way back if it goes wrong they're not members of boarding school old boys groups gentlemen's clubs they're not part of the

washington kind of establishment so if they go down there's no ladder out for them and and that's why there's no sense of kind of solidarity among them i think which there might be a question yeah there's a question from the church mouse could nixon have survived if it had been handled differently e.g the trump method of hanging others out to dry but denying nixon knew about it instead of trying to cover it this is exactly what they do tom this is exactly what their plan is so that's the 21st of march the next day dean gets sent nixon Dean to Camp David and he says I think what you should do is write a report for me about everything you know about the cover-up now at that point when the president tells you to do that you kind of think oh that that doesn't sound very good

because does he want me to incriminate myself does he want me to lie about what's going on here the very day after that the 23rd of march the judge is sentencing the burglars and the judge gets up in court and he says publicly in open court in front of the press he says um i've been handed a letter by one of the burglars james mccord and he reads out the letter the letter says we've been put under political pressure from the start this was never a cio operation that's not true people have perjured themselves in this um investigation and other powerful people knew about this and were behind it and you can imagine the you know report it's that hubbub in court yeah it's that classic scene of Hollywood. Rubub, rubub, rubub. Running people running.

They're rushing off for the phone. They are rushing. But they literally are rushing for the phone. Yes. This is just absolutely unbelievable. So now things start to unravel in a really interesting way. So the 6th of April, so a little bit, just a couple of weeks later, John Dean, Nixon's White House lawyer, decides, I need a lawyer of my own to represent me.

And behind Nixon's back, he starts talking to a Senate committee that has been set up to look at campaign irregularities in 1972 called the Irvin Committee. So he starts talking to them and he starts talking to the prosecutors. So we're in April 1973. Nixon's first term has only really just started, but already things are starting to unravel. And throughout the course of this month, there was a series of meetings, Nixon and his aides, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean,

they're kind of sitting around saying, how are we going to stop this? You know, who's going to take the fall? And with each meeting, it becomes more and more obvious that of those four men, three of them are going down, and the only question is whether they're going to take Nixon with them. So it's like the end of succession. It is.

It's very succession-like, actually. It's very succession-like, except Nixon is much more shambolic and ham-fisted than kind of Brian brian what's his name uh logan roy logan roy i love logan roy anyway um so um by the end of april nixon now knows that dean is talking to the prosecutors and all this sort of thing and he thinks the only way i can deal with this is to is to get rid of all of them. The lot, basically my my my closest aides. And there are these incredibly kind of tear stained conversations almost where Nixon says to. So if it's like a cancer, this is full operate.

Yeah. Amputation. They've all got to go. I didn't know anything, but they knew everything. It was nothing to do with me. So they all go. We talked about Nixon and Quakerism in our last episode. Haldeman says this is the only time he and Nixon ever physically touched. So Quakers don't approve of excessive physical contact. And Nixon only ever shook hands with Haldeman after he'd basically fired him.

He sort of said, oh, Bob, you're a great man. I'll miss you. And shakes his hand. And it's very, you know, Nixon's very Gordon Brown like, Tom. I don't think that's an unfair comparison. I think he's like a sort of more, a sort of darker, more sinister version of Gordon Brown. A trickier. Yeah, trickier.

Exactly. So at that point, Nixon's presidency has kind of been amputated. He's lost his key. He's only got Kissinger left, really, of the people he ever relied on. But Kissinger is desperate to kind of keep his distance from the Watergate issue now. Has Kissinger been embroiled in this? No, although he used to pester Nixon to bug his own staff to find out who was leaking. But Kissinger wasn't involved in the campaign irregularities or anything like that at all.

