Thirst for power links Watergate, Jan. 6 riots
Two incidents also highlight differences in congressional investigations over time
The wreckage of Watergate and Jan. 6 are a half-century apart yet rooted in the same ancient thirst for power at any cost.
Two presidents, wily and profane, tried an end run around democracy.
Mysteries from both affairs endure as the continuing House probe into the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the Capitol intersects with this week’s Watergate 50th anniversary.
Is there a smoking gun to be found in Donald Trump’s deceptions? Or have we already seen it in his summoning of angry supporters to a “wild” time in Washington, his call for them to “fight like hell,” his musing that perhaps his vice president — one of the few “no” men in his compliant cabal — should be hanged like the insurrectionists demanded?
From the Watergate era, a key question may be why Richard Nixon ever bothered to go rogue. He was on a seemingly comfortable path to reelection when bumbling burglars tied to his campaign committee broke into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building 50 years ago Friday and got caught.
The exposure of his cover-up and efforts to obstruct justice drove him from office nearly two years later when he quit rather than face likely conviction in an impeachment trial. Three Republican leaders from Congress helped to convince him he was doomed.
In contrast, Trump was desperate, having clearly lost the 2020 election when he sent his own bumblers — lawyers, aides, hangers-on — as well as the violent mob at the Capitol
on a quest to upend the
results and keep him in office. Few in his party publicly urged him to accept defeat.
Watergate is the American presidential scandal by which all others are measured. It brought down a president. Yet Jan. 6 was the one that spilled blood.
Watergate had a powerful afterburn, as Republicans were tossed out of Congress by the dozens in 1974. This time, the party is expected to make gains in November.
When the Senate Watergate committee conducted its landmark hearings starting in May 1973, the public had plenty of distractions, high inflation and a stock market crash
among them. But Americans were riveted by the spectacle of a president sinking slowly but inexorably into disgrace.
The Jan. 6 hearings, to date, are less about investigators discovering new facts than about showing and telling what they’ve already found out in months of methodical work.
To author Michael Dobbs, evidence of
Trump’s direct involvement in planning or inciting the Jan. 6 riot with the intention of overturning the election would constitute a Nixonian smoking gun. The challenge for the Jan. 6 inquiry and any prosecution is “the ambiguous nature of Trump’s statements from a legal point of view,” he said. “‘Fight like hell’ can be interpreted in different ways.”
The Watergate committee of four Democrats and three Republicans was formed by a unanimous vote in the Senate. The House Jan. 6 committee, in contrast, was formed on a 222-190 vote. Only two Republicans voted for it.