As the nation marked the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the U.S. on Aug. 9, a fully packed auditorium at the Central Library gathered on Aug. 12 to see Elizabeth Drew, a journalist who covered the months leading up to Nixon’s resignation for The New Yorker, and to hear about the recent edition of her book on the Watergate scandal, “Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall.”
Reflecting on that period, Drew described the Watergate years as “fun, hilarious, [and] frightening.” People “were scared,” she said, “we didn’t know what was going to happen — what this strange man [Richard Nixon] in the White House was going to do next. He had done so many unpredictable things … We would joke, ‘Well, one of these conversations is being tapped.’ It was possible that it was.”
The story of Watergate began on June 17,1972 when a group of burglars, known as the “plumbers,” were caught breaking in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. Many of the “plumbers” were Cubans who were angry at President John F. Kennedy and the Democrats for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Drew discovered through research for her book that when they were caught it was fourth attempt to break-in.
DREW’S COVERAGE OF WATERGATE began in early-September 1973, when her editor at The New Yorker, William Shawn, asked her what she planned to write about next. She responded, “You know, I just have a sense that we’re going to change vice presidents” referring to then-Vice President Spiro Agnew being charged with accepting bribes from contractors in Maryland, and “I also think we’re going to change presidents.” She said that the idea of the vice president and president leaving office was a “far-out thought at the time.” Drew and her editor agreed that she would write about the events that unfolded in a journal format by attending press conferences and conducting interviews.
Not too long after Drew started covering Watergate, the “wildest night” of the scandal, in her words, was about to take place, which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. It started in the summer of 1973, when Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed Archibald Cox as a special investigator to investigate the Watergate break-in. Cox had subpoenaed Nixon to turn over tapes of recorded conversations at the White House. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes. On the evening of Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Instead of complying with Nixon’s demands, Richardson resigned. Nixon then asked Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, but, like Richardson, he refused and resigned as well. Eventually, Solicitor General Robert Bork, as acting attorney general, ended up firing Cox.
Drew said at that moment, the country was in a “constitutional crisis” and was wondering if the president considered himself above the law.
In her book, “Washington Journal,” she described the mood of that night: “The news is coming too fast. Faster and harder than anyone expected. It is almost impossible to absorb. Summary firings are not our style … Too much disarrangement at once. The speed of the events has become part of their substance. One journalist says it’s like being in a banana republic.” With regards to Nixon, she wondered, “Is there to be any check on him — or any President — ever again? Do we have a system of laws?”
Drew commented on how the dismissal of Cox was such a mystifying event for people to understand with the constant reports coming in. She was glad that 24-hour news channels or social media did not exist back then because she felt that people would have been inundated with too much information. According to her, the news cycle was “very peaceful compared to now” since people only received information from nightly news broadcasts, the radio, morning and evening newspapers, and the phone.
“Thank heavens there was no cable” or “Twitter then. We’d have gone mad because any rumor would have been out there and you couldn’t think. The competition to scoop would have been ferocious and, frankly, quite careless,” said Drew.
NO ONE HAD SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED impeaching President Richard Nixon from office until the Saturday Night Massacre. Drew noted how the country felt it was such a powerful act to remove the president. The only U.S. president that had been previously impeached was President Andrew Johnson in 1868, who was subsequently acquitted.
Nixon remained defiant in the face of the investigations into Watergate.
“I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice,” said Nixon at a press conference on Nov. 17, 1973. The president said he welcomed “this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
Drew argued that the issue of whether or not Nixon knew about Watergate is irrelevant because “it happened under his aegis. His aides were carrying out what they thought he wanted done. I find in the tapes no reference whatsoever [of him saying] ‘what a terrible, stupid thing to do. What were they doing there?’”
Several months later, the tide was turning against Nixon. On July 28, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted, with bipartisan support, to impeach the president. The articles of impeachment against Nixon included abuse of power and obstruction of justice. However, Nixon was never formally impeached since he resigned on Aug. 9.
In September 1974, President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon following his resignation, pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed in relation to Watergate and throughout his presidency. It was a move that was highly controversial at the time. When asked about her opinion of the pardon, Drew agreed with what Ford did.
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” she said. She felt that Nixon “had been seriously punished. I mean, how much more worse can it be when you’re thrown out of the presidency, which you strived for decades and decades.” For Ford, the lingering controversy over Watergate “would have been an enormous distraction” and he needed to focus on governing the country.
Attendees of the library event felt that many Americans, especially those born after Watergate don’t fully understand the importance of Watergate. Despite that, in the words of Arlington resident Ainsley Stapleton who was born after that period, it is “the scandal against which you measure against all scandals.” Stapleton, who works with people who are in their 20s, said that “most of them don’t have the foggiest idea [about] Watergate — it’s something they heard in history class.”
Daniel Bonds, a George Mason University student from Clifton, referred to a recent CNN/ORC poll showing that 46 percent of Americans believe that Watergate was “just politics” as opposed to 51 percent who believe that it was a “serious matter.” Also, 52 percent of Americans under the age of 35 say the scandal was “just politics.”
“I think that that shows that we just really don’t have the attentiveness to our recent history,” said Bonds. He mentioned how “the word ‘-gate’ is appended to all of our scandals now, and if you don’t really have an understanding of what Watergate was you don’t have a good perspective on the gravity of whatever situation you’re currently encountering.”