So in some ways, Kissinger, certainly in foreign policy, is now just basically running the presidency. Because Nixon is spending all his time sitting up late at night, sweating and staring into the darkness. And it's sort of very, having these kind of interior Shakespearean monologues. Yes, yes. And Dominic, in terms of foreign policy yeah 1973 is quite a turbulent year isn't it it is well we're going to come to this going on in the background there is there's lots going on in the background are you thinking about uh the unraveling of the ted heath premiership is that what you're thinking about well i think kind of energy crisis yes we're going to come to this we will get very topical we're

going to come to this you'll see so we now get to the summer of 1973 so this scandal is now very big news and I said earlier there was a senate committee investigating it so the one of the great things about this story is that the focus keeps moving from arena to arena so it now moves to the senate committee hearings the Irvine committee hearings and they are held they are on tv they are in the at the precise the the networks clear their schedules and put them where the daytime soaps would be so it becomes a kind of soap opera in and of itself 85 percent of americans watched part of these hearings i mean that tells you just how the colossal impact of them and um so you basically and is nixon saying that this is all the cosmopolitan liberal elite? Yeah, he is.

Out to get it. Exactly. They are bitter about the election. They've always hated him. He knew nothing about it. It's very unfortunate these things happen in the White House, but they had nothing to do with him. He would never...

And we've got a question from the McRae case. Nixon's misdemeanors aside, how much of Watergate was congress getting its revenge for being sidelined over vietnam and finally finding the chance to bear its teeth there's a huge amount of truth in that actually so there's this phenomenon called the imperial presidency that people talk about um uh historians wrote about in the sort of 70s they said the presidency has become more and more powerful since the second world war and the cold war and has accumulated power and taken it from congress and particularly after vietnam this is congress's chance to reassert itself and i think there's there's loads of truth in that a lot of people in congress are itching to take back power from the presidency and they see the dirty tricks

the wiretaps and so on and the surveillance as a sign of a presidency that has lost any sight of kind of constitutional responsibility so i think that's a really good um question anyway the hearings there's two big moments one is where john dean the nixon's old council white house council um goes along on and this is in june and he says the president did know he knew about the cover-up and he says it's live on television he knew about it and he was in on it from the start. And actually, it's a great sensation. But lots of people think Dean is a kind of a reptilian figure.

So one columnist calls him a bottom dwelling slug. So and people sort of say not a very pleasant. Dean is very sort of slick, smarmy kind of Republican operative. And some people distrust him. They say, maybe he's lying. No, maybe Nixon didn't know. Maybe he's lying. But then the great revelation, a flunky called Alexander Butterfield goes along to be interviewed in July.

And almost by sort of random chance, somebody says, there doesn't happen to be a taping system in the oval office and he's and and he had he had decided you know beforehand i won't tell them anything about tapes unless they ask and if they ask me a direct question i'm not going to purge myself and he says oh well now you come to mention it yeah there is and at that point of course you know another sort of slightly run for the phones sensation because now you can find the proof you know now you can find out one way or the other so at this point so why had nixon not destroyed the tapes well that's what most of people said why the hell did he not i mean even after the revelation some people some of nixon i think alexander haig uh who was then n's chief of staff after Oldman, says, you know, I just said to him, get a massive pile of the tapes, put them on the White House lawn, pour a load of petrol over them and just set them alight.

And then there's nothing they can do. But he's just paralyzed, I suppose. To destroy the tapes is an omission of guilt, right? Yeah. And he doesn't want to give because of so is there a sense in which in which nixon's i mean it sounds an odd thing to ask but is there still a kind of strain of the moral within nixon that is struggling with his his worst nature that's a good question because i mean if you're a complete criminal yeah obviously you're going to get rid of the incriminating evidence on you. I mean, the fact he doesn't.

