Admitting “errors of judgment,” regretting the “injuries” he had caused, and acknowledging that he no longer had the political support in Congress to serve as President of the United States “in the best interests of the nation,” on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced that he would resign the following day.
The statement, broadcast live on television, marks the culmination of the enormous Watergate scandal, which began 792 days earlier after the young journalist’s rude awakening Washington PostBob Woodward, with a simple phone call from his boss. It was a Saturday morning, June 17, 1972. A robbery had just been committed on the sixth floor of the Watergate Office Building in Washington, in the offices of the Democratic Party. The break-in had to be covered for the next day’s edition. The news item would quickly turn into a state affair.
Half a century later, the story of what would quickly be revealed as a failed attempt by the Nixon administration to spy on Democrats, followed by a series of manipulations, lies and cover-ups orchestrated by the president and his entourage, still haunts the country. Partly for what it brought to light: the abuses of power by the American executive branch. And partly for the lessons that, 50 years later, have never been learned.
“Americans in general and political leaders in particular seem to have missed the opportunity to learn from Watergate and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,” says Richard Filipink, a historian specializing in the 1960s at Western Illinois University, in an interview. “What they should have understood is that partisanship and individualism must be set aside when there is evidence of wrongdoing by government officials. Americans should also support politicians who call for stronger legal safeguards against political corruption and unethical behavior, regardless of which party is responsible.”
This is far from certain in an American election year marked by the strong comeback of a former president, Donald Trump, afflicted by a criminal conviction and a series of accusations following an attempted coup and an insurrection launched against the Capitol in 2021. A surprising political destiny – the populist leads in voting intentions against Kamala Harris in several key states – whose trajectory was undoubtedly traced by Richard Nixon and the impunity he enjoyed after his resignation in 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a “full and unconditional pardon” in September, a month after his resignation, immunizing him from all prosecution for crimes he had “committed or could have committed” as president. Ford will then say that he was acting in the name of the country’s interest, to ease tensions.
“Failure to pursue criminal charges against a president, current or former, sends a dangerous message to future presidents,” said constitutional expert Catherine Ross, contacted in recent days by The duty at George Washington University in the US capital. It tells them that they cannot be held accountable for their crimes. Ford’s pardon of Nixon may have prevented short-term political and social unrest in the US, but if Nixon had been tried, we might not be where we are today with Trump.”
The populist has been proclaiming for months that he should not face justice, invoking, in front of his followers and through his lawyers, that all the actions he took during his presidency are covered by the immunity of the American executive branch. An assertion supported at the beginning of July by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court — for which Trump is largely responsible through his appointments of judges. The highest court in the country has in fact ruled that “a president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts committed during his term of office.” “Unofficial behavior,” however, is liable to prosecution. Such a framework would have spared Richard Nixon from suffering the odious threat of impeachment that he dodged by resigning.
Missed opportunities
The Watergate scandal had everything it took to bring about a turning point in American political history and thus restrict the power of the executive branch in the future and limit its abuses. In vain.
In early July, on the X network, former White House legal adviser John Dean, a key figure in the Watergate scandal, joked that the Supreme Court in 2024 had just confirmed what Nixon claimed in 1972: “When the president does it, it means it’s not illegal,” a statement Trump has repeated almost word for word since his 2020 defeat and in the wake of the impeachments that followed, for fraud, concealment of bribes, attempted insurrection and manipulation of the results of the vote.
Worse, in 2005, the discovery of the identity of the anonymous source of journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who documented the crimes committed at the highest levels of government and led to Nixon’s downfall, was celebrated as a victory for democracy and open government over a president who abused his office for his own personal gain. Deep Throat, as he was known, was in fact W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s number two at the time. But this reading of events did not hold water for long.
“Watergate demonstrated above all how potentially fragile constitutional safeguards against presidential abuse of power can be because they rely on bipartisanship in Congress,” notes Richard Filipink. “Within the Republican Party, hyperpartisanship has now taken over, replacing a bipartisanship that can prevent corruption and abuse of power.”
“Our democracy is in much greater danger today than it was in the 1970s,” W. Michael Weis, a history professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, said in an interview. He foresaw the situation 20 years ago when he wrote that “Watergate taught people who wanted to do illegal things to be better at it,” by learning from the mistakes of others. And they can do it now with the support of a portion of the population.
“Fifty years ago, most Republicans were outraged by Nixon’s abuses of power,” Weis said. “Today, most accept that only by manipulating the system and limiting access to the ballot box can they win.”
Moreover, “Watergate highlighted the fact that Americans at the time were educated and well-informed about complex issues,” adds Richard Filipink. That is no longer the case today, he says, in a “polarized media environment where the massive capacity that exists to create and propagate disinformation far exceeds what existed in the 1970s. This makes it much more difficult to educate the public” about the ins and outs of these crimes committed by the American executive branch.
In this context, the hope of avoiding another Watergate lies much more in the future than in the present, he says: “When some of the current political leaders who have learned to deceive and abuse the system are overthrown or leave the political scene,” Mr. Filipink concludes.
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A previous version of this text, which referred to Richard Nixon’s successor as “John Ford,” not “Gerald Ford,” has been amended.