JD Vance and the Latest Nixon Cover-Up

JD Vance is apparently in his Nixon-maxxing moment. The vice president is on what has to be one of the world’s worst book tours right now, promoting his new faith memoir Communion through a series of appearances that have only made headlines for his utter lack of charisma, timing, or sense of humor. (“Good to see you,” he told his … wife … while appearing on her podcast.)

Yesterday, the tour brought him to Yorba Linda, where he spoke Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and said: “I think Nixon’s historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a twelve-hour news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy.”

It’s a fascinating comment for more reasons than might appear initially, and as someone who, as many of you know, wrote a book about the full scope and sweep of Watergate — (It’s a good one too! Don’t take my word for it — the Pulitzer Prize committee called it “a comprehensive analysis of the country’s best-known political crime, a finely-crafted synthesis of multiple sources into a comprehensive account that is engaging, humanizing and funny”!) — I wanted to take some time today to explain why he’s fascinatingly on-trend, so wrong, and also right at the same time.

It’s also a very funny comment to make in the week where this administration’s own lower-case w “water-gate” is playing out, as Donald Trump is being driven insane by the algae blooms in the Lincoln Memorial reflection pool and the government is erecting fencing around the pool and launching a nationwide manhunt for the “vandals” who sabotaged it. It’s a literal “water-gate”! 

Anyway — onto the historical analysis:

Why Vance is on-trend on Nixon:

As ChatGPT might say in its wooden rhetorical way, JD Vance’s reflection on Nixon and Watergate didn’t come from nowhere. In fact, I spoke with an LA reporter a couple weeks ago about how the Nixon Foundation is in the midst of creating a social media renaissance for the 37th president. The Foundation — which is privately funded and technically separate from the taxpayer-supported presidential library run by the National Archives — has embraced a very Gen Z-forward social media strategy, doubling its Instagram followers with what reporter Tomo Chien called “a steady churn of viral content — sleek, sexy edits of archival footage set to trending music — that looks more like promo material for a hip-hop artist than a disgraced, long-dead president.” The Foundation even sold out of a limited-run “Nixon maxxing” hat:

Along the way, the Foundation has been promoting a series of clips and speaker appearances at the Nixon Library that embrace 1980s and 1990s conspiracy theories that Watergate was a “set up” by what we would now call the “Deep State.” (Many of these “distinguished” speakers are basically exactly who you’d imagine them to be: Like Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist whose jihad against Critical Race Theory and gender issues has upended all levels of American education in recent years, and who in one clip shared by the Foundation said, “If you look at the history of Watergate, you see that it was a set up from start to finish… In time, I think we’re going to see Nixon vindicated and the history around Nixon will be changed.” It’s basically the JD Vance line!)

Throughout the clips — and an increasingly concerted effort by the Foundation and Nixon backers — you see an attempt to launder Nixon’s reputation and culpability for Watergate for a new generation who never knew him.

A big part of this false, revisionist theory is that Watergate is basically what the Hollywood version of “All the President’s Men” makes it out to be: There was a cover-up of a minor burglary that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein personally uncovered, that, in turn, was weaponized by the Deep State to force Nixon from office. No part of the preceding sentence is true. (The Woodward-and-Bernstein mythology is particularly fascinating to untangle: They mattered, but not in the way we think they did.)

JD Vance’s comment was in keeping with this new spirit and entirely on-brand and on-message.

But it’s also a shockingly a-historical and immature understanding of what Watergate was and wasn’t. If you don’t know the story — or think you do because you watched “All the President’s Men” — buckle up:

Why Vance is wrong about Watergate:

Vance — and many of the Foundation speakers highlighted on social media — appear to be either (a) ignorant, (b) willfully misleading, or (c) both in their facile and reductive understanding of what Watergate really was, hand-waving it away as just the simple burglary and bugging operation at the DNC offices on June 17, 1972.

What I tried to do more than anything in my book is reframe Watergate from an “event” into a “mindset.” Instead, the Watergate burglary was really the loose thread that, once pulled, began the unraveling of ultimately a dozen or more other separate, specific, and distinct-but-related scandals with overlapping players, some of which we didn’t fully understand until the 2010s (and some of which weren’t placed in context until my book in 2022). As I list them in the book, the distinct scandals included: The Chennault Affair, the Huston plan, the Kissinger wiretaps and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, milk-price fixing, campaign “rat-fucking,” Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud. You could even add in some others — like illegal campaign donations from the CIA-funded Greek military junta in ’68.

The “story of Watergate” isn’t about a burglary — it’s about the paranoid and conspiratorial mindset that Richard Nixon brought to the White House and that, in turn, slowly poisoned his presidency as it permeated his whole administration. The challenge was that by the summer of 1972 that there were so many separate crimes and conspiracies underway inside the Nixon White House that no one could safely disentangle the Watergate break-in and bungling burglars — which was ironic, of course, because there really is no evidence to believe that Nixon knew about that particular crime in advance.

But to think that the Watergate break-in was some odd, discreet, and minor scandal is to ignore its origins as we now understand them: Nixon couldn’t cut the burglars loose in 1972 because they’d been part of the 1971 planning for a burglary that Nixon is actually on the White House tapes personally ordering — the 1971 firebombing of the Brookings Institution! — which, in turn, Nixon wanted in hopes of covering-up his 1968 participation in the still opaque Chennault Affair, which represents one of the only instances of credible treason allegations in US history, as he and his campaign manager John Mitchell stalled and interfered with the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War to help his presidential campaign.