Yes, I think that's a good point, actually. It seems a surprisingly moral thing to do. Maybe to some extent he's not. It suggests a respect for the law. Yes. Well, he keeps fighting the law. So, I mean, why doesn't he do it? Oh, I think it's just he paralyzed he's paralyzed by indecision

he's staring at the headlights yeah um but the weird thing is this then battle this battle then goes on for for months so now it's about the tapes so now yet another sort of antagonist presents itself nixon has been forced to set up a special prosecutor. And it is, I mean, you talked about Kennedy being his worst nightmare in the last episode. The special prosecutor is, if you went into Richard Nixon's nightmares and you got somebody who would be,

you know, just the ultimate bogeyman, you would find a man called Archibald Cox. Archibald Cox went to boarding school, an East Coast boarding school. He wears a bow tie. He went to Harvard, which, of course, poor old Dick Nixon didn't get to go to because his family was too poor. And he worked for the Kennedys. He was a Kennedy lawyer and he worked in the Kennedy White House.

So he's the special prosecutor. And he says, I'd like to see the tapes. And Nixon says, no. And then you have this months-long battle. And eventually Nixon comes up with a... I mean, this is the deludedness, Tom. He should have burned them, you're right. What he says is, he says, I'll do a compromise with you.

I will release the tapes, but I'll only release them to one man who's a senator from Mississippi called John Stennis, who's incredibly senator from mississippi called john stennis who's incredibly racist and reactionary and is also deaf it says i'll release them to him and he can maybe make notes on them and tell you what's on the tapes that's not really how evidence works in court i mean it's still not quite as good as Jeremy thought but it's getting there so Archibald Cox says no that's not good

enough you know you need to give me all these tapes Nixon says if you ask me for the tapes again because Archibald Cox is supposedly working for Nixon this is the bizarre thing Nixon says if you give me them again I'm going to sack you stop asking for my tapes and Archibald Cox asks for the tapes again.

So on the 20th of October 1973, Nixon says to his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, fire Archibald Cox and shut down the prosecution, shut down the Special Prosecutor's Office into Watergate. Richardson says no. He resigns. Nixon gets his deputy on the phone, a man called William Ruckelshaus and he says fire archibald cox shut down the special prosecution unit and ruckelshaus says no he resigns finally they come to the third man who's a man called robert bork he's got this sort of mephistopheles kind of oh who becomes uh yeah reagan reagan nominates for the supreme court and and he doesn't get he doesn't get him. He's got this, partly because of this, because he's got this sort of Mephistopheles beard.

He looks very sort of sinister. And he says, I'll fire him for you. So he fires Archibald Cox. The White House sends people to seal off the offices and to sort of seize the evidence that Archibald Cox has amassed, which looks kind of shocking i mean the pub that as a pr move it is an utter unalloyed catastrophe that nixon is basically sacking the person who's investigating him trying to seal off his offices take all his stuff and all this um nixon's approval rating plummets to 17 and he gets half a million telegrams the highest in western union's history of people saying you're a fascist you're trying to you know subvert the rule of law

and this is where your stuff about foreign policy comes in tom because this is at precisely the moment that the yom kippur war is raging between israel egypt and syria the war that is going to trigger the great opec oil shock and the energy crisis of late 1973. And at this very moment, American and Soviet ships are kind of steaming through the Mediterranean with supplies for their rival clients. So Nixon is... So America is backing Israel.

Yeah, America is backing... Soviet Union is backing Alex. Exactly. And there's a sense, you know, this is escalating towards something completely out of control nixon has gone mad and is consumed by watergate on the 24th of october so four days after the so-called saturday night massacre when they tried to shut down the prosecution um the situation in the middle east is so bad that Henry Kissinger, with a couple of other kind of Nixon officials,

behind Nixon's back puts America's nuclear forces on the highest alert, DEFCON 3. So it's a really serious thing. But Nixon is not even involved in that decision because he's spending all that time sweating, sleeping late um drinking just in swearing an absolute kind yeah in an absolute mess in an absolute mess uh so anyway world war three doesn't happen um the reaction to this nixon's move is so bad that he has to appoint another prosecutor a guy called leon jaworski who has working with him a certain hillary rodham later hillary rodham clinton okay yeah um and finally nixon starts to release these tapes so the first transfer tapes comes out in november 1973 seven tapes and one of them um the one for the 20th of

