The Positive Side Of Watergate

In June of 1972 a burglary by five men occurred at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The following two images are from Google Earth.

The campaign was under way for the 1972 presidential election. The incumbent president, Republican Richard Nixon, was seeking reelection against Democrat challenger George McGovern. The five burglars were working for the Republicans and their target was Democrat headquarters, seeking information.

The burglary took place after the office complex was closed for the day. The doors of the building to the outside had latches so that the doors could be opened from the inside, for someone leaving the building, but not from the outside. The building's security guard noticed that someone had put tape over a latch, making it possible to enter from outside. The guard removed the tape but when he passed by the door again the tape had been replaced. The guard called the police, who caught the five burglars. 

At first the burglary was considered as a minor incident. It was two reporters from the Washington Post who kept digging and turned it into one of the great events of American history. The trail led all the way to the presidency. 

Whether or not Nixon ordered the burglary, he definitely tried to cover it up and hindered the investigation of it. The crisis went on for two years, dominating the news with resignations of government officials, arrests and, televised hearings. It finally concluded with Richard Nixon addressing the nation to announce his resignation. Nothing like this had ever happened in American history.

It wasn't entirely unprecedented as Nixon's predecessor as president, Lyndon Johnson, had similarly shocked the country by making a televised speech in 1968 that he would not be running for reelection. Johnson had been plagued by protests against the Vietnam War in a way similar to Nixon being plagued by the Watergate investigation. Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had also resigned over tax evasion the year before Nixon's own resignation, although this had nothing to do with Watergate.

The whole thing was absolutely ridiculous. Nixon won the 1972 election in a landslide, without any help from the Watergate burglary. The only one of the 50 states that McGovern won was the Democrat bastion of Massachusetts. It was like a sports team being ahead 49-1 in a game, cheating just to make certain that they win, and then getting disqualified for cheating. It just didn't make sense.

America moved past Watergate relatively quickly but what I want to discuss here is the positive effect that it might have had on the outside world in favor of democracy. Watergate was actually good for democracy. It showed that no one is above the law, and the same law is written down for everyone. If the average citizen does something wrong then he or she is in trouble, and if the president does something wrong then the president is in trouble.

We have seen how it was the French Revolution that set the modern political era in motion, the overthrowing and execution of a king and queen in favor of a republic or military ruler. There was certainly an element of reenactment of the French Revolution in the protests of the 1960s, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. There is always some "storming" that is a reenactment of the Storming of the Bastille and this shows up as the attempt to levitate the Pentagon and the occupation of campus buildings by protesting college students. But what Watergate added to it was a leader being forced out of office and making a resignation speech, instead of being guillotined.

Watergate was likely part of the motivation of the final stage of the Vietnam War, in 1975. A truce had been agreed to two years before. But the Communists saw America distracted by Watergate and gambled that it wouldn't get re-involved in the war if they broke the truce and invaded South Vietnam. The invasion was successful and the resignation speech of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu very much resembled that of Nixon the year before.

In 1979 the Shah of Iran, who had been a friend of Nixon, made a similar farewell speech, although he did not abdicate and left his prime minister in charge.

Nixon realized that he couldn't go on and resigned before he could be impeached, in favor of his vice president, but not before trying his best to hold on. In the following decade the "old guard" of Communists in the Soviet Union went through the same process, finally letting the new generation in the person of Mikhail Gorbachev take over following the death of Konstantin Chernenko. Nearly seven years later, Gorbachev himself would make a resignation speech that was very similar to Nixon's.

What about the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, bringing the end of Communist rule? This was the bicentennial of the French Revolution and was certainly a reenactment of it. But most of the fallen Communist leaders made televised resignation speeches and then stepped down, as per Nixon, rather than being overthrown and executed like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. 

The sole exception was Romania, where the unsuccessful escape attempt and then execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were a modern reenactment of the French Revolution. It might have been because of the symbolism of Bucharest having a copy of the Arc De Triomphe.