I became convinced in my research that the Watergate-era mantra “The cover-up is worse than the crime,” the belief that it was Nixon’s bungling efforts to cover-up this minor break-in that forced his impeachment and resignation, is actually completely wrong. The crimes were worse than the cover-up; Nixon’s crimes were the worst we’ve ever seen by a president until the present era. Sure, there are some legitimate questions and evidence that we don’t still understand the full motives and knowledge about the burglary itself, but the accumulated crimes of Nixon’s presidency by 1972 were shocking.

(Trust me — the full story is even more wild than this! If you haven’t read it and don’t know it, read the full book!)

Why Vance is right about Watergate:

But here’s where we get to the one true statement of JD Vance’s comment: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a twelve-hour news story.”

The question I get most often when speaking about Watergate is a version of “what would happen if Watergate happened today with Fox News?” And my answer is always very simple: Nixon would have survived. Not because he didn’t deserve to be forced from office, or because there was a Deep State campaign against him, but because today (a) the conservative noise machine would have defended Nixon and undermined the investigation and (b) because there are no longer any Republicans left who act for the country over the party.

This latter switch is one of my regular themes: Republicans in the House and Senate during Watergate, from 1972 to 1974, were good-faith participants in an investigation of the presidency, understanding that they had an important constitutional responsibility, as legislators and members of a coequal branch, to hold the executive branch to account for abuses of power.

That sense of constitutional responsibility and country-over-party is long-gone.

This truth — and the result — is self-evident.

There is no Donald Trump without the right-wing media machinery that protects him, amplifies his lies, and slanders those who attempt to investigate him or hold him accountable. And today the entire GOP congressional leadership has led us not into a “constitutional crisis” but a “constitutional crash,” where they simply refuse to uphold their basic constitutional responsibilities.

The result is, well, all of this.

I’ve documented multiple times in the last year where sometimes in single news-cycles we’ve seen scandals as big as Nixon’s Watergate speed-run by the corrupt administration of Donald Trump, Washington shrugs, the media obfuscates, and the whole country moves onward.

The information environment is so poisoned and the political environment so polarized and insulated that we’ve lost any effort at accountability.

Exactly “how” this happened is its own fascinating story: There were really two separate political efforts that came out of Watergate — Democrats launched a major effort to reform government and secure better transparency, accountability, and oversight of the executive branch and intelligence agencies; Republicans launched an all-out campaign — one that continues to this day through efforts like the Instagram campaigns of the Nixon Foundation — to ensure that no Republican president would ever be forced from office again. (Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer is at work on a new book, “Impunity,” about this very topic and I could not be more excited for it! Stay tuned!)

It turns out that, sadly, we are as a country indeed “Nixon-maxxing,” much to the detriment of our democracy.

GMG

PS: A final thought: One of the things that bothers me about the Nixon Foundation’s attempts to white-wash Watergate is that there is so much else to celebrate about Richard Nixon — he was truly one of the few presidential giants of the 20th century and you could spend plenty of time and effort highlighting all his actual accomplishments. You want to tell a Nixon story to Gen Z that would excite them? How about the fact that Richard Nixon actually tried to launch a “universal basic income” as president?!?!!

I took a stab at the positive case for Nixon in my book as follows:

“Richard Nixon was one of the most consequential political figures of the 20th Century. As a young congressman, he helped fuel the Red Scare and give life to McCarthyism, turning ‘Communist’ into a career-ending slur. Later, over the twenty years from 1952 to 1972, he was on the Republican Party’s national ticket five times; he shaped, escalated, prolonged, and eventually wound down the Vietnam War as it roiled the nation; he signed the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Occupation Safety and Health Act, transformed the Post Office into a quasi-private government enterprise, hiked Social Security payments, declared war on cancer, signed Title IX to give women opportunities in academia and on athletic playing fields, transformed the military by ending the draft and creating an all-volunteer force, and helped push forward civil rights. He tried to position his government at the forefront of equal opportunity, hiring a presidential staff assistant focused solely on bringing more qualified women into government who helped triple the number of women in policy-making roles and recruited 1,000 women into previously male middle-management roles; he brought the first-ever female military aides into the White House. He even, wrestled momentarily, with the idea of providing a conservative-style universal basic income to lift Americans from poverty. He averted a larger war in the Middle East amid the conflagration of the Yom Kippur War; he calmed the Cold War and signed arms control treaties with the Soviet Union; and he reopened diplomatic relations with China. He was the first president to visit a Communist country, the first to visit Peking, the first to stand in Moscow. Judged on paper and resume alone, Nixon would stand among the giants who occupied the White House through the American century, from Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt to LBJ and Ronald Reagan. ‘The Nixon presidency was an intense one—hardworking, determined, wide-ranging, organized, and creative,’ concluded his close advisor and one-time Cabinet secretary Maurice Stans. ‘I don’t believe any man could have been more determined to do the best possible job as president than Richard Nixon.’”

That’s a story that would be fun to tell — and you don’t have to get down in the gutter with conspiracists about Watergate as a Deep State plot to undermine Nixon.