june right after the watergate break-in has an 18 and a half minute strange inexplicable 18 and a half minute gap on it and everybody says what's this gap uh Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig says the tape must have been erased by a sinister force but I don't know what it is and then Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods says um oh I must have accidentally erased it by pressing the wrong button when I was leaning for the phone. And then basically the prosecutors make her do this thing which proves that she could only have erased it while reaching for the phone

by doing these incredible acrobatics across the room. So basically it looks like Nixon erased it himself in a very shambolic way. Haig himself has said since, he thinks Nixon listened to the tape and tried to destroy the whole tape but made a mess of it because he was terrible with equipment he didn't know you know it's the classic kind of dad who doesn't know kind of how the video recorder works um so there's this 18 and a half minute gap which looks pretty bad but still the president he's

still president it's still lingering on so anyone else would probably run away at this point and or just you know go into a locked room with a revolver and a bottle of brandy or something but nixon is still there he can't be killed keep going they keep asking for more tapes it gets to april 1974 now nixon says well i'll tell you what, I'm not going to give you the tapes. I'll give you transcripts. So he, and he thinks if I give them loads, then they'll kind of, there'll be so much.

They're just, why not to do it? See the, yeah. He gives them 1200 pages worth of conversations, but he has gone through them all. I had his people go through them on, take out all the swearing.

This is the Quaker again. So all the swearing has been taken out and replaced with expletive deleted. And the weird thing about that, I think a lot of people, historians, have written about this, is that actually Nixon's language wasn't that bad. But because of his Quakerism, he got them to take out damn, you know hell all the so so it's kind of don't think of an elephant right oh all the swear words are missing yeah exactly so everyone yeah um so he's so it's another example of the cover-up being worse it is actually this is a very good example finally the supreme court rules that he must surrender all the tapes august 1974 uh he releases a load of tapes and among them

is the smoking gun conversation that we talked about the end of the last episode where he said to holderman get the cia to tell the fbi not to look into it and with that i mean that he has sunk because that shows that he knew about the cover-up from the very beginning, that he's lied about it ever since. There is no possible excuse. There is no way around it. The wheels of impeachment are already in motion. The House Judiciary Committee has voted to impeach him,

and six Republicans on the committee have voted to impeach him. It's going to go to the Senate, clearly going to go to the Senate for a trial. Then you have these incredible scenes so on the 7th of august the republican party's congressional leaders go to see nixon they basically say mr president the game is up you know you're not going to win a trial you know not even going to come close you're damaging the republican party you know you've got to go so then they they go away the republican congressional leaders and then there's this incredible scene you know very hitler in his bunker uh nixon sits alone in the darkness he listens to classical music kind of staring into the night then he calls henry kissinger and he's um he says henry i need you to come over

kissinger comes over and they sit together drinking brandy. Nixon starts crying. He sobs. And then he says, Henry, will you pray with me? And they get down on their knees together. And they pray. And Nixon is crying. And by some accounts, Kissinger kind of holds him like a baby there in the White House study

and then you know what Nixon says when Kissinger finally, Kissinger thinks this is excruciating by the way, he's incredibly embarrassed, when they leave the last thing Nixon says to him Henry he says please don't ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not

strong and here we are talking yeah because it tells everybody okay terrible terrible behavior okay so then the eighth the next day the 8th of august he gives this resignation speech live on television then he sits up he can't sleep uh and then he actually comes to go on the 9th and and right at the beginning of the very first episode, which seems like a lifetime ago, I think it was Stefan Jensen asked, why is Watergate so resonant compared with other scandals?

