The Real Watergate Scandal

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This book has two goals. One goal is to take a step in toward the rehabilitation of the reputation of President Richard Nixon. The second is to document the political corruption on the part of Nixon's enemies in taking him down.

Geoff Shepard advances the first goal by reminding us of the signal achievements in domestic and foreign policy made by President Nixon and his administration. Certainly, compared to the feckless administration of the presidency after 1992 - approximately the end of the Cold War when it seems that the nation has become silly and immature - Nixon and his administration come across like adults compared to the children who have been in charge for the last decade.

Concerning the second goal, Mr. Shepard extensively documents the shocking ex parte contacts between the prosecutors and the judiciary in the pursuit of the cover-up. Judge Sirica's unjudicial stacking of the deck, including pretending to sentence John Dean to four years imprisonment, while secretly planning to sentence him to time served, as part of which he never spent a night in jail, constitute a political corruption that far exceeded anything that Nixon did.

The mindset of the anti-Nixon forces that Mr. Shepard describes is corroborated in [[ASIN:1425717918 Hillary's Pursuit of Power]] by Jerry Zeifman, who was Hillary Clinton's former supervisor on the Watergate Impeachment Commission. As I observed in my review of Mr. Zeifman's book:

“Zeifman was in charge of the impeachment committee during Watergate. He was nominally Hillary's supervisor, but she was quickly walled off into a thoroughly partisan group committed to denying Nixon basic civil rights and due process. For example, it was her brainchild to attempt to deny Nixon any legal counsel in the proceeding despite precedent to the contrary. This and other partisan innovations were shot down by the Democrats (and Republicans supported the impeachment committee vote.) Things were done differently then, more democratically, with more of an eye to the past and the possibility that one might be out of power some day, things that the heirs of the Fire-eating New Left Democrats, who were willing to play the nuclear option and make judicial nominations subject to a simple minority, lost sight of.”

And we have seen how that decision to change the filibuster for judicial nominees has played out, when, in 2017, the Republicans returned the favor by eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations with respect to the Gorsuch nomination.

The point, though, is that there was something fundamentally cancerous about the partisan behavior in response to the Watergate break-in, followed by a decade's-long wallow in promoting the myth of their virtuous salvation of the Republic from a threat that never existed. It was perhaps the first time that we saw the press enlist as virtually an arm of the Democrat party, a role to which it has become accustomed. The hypocritical partisanship of Watergate stands out in relief now after we have seen the media and Democrats defend a president who committed perjury, on the grounds that lying about sex is hunky-dory, and a presidential contender who put national security secrets on an unsecured server because, “Hey! No big deal.”

In light of the serious scandals of the Obama administration, which the press never showed an interest in pursuing, which have resulted in the deaths of Americans and the persecution of the president's opposition, things which Nixon never dreamt of achieving, the political crimes of President Nixon seem mundane.

I came to political maturity in the immediate aftermath of Watergate. I, therefore, absorbed the media's portrait of Nixon and his aides without critical thought, since no one was providing an alternative. Mr. Shepard, however, is proud of his work in the Nixon administration and is the first person I recall who describes Haldeman and Ehrlichman as loyal and decent public servants, rather than as corrupt enforcers of crypto-fascism. Reading that was definitely a different experience for me, as I'm sure it would be for most Americans who have never heard any dissent to the media created and maintained myth.

This book is quite timely and worth a read.