nplusonemag | Turning points in history require distance to understand their full complexity. For Watergate, the initial arrests of which mark their fiftieth anniversary this summer, there is yet no similar judgment on the magnitude of Woodward’s telling in The Origins of the New South. The historical insights of one era have been lost to the journalistic instincts of another. Whereas we understand how a growing country in the late 19th century could be brought together by open collusion of business interests, we give little attention today to how changing commercial opportunities during the Vietnam War might have torn apart the political accommodations that followed World War II. Watergate’s place in this history today is but a hairline fracture to the New Deal Order; a symbol rather than a decisive moment. This is a serious misinterpretation that leaves unexamined the universal business consensus behind Richard Nixon in both 1968 and 1972.
Watergate was nothing less than the visible manifestation of a hypogeal realignment. A basic continuity in American trade and financial policy has persisted ever since the Nixon–Ford Administrations. In foreign policy, the historian Bruce Cummings faithfully describes the period after Watergate as “Nixonism without Nixon.” Most potently for a present reacquainted with the discomforts of inflation, planned recessions and stagnation remain the preferred tool among policy experts for regulating growth since our trust in price freezes and direct controls on wages and prices has never recovered from the Nixon scandal. The narrowing of our understanding of the import of the investigations that followed the 1972 campaign to the quirky personality and outrageous private pronouncements of Richard Nixon himself leaves these legacies unexplained.
The break-in’s fiftieth anniversary marks a new occasion for taking stock. Alongside a fiftieth anniversary edition of Bob Woodward (no relation) and Carl Bernstein’s canonical account of the investigation at the Washington Post, Washington journalists Garrett M. Graff and Jefferson Morley each published their own updated investigations into the presidential entanglements of the early 1970s this year. Yet to the disappointed eye of the trained historian there is no semblance of a synthesis on the horizon: the basic contours of interpretation remain those set during the spectacle itself, in the Senate hearings and their exclusions. If there is debate about the subject of these books, it will unfold on those vintage terms of 1973 and 1974—the pliability of patriotic fervor and its tendency towards fascism; the roles of fear and vanity in political leadership; the importance of the CIA and its exact role in the burglary and the cover-up. In its narrow focus on process—the motions by which the 37th President violated civil liberties, extorted donors, lied to Congress, and obstructed justice—Watergate’s prevailing interpretation also invites an easy analytic leap to Donald Trump. The neat portability of this historical analogy obscures not only the historical significance of the Nixon helmsmanship at a critical moment of capitalist transformation, but our own understanding of economic interests today and their relationship to modern party politics. Woodward and Bernstein give this reductive interpretation of the present their own authorial imprimatur: “Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions, to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means.”
Yet the burglaries were never the story. Control of the executive branch remained critical at a moment of global shift: détente, the end of the gold-dollar standard, the rise of government economic planning across the global south and its threat to corporate autonomy at home, and the challenge to the material basis of organized labor’s power in the old manufacturing industries of the US Northeast and Midwest. The money from Nixon’s election campaigns that paid for the Plumbers was, after all, donated by blue-chip corporations, intent on ensuring their man remained at the wheel to steer the nation through the moment’s economic dislocations and the ascendant social pressures to transform the American welfare state into something more capable of ensuring stability on popular terms. For all