What JD Vance misunderstands about Nixon, Watergate — and Trump

By now much has been said about Vice President JD Vance’s comments last week at the Nixon Library, where he attempted to rewrite the history of the Watergate scandal by musing that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.”

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He further stated, “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

I am a former assistant Watergate special prosecutor. I was there. Vance’s description of the Watergate scandal was a fairy tale.

The June 1972 arrest of burglars at the Democratic National Committee may have been a 12-hour news story if the Nixon White House cover-up, which described the matter as a third-rate burglary, had been successful.

It was not.

While the cover-up held up through the 1972 presidential election in which Nixon won in a landslide victory, Nixon’s stonewalling began unraveling two months after he was inaugurated to his second term. On March 23, 1973, Judge John Sirica, a Republican appointee who presided over the criminal prosecution of the burglars, said he believed there was a wider conspiracy and planned to sentence the burglars to stiff sentences.

One of the Watergate burglars, former CIA operative James McCord, came forward and revealed to the judge that the burglars had been pressured to plead guilty and remain silent at the direction of others.

This breakthrough in the case was the beginning of the end for Nixon. Additional facts emanated from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray to be FBI director. Gray admitted to burning relevant documents in his fireplace. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were publishing various exposés from their source identified as “Deep Throat.”

None of this drip-drip of almost daily revelations amounted to a mere 12-hour news cycle. While Nixon pushed back, proclaiming, “I am not a crook,” more details of his crookedness were revealed over a two-year period. Working on the Watergate case, I dealt with the onslaught of allegations that turned into a flood of criminality. All of this amounted to an ongoing news cycle that did not end, even after Nixon left office. Should a similar scandal emerge today, in a similar fashion, we shouldn’t expect it to play out much differently.

The Nixon revelations led to the formation of a Senate select committee to investigate the burglary and the appointment of Archibald Cox as special Watergate prosecutor.

The nationally televised Senate committee hearings revealed the existence of a secret taping system in Nixon’s White House offices. After the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to release the tapes on July 24, 1974, Nixon proposed a compromise by which former Sen. John Stennis, who was partially deaf, would listen to the tapes to create summaries.

Cox refused to agree to this compromise since summaries of the tapes would not be admissible at the Watergate cover-up trial. Cox’s position resulted in the Saturday Night Massacre on Oct. 23, 1973, in which Nixon fired his attorney general and deputy attorney general, who refused to fire Cox. The solicitor general, the third highest member of the Justice Department, carried out Nixon’s order to fire Cox.