It's because the melodrama is greater. So the 9th of August. And punctuated, I guess, by kind of certain points that people can tune in to find out what's going to happen. Exactly, exactly. So he assembles all the white house staff his family he comes out on this platform and he gives a farewell speech in which he breaks down again and again he he just he hasn't slept for days he just starts rambling

he talks about his father a little man they would call him a kind of common man he talks about his mother uh who lost two sons she was a saint he says she was a saint he reads from theodore roosevelt's um memoir about when his wife died comparing himself basically somebody who's been bereaved and then he gives this i always find i know lots of people will laugh at me about this uh i always find very moving he says um his final words virtually his final words he says you know the greatness comes and you're really tested when you take some knocks some disappointment when sadness comes because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain very sort of shakespearean wow very shakespearean and then he goes off to the helicopter the v signs and flies off

um to california and that's the end that's okay and i think and i think it's farewell to the first part of this second episode this is only the first part oh my god i thought you're gonna say yeah it is no no so so when we come back and and i know this is going to be agony for you but i think we've got to compress quite a lot we need to look at how uh he gets his pardon and the long-term effects of the scandal whether it had long-term effects so we will see you back after the break see you after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest

of entertainment.com that'sisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to the second part of our Watergate-themed series on The Rest Is History. Nixon has resigned. He's flown off in his helicopter to California. Dominic, we have a counterfactual here um from roy nelly yeah and he asks how does u.s political history play out in a world where

ford doesn't pardon nixon okay presumably ford is easily re-elected and no ronald reagan so gerald ford is the vice president yeah under nixon therefore automatically succeeds him as president and he pardons Nixon. What happens if he doesn't? He was always going to pardon Nixon. I don't think there's a scenario in which he doesn't pardon Nixon. I like Gerald Ford, the only president of course to have appeared in a Pink Panther film

in Pink Panther Strikes Again. Big golfer, wasn't he? He was a very sport... Weirdly, everyone remembers him for falling over. But actually, he's the most athletic president in he was very he was a very sport weirdly everyone remembers him for falling over but actually he's the most athletic president in american history he's a very very good sportsman um i like joel ford a lot actually he's he used to go on holiday of course okay jim callahan um so ford pardons nixon a month after nixon leaves he has to pardon him i almost everybody around him says we cannot have nixon's trial hanging over

your presidency it will defeat everything you want to do it will completely torpedo any possibility you have of winning re-election been prejudged in the press and because there'll be no possible juror who is unaware of the scandal. So it will be very difficult. Nixon's also in atrocious health. So Nixon has phlebitis in his leg, which he's allowed to get worse and worse in the course of 1974. A lot of people think that Nixon basically had a suicide wish at this point. So he's also getting advice from people who know Nixon that say

Nixon may well kill himself if you um allow him to go to trial if you don't pardon him ford also is told has got legal advice that the acceptance of a pardon carries an imputation of guilt of guilt yeah um and what what is ford's relationship with nixon i mean had they got no they weren't very close so ford wasn't actually nixon's first vice president nixon's first vice president man called spiro agnew um who'd resigned because he'd been taking kind of kickbacks when he was governor of maryland spiro he hated hippies spiro agnew is a great i love spiro agnew he's like a sort of daily express columnist um yes he he goes around he talks about the nattering the daily mail ones nattering the bobs of negativism. I always like his... He attacked the...

He talks about you, Tom. He said liberals were... What does he say? An effete core of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals. Brilliant. That's me to a T. Yeah.

Anyway, so Ford probably... Okay. So Ford pardons him. Yeah. Ford pardons him. Nixon doesn't die. Yeah. He... Goes to talk to david frost talks to david frost david frost gets it yeah so so so so that's watergate yeah but i think that that um we've had a lot of questions about the the impact um and why it had

this resonance so just for example um Barry Grogan, why does Watergate continue to be so famous, have such staying power? There have been much more serious presidential scandals such as Iran-Contra or Trump's actions before and on January the 6th. I mean, would you agree with that? I would actually. I think Iran-Contra certainly. Reagan was running an illegal foreign policy that had been basically explicitly banned by congress giving aid um to the contras in nicaragua uh he's what is he doing he's secretly um trading arms for hostages it's much more serious than watergate which is basically a caper i mean watergate really is a caper that a ludicrous um you know the bug okay the bugging of the democratic national committee

