The Nixon resignation in 1974 was not only a watershed historical event, but it was a low water mark for the Republican/conservative movement in the United States. But the Republican Party and the Right learned crucial lessons from the debacle.
Within a few years, they began building up their own media infrastructure, they invested in think tanks that would assure more loyalty in Washington, and they financed attack groups to go after adversaries, including troublesome reporters.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and the Left grew complacent, assuming that the painful lessons of Watergate and the various reforms enacted in the 1970s would protect the country from similar crimes of states in the future. The belief was that Washington's checks and balances would continue working as they had to stop Nixon.
But the Democrats and the Left underestimated the toughness and determination of the Republicans and the Right. By the 1980s, the protections were in place to prevent any meaningful accountability against Ronald Reagan over the Iran-Contra Affair and related scandals, such as Reagan's covert "Iraq-gate" support for Saddam Hussein and cocaine trafficking by Reagan's beloved Nicaraguan contra rebels.
In those later scandals, the pattern of accommodating Democrats seeking to tamp down discord and avoid head-to-head confrontations also recurred.
Looking back at the Watergate scandal from the perspective of the early 1990s, Spencer Oliver noted the ironic turning of tables in the two decades after the burglars first snuck into the Democratic offices and planted the bug on his phone.
"Watergate was the most devastating blow that any political party has suffered in modern history," Oliver told me in an interview in 1992 when he was serving as chief counsel for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The President was driven out of office. The Republicans were repudiated at the polls. They took enormous losses in Congress.
"What they learned from Watergate was not 'don't do it,' but 'cover it up more effectively.' They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal."
It was that lesson -- how top Republicans could make themselves unaccountable, often with the help of key Democrats -- which may have been the most important historical change that emerged from Watergate.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
