Nixon

I think now and have thought for a long time that Richard Nixon was a bad president, one of the  worst.  He gave us  wage and price controls, the 55 mile per hour speed limit, the EPA, the beginning of affirmative action quotas along with his handling of the war in Vietnam,  relations with the Soviets, and an oil embargo and “energy crisis”.  (Of course he also did some good things such as ending conscription, and the mess in Vietnam was inherited from Johnson.)  However I had not thought much about the circumstances of  his being pushed out of office for many years until recently.

 At the time, even though I disliked Nixon, the official story that the  guardians of righteousness in the government and the traditional media did the job on Nixon in a noble and disinterested way to protect the nation from the dangers of abuse of power was hard to buy.  I knew the actions  he was accused of (and worse) were fairly commonplace in other administrations.  After all his immediate predecessor was Lyndon Johnson, and the director of the FBI until 1972 was J. Edgar Hoover. The notion of an epiphany on the dangers of abuse of power occurring in mass  just in time to be bad luck for Nixon did not seem likely.  I guessed  that since people in his own party deserted him, he must have gotten caught doing something really bad that the powers in both parties did not want revealed to the public. So they agreed  to remove him -  nominally  on the basis of other,  fairly insignificant things.   While that could have been dismissed as the overly imaginative conjecture of a naïve kid  who had read too many spy stories, it seemed at the time less improbable than the  idea that an American president  was being railroaded and removed in a cynical coup d’état.

Watching what has been going on lately with Trump and the politicians and bureaucrats has led me both to think about Watergate again and to reconsider my earlier guess.   It is no longer reasonable to claim  that a concerted effort by powerful, well connected people and members of the traditional media to smear and remove a president for no good reason is impossible in this country. We are seeing one now. Irrespective of what one thinks of Trump, there is evidence that people in the bureaucracy and traditional media and politicians in both parties have attempted  and are still attempting to work up a Watergate on him without much concern for fairness, context, seriousness, or accuracy.    If Nixon had been caught doing something really bad, a lot of people would have had to have known about it for him to be forced out of office.  Forty four years is a long time for a secret known to a lot of people in Washington not to come out.  The official version of Watergate remains improbable and, after observing the behavior of officials and people in the traditional media over several decades, risibly so.

So my best guess now is that Nixon was railroaded and removed in a cynical coup d’état . I still don’t care for him, but that is beside the point.