is not good it's it breaks the kind of democratic norms but it's not the end of the world it certainly doesn't compare with the trump support to storming the capital that's that's absolutely i mean they're not in the same league so so so obviously i guess the the impact of of watergate on america standing in the world is is not positive uh I mean yeah it's not good for America but you could couldn't you argue that actually it it shows how important the rule of law is yeah of course you could something so small can bring down you know the president of the United States you could argue Tom and you can imagine this kind of thing going on you know in other countries and nobody would bat an eyelid. Isn't Nicolas Sarkozy just been sentenced to prison in France?

I mean, yeah, you're right. I mean, you could argue, I think it would be a reasonable argument, actually, that it reflects well on American politics. That the system works. The president has been... Is not above the law. Is not above the law. He's been party to wrongdoing. He's tried to cover it up.

And he's been caught and he has been forced from office. I mean, I think you could absolutely make that argument. I think one reason it's so resonant, going back to that first episode we did, it happens in the context of the late 1960s, Vietnam, a general loss of trust, an economic downturn, a crisis of authority generally. And it feels like part of a bigger story i mean scandals always resonate we talked about this in the thorpe episode why do scandals resonate they resonate if they express a uh they if they see they're

seen as symptoms of a wider disease if they are kind of windows into a bigger story and watergate is exactly one of those perhaps also if they do have a slight element of the comic yes that can yeah can kind of hook people so that you have all the drama and the tension but there is also the slight element of slapstick although I don't think actually that what strikes us now the slapstick elements I think at the time a lot of Americans didn't find it funny I think they were genuinely shocked about the swearing in the Oval Office and about the kind of characters that Nixon was associated. I mean, they didn't view it as we do in a sort of cynical, flippant way. They thought this is because they really venerated the presidency. I mean, I don't think that's just Dominic. Yeah.

So that leads on to another question from Duncan Simpson. We now live in a society where there is constant scandal in the news and the proven lies from our leaders are met with very little uproar. How much did Watergate change the idea of faith in our leaders and an expectation of them being good people? Yeah, I think it definitely damaged Americans' faith in the presidency. I mean, that's one reason they turned to Reagan, actually, in 1980. I think there's a thirst for somebody who, you know, will restore, as people see it, the grandeur, the kind of regal magnificence of the presidency. And is that why Reagan is able to weather the Iran-Contra scandal?

Yeah, I think absolutely. People just didn't want it. There's no appetite for it. They just didn't want it. But then it does, you see, then you do have the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s. And that is seen as kind of, I mean, certainly Democrats see that as Republicans deliberately trying to get revenge for Walter Gellert. They absolutely do, because people point to the fact that Hillary Clinton had been working for the special prosecution team in 1974. Although, of course, I always think with the clinton impeachment you know everybody's for 20 for you know 10 15 years people said ah it's nothing it's a storm in a teacup you know it's

just a republican concocted um and now i think people post kind of me too don't you think people look at that clinton and lewinsky and think that was actually pretty shabby i don't know i i mean i think it's hard to take the the republicans of that period seriously you're right kind of woke gender warriors yeah yes that's very true especially as most of them ended up you know being brought down by the by the business as well um exactly yes i mean i think but i mean but one thing that's i do think is is a you could argue a dangerous legacy of watergate is the tendency to kind of criminalize presidential politics so you know america has had a lot of impeachments now compared with the previous hundred years or so

um well dominic do you remember that the the very first episode we recorded that in the end didn't go out because we weren't very good yeah where we just lectured each other nothing's changed well we we but we did a comparison between ancient rome and modern america we recorded it and we did one of the things that happens in ancient rome is is that um the law becomes a weapon yeah in kind of political rivalries and the chance to prosecute and drag down a rival kind of contributes to the turbulence of the late Roman Republic. And would you see the same thing happening?

Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly, actually. And it's interesting because once you get to the Trump impeachment, that, unlike the Nixon impeachment that unlike the nixon impeachment which obviously didn't reach its culmination the trump impeachment certainly the first one was absolutely perceived in terms of party politics wasn't it i mean nobody it divided on partisan lines except for mitt romney i think and nobody there was no sort of sense of the rule of law being a standard above petty partisan politics which i think there was no sort of sense of the rule of law being a standard above petty partisan politics which i think there was in 1974 it i mean it was basically you know we've got to stand up to russia

or we've got to stand up to china yeah and so that was it was also a kind of policy divide wasn't it well i suppose um but it was also just purely seen as a referendum on what do you support trump or do you not support him okay so stephanie edson of the show, but is being a little bit greedy here. I'm not going to deny because this is his second question. Yeah, in two episodes, though. I mean, yes. Yeah, well, all right. But it's a good question. So we'll forgive him. Would Trump have been impeached if he did the exact same thing today? To what extent have cross-partisan norms and trust been eroded to the point that there is always no limit to what a party will accept from their president that is or i suppose conversely

to what what an opposition will do to bring down a president that's a really that's a really excellent and actually slightly um disturbing question because i think stefan's implication is probably right that uh trump certainly would have said everybody does it you know fake news the media how many republicans would have fallen into line behind him well i think you just look at the react you know he he got a what he he was not him he was not convicted in the second impeachment after the storming of the capital i mean if you won't you won't convict him for that you'll never convict him yeah so i mean that's your answer i think isn't it that that's i think um any president i'm sure it probably works the other way around as well by the way i and when you once you have a hyper partisan political environment then it becomes impossible to

appeal to some sort of sense of the rule of law that transcends politics. Loser's consent has basically gone in America, hasn't it? I mean, would that be too much of an exaggeration? No, I think... Not entirely, obviously. And I think Clinton is where you saw that. There were lots of Republicans who viewed Clinton as an illegitimate president. Even though he'd won the 1992 election fair and square. He was re-elected in 1996.

But there were lots of people who just thought we have to get him fair means or foul yeah um and okay so this is yeah yeah so there's there's an absolute train of a within american politics that you can see but there's also and this is again a great question from bartman 1981 to what extent have the many films on nixon and Watergate influenced and perhaps misinformed the public perception on the subject? And I would like to expand that to say, to what extent has the idea of paranoia, of conspiracy, of covers up, that has become a massive part of popular American culture, to what extent do you think that has corroded the norms of American democracy?

Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Tom. I think it has corroded it, undoubtedly. The idea of the corrupt establishment, sinister forces, all that stuff. I mean, actually, that's already there before Watergate happens. It's kind of in the air. There's a whole load of films from the early 70s.

There's obviously All the President's Men. There's a film called The Conversation. I think that's 1972. That's about taping. Gene Hackman. There's a film called, a brilliant film called The Parallax View about assassinations. Again, 1974. And there is this sort of sense

of American cinema in the early 70s being very paranoid and all about conspiracies and stuff yes of course I think it probably is damaging it reflects a general loss of faith in authority that had a lot to do with Vietnam but obviously as we now know because we have it in Britain

everywhere in the western world has it goes beyond that don't you think it's damaging? I mean you and I can joke about it in a sort of flippant way and say, oh, we love conspiracy theory films. But they do matter. I mean, they do affect the way people think about politics. Well, I was kind of thinking that the backdrop to the Clinton impeachment was X-Files. Yeah.

