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| Jason Moscovitz |
By Jason Moscovitz
As the Trump impeachment “breaking news” drama in the U.S. continues to
feed on itself, I am more interested in the big picture than the details. The
big picture inevitably brings me to comparisons with the Watergate scandal that
crushed president Richard Nixon.
The historic Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973 coincided with my
graduating from journalism at Carleton University. My major was political
science. Watergate became my passion and I absorbed everything. I had the time
to go full throttle.
After graduation, I worked part-time doing media research. I worked on
my own schedule, so I had lots of free time to follow Watergate all summer. I
watched every second and then the replays at night.
The spectacle of watching the unthinkable every day for weeks was a
measure of how the Watergate hearings had to be one of the best live dramas in
the history of television. That and the mourning weekend for president John
Kennedy would be the classics.
Not to diminish anything on the Kennedy side, Watergate ran on high over
a long shelf life. It never got boring. It just got better. What made it so
interesting was that back then, many Americans didn’t think a president could
do such rotten things.
Today, people take it for granted that President Donald Trump is no
angel, but Nixon had a checkered past as well. He was called Tricky Dicky long
before Watergate. Point being, back then, the president of the United States,
by virtue of the office, was usually, at least initially, given the benefit of
the doubt.
In Nixon’s time, there was no all-news television or social media. The
president was allowed to breathe and some things really were kept top secret.
It was a cloistered public existence compared to today’s madness.
But for all the differences, there are similarities – one of them
glaring. The root of both presidents’ trouble was actions they undertook to get
dirt on political opponents, past and present. Nixon was bloodthirsty for dirt
on the Kennedys.
Nixon would have survived Watergate except for those countless tape
recordings in which he clearly incriminated himself. Once the Supreme Court
decision forced their release, Nixon’s Republicans in the U.S. Senate jumped
ship and his presidency was dead.
You would have to wonder if the call with the Ukrainian president was
taped or preserved when Trump was seeking dirt on Joe Biden. Somehow, you would
think not. One would assume Nixon was the last of the U.S. presidents who taped
themselves for posterity, but in that nut house environment, who knows. What we
do know is that there are hotly contested differences over the veracity of the
transcript.
Officials on the call with Trump have given sworn testimony that the
White House version is missing some key parts that would put Trump in an even
worse light. Missing parts?
It reminds me of a pivotal Nixon tape with an 18-minute gap. Nixon said
Rosemary Woods, his executive assistant mistakenly erased the 18 minutes while
transcribing. There was so much bad stuff without the gap one could only assume
the 18 missing minutes was a smoking machine gun.
There was something else about Nixon. The Watergate break-in was not
Nixon’s only faux pas. His long list of misdeeds included another break in at a
psychiatrist’s office to get dirt on another political enemy. And how about his
threat to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after enemy journalists?
Trump’s long list of misdeeds stem from a Nixon-like mind that sees
enemies everywhere while Trump surpasses Nixon when it comes to adultery and
illegal payoffs to keep women quiet.
Watergate had “Deep Throat,” Mark Felt, the second-in-command at the FBI
who was passed over by Nixon when he named a new director. On one of the tapes,
Nixon referred to Felt as “that Jew from the FBI,” even though Felt was not
Jewish.
Trump’s Ukrainian extortion attempt burst open when a whistleblower came
forward because, as in the Nixon era, it ultimately came down to a president’s
abuse of power.
Nixon resigned before he was impeached. Trump won’t have to because in
today’s world of five scandals a day, his bad behaviour is the swamp that is
the Trump presidency.
Unlike Watergate, there is not enough shock and zero shame.
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