International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics - 50 Years of Nixon’s Fall After Watergate, Sept 2024

The Watergate scandal has been grandiloquently called ‘the most daring and exciting story in the history of American journalism’. The popular narrative about the scandal is that the press – notably two young and tireless reporters for The Washington Post – exposed the wrongdoing that brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. That interpretation has maintained impressive appeal among journalists in the more than 50 years since Nixon’s resignation. It is nonetheless an interpretation steeped in mythology, one that reinforces a simplistic and misleading notion of news media power in democratic politics. As this article discusses, the evidence is strikingly thin to support the interpretation that Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein decisively exposed Nixon’s misconduct. Their reporting included some notable breakthroughs but was far from an unbroken series of bombshell revelations. A little more than four months after the seminal crime of Watergate – the burglary at Democratic National headquarters in Washington, DC, months before the 1972 presidential election – Woodward and Bernstein had run ‘out of gas’ on Watergate, according to their editor, Barry Sussman. It likewise is important to note that Woodward and Bernstein missed crucial developments as the scandal unfolded, including revelations about Nixon’s secret White House audiotapes, the contents of which were pivotal to Watergate’s outcome. This article addresses those and other elements of the Post’s reporting while tracing the emergence of the popular ‘heroic-journalist’ myth of Watergate to a lengthy, effusive article in the Columbia Journalism Review published more than a year before Nixon’s resignation. The article, which carried a headline likening Woodward and Bernstein to ‘Davids’ who ‘slew Goliath’, was the ur-text of what, more than fifty years on, has become an enduring popular celebration of the two journalists and the presumed impact of their reporting.

The Watergate scandal remains a tumultuous and troubling time in American presidential history. Leading to the first and to date, only presidential resignation from office, the events of this period exemplify the political and societal consequences of corruption and misuse of power. This article provides a renewed look into the lasting legacy of Watergate by examining letters addressed to President Richard Nixon by members of the public during the spring of 1973. Following Nixon’s landslide 1972 re-election, this period would prove memorable with the then White House Counsel John Dean characterizing the scandal’s ‘cancerous’ nature on the presidency. Within this exploratory analysis, we wish to develop a better understanding of (1) which members of the public wrote to Nixon, (2) the general public perceptions of Nixon’s role in the scandal, as well as (3) citizens’ thoughts on related political concepts, including the president’s invocation of executive privilege to withhold information from special prosecutors. The text corpus includes over 300 individual letters written to Richard Nixon. Each is coded by key political considerations, namely the writer’s support for Watergate-related events, as well as support for an independent investigation into the scandal itself. Other identifiers, including gender, partisan affiliation and geographic location, are also included in the data. We do find substantive and meaningful differences among letter writers. By scrutinizing Watergate-era presidential communication, we are able to more fully appreciate the dimensions of public sentiment, concerns and expectations during a critical juncture in political time.

Watergate marked a significant moment in the evolution of American politics. Its impact and legacy underscored the damage a political scandal could do, not only to individual political figures but also to the credibility of the political establishment as a whole. The stakes involved in the defence and prosecution of scandal politics were thereafter pronounced. This article focuses on the strategic battle to manage scandal revelations following their public disclosure. It addresses scandals in two genres, those concerning the abuse of political power and those based on questions of moral standing, normally involving acts of infidelity by political figures. Damage limitation strategies have changed since Watergate. In Iran–Contra the strategy of plausible deniability ensured that it was more challenging to link Reagan to specific aspects of policy management. In the contemporary period it has proven ever more difficult for those involved in scandal to control the media narrative, given the presence of indelible digital evidence and the largely unregulated online discussion of political action. Damage limitation has proven to be ever more difficult to enact. This article addresses the challenges now faced by those charged with wrongdoing and the changes that this has brought in the context of the control of evolving scandal narratives.

This article offers a discourse analysis of the themes the Polish Communist propaganda press developed around the Watergate scandal and the figure of US President Richard Nixon. When, in 1976, political scientist Leon Hurwitz examined the reports on the Watergate affair by Communist newspapers in western democratic countries and Soviet newspapers, he noticed they differed both in the level of interest in the scandal and in the evaluation of Nixon’s status. The critical reading of the Watergate-related articles in three Polish periodicals – Przekrój, Polityka and Trybuna Ludu – between 1972 and 1974 confirms Hurwitz’s findings: the policy of détente resulted in the Watergate scandal being interpreted as a ‘domestic’ affair of the United States, failing to generate much interest in the Polish media. Nixon’s impeachment and resignation were treated with the greatest caution and discretion to make sure these events would not disturb the prevailing good bilateral relations between the United States and the USSR. In other words, Communist propaganda shaped and framed the discourse of the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, adapting it to the concurrent political interests of the Kremlin.

Every major scandal is compared to Watergate by the media. All presidents face scandals big and small, but for 50 years, Watergate has been the scandal to which all scandals before and after are measured. After five decades, how does the Watergate scandal rank relative to other major presidential scandals stretching back to the late 1800s? Using an expert survey of scholars of the presidency, we probe where Watergate ranks in the pantheon of presidential scandals. The findings suggest Watergate still ranks above and beyond all the others as the most consequential scandal in presidential history, followed by Iran–Contra and the Trump–Ukraine scandal. Personal scandals, such as the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, Andrew Jackson’s marriage to his wife while she was married to another man and Donald Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels, are less important relative to Watergate than other scandals involving public funds and political corruption. The results illustrate why Watergate is still the most important – and standard-defining – scandal in American political history.