Which ostensibly was about aliens, but actually was about kind of cover-ups and that you can't trust the government and that um nothing is true um and that actually that did kind of provide you know its popularity was obviously buying into a sense that you can't trust anybody yeah in government yeah and that's always been there in america to some extent because america is obviously founded on a distrust of government i.e of george iii and the anti-government spirit um i mean what the historian richard hofstadter famously called the paranoid style in american politics the sense that you had in there that's always been there initially it was catholics out to get them and and then it was communist but is that does that answer the question then of why Watergate has has had this kind of massive impact is that actually it kind of goes with the grain of what

quite a lot of people in the United States kind of suspected about the doings of government yes I suppose so and I suppose one thing that's interesting about the American reaction to is had it happened in France you know there'd have be an awful lot of shrugging and people sort of saying yeah oh well that's what politicians do you know kind of yeah um uh i mean french politics is incredibly corrupt right i mean sarkozy shirak mitterrand you know list as long as your arm um but there is also that kind of you know what the quaker and richard nixon would have recognized that that kind of sense of we're a clean living sober protestant godly people and we should be we're a shining city on a hill which i mean lots of people

said this during watergate we should be the example to the world we're america we don't do this you know this isn't America. Yeah. Yes. As everybody said, as everybody said after the Capitol insurrection, didn't they? This is not America. Like, well, it kind of is. Kind of is now.

Yes. Okay. Well, coming to the close, but let's just turn it back to Nixon himself. Yeah. So this is a kind of question that's been shadowing the entire both both episodes really which is how do you think he would be judged had Watergate not tripped him up would he be remembered as as as an impressive president I think he would actually and do you think that um that Watergate has has kind of tarnished the memory of the achievements that he he could clock up um because he's seen as a kind of evil person. I mean, Tricky Dicky,

the Huntress Thompson that we began episode one with, he is a kind of moral turd floating in the sewer. Right. That's very harsh. Very, very strong. I think that's very, yes. I think people, but there's also a comic sense to Nixon, isn't there?

I mean, people have Nixon on T-shirts or they have kind of, the very image of Nixon with his kind of jowly face. Bowling or something is seen as as amusing and kind of retro. I wish it's funny on The Simpsons. Yeah, exactly. He was on. He was often on a show called Futurama kind of Simpsons type show.

Yeah, I think Nixon was a fascinating and creative president governing in troubled times who was actually much more liberal often than he's given credit for and in terms of foreign policy you know had tremendous achievements detente and so on going to moscow so the comparison of him to trump oh it's ridiculous the other thing about nixon so i said that we talked in the first episode how i taught this course when I was an academic at Sheffield. It ran all year and we met for four hours a week and we went through Nixon's whole career in Watergate. We did it in enormous detail. So this is kind of typical Marxist academics. Right.

Undermining decent right thinking ways of understanding. And I have to say the students ended it incredibly sympathetic to Nixon. And it wasn't just my brainwashing. It's one of them who actually went on to become a... He is a tragic hero. Yeah, one of them who went on to become a historian himself, and I think he's at Nottingham, said to me... I can remember him saying in the seminar, he said,

the thing about Nixon is, as a man, when you look at Nixon, you kind of look you see yourself all his anxieties are the anxieties of kind of masculinity that you're kind of you know there are people having more fun than you that the girls aren't looking at you that the part of sweat gathering under you exactly you you have you've got to put your children's on you've got the wrong shoes you know you you don't really know how to behave. You don't know what difference between Burgundy and Bordeaux. You've worked so hard to get here.

You know, you've worked harder than anybody else. And yet they will always look down on you and sneer at you. Trying to cover up that parking ticket. Spiral that control. But yeah, exactly. The knowledge at the back of your mind, the nagging fear, that terrible thing you did, which seemed the knowledge at the back of your mind the nagging fear that terrible thing you did which seems so small at the time is going to bring you down i think there's something

so so sort of empathetic in in nixon and if you can't see yourself in nixon there's something wrong with you that's okay well i think that's an amazing note on which to end. Are you like Nixon? If you're not, there's something wrong with you. Top, top, top, top historian of the modern United States, Dominic Sandbrook, has spoken. And on that note, we will bid you farewell. Farewell. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.