THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
You might imagine that liberals would have been the big winners from Watergate. But the 1974 anti-Republican congressional landslide returned a large number of Democrats who were critical of big government in all its forms, including welfare. Anti-elite fever led to the nomination of Jimmy Carter in 1976, a born-again Christian and political moderate. Carter in turn found that Watergate, by empowering Congress and the media, had made it far harder to run the country. Washington looked impotent and out of touch.
Meanwhile, Watergate contributed to the radicalisation of the Republican Party. Anti-establishment conservatives were in the ascendancy, helping to nominate Ronald Reagan in 1980, and though they acknowledged Richard Nixon was guilty, they believed he was also the victim of media bias.
The American right toyed with alternative media, an experiment that culminated in the launch of Fox News in 1996. Its founder, Roger Ailes, had played a part in Nixon’s 1968 election victory and was linked to Donald Trump in 2016. Trump and Nixon occasionally wrote to each other, and Nixon’s wife even predicted the businessman would someday win office.
Nixon’s reputation slowly revived among grassroots conservatives – many of whom, convinced they were up against a vast liberal conspiracy, approved of his transformation of the White House into an aggressive bulwark against courts and Congress.
And Trump, who was impeached not just once but twice, was compared far more to Nixon than to Reagan. His own culture war, hot on race and crime, was straight out of the “Tricky Dick” playbook. ■
The Watergate panel discussion at 6pm on 14 June is a British-American Parliamentary Group, London POTUS Group and Archives & History PPG collaboration taking place in the Speaker’s State Rooms. For more information contact mitchellhk@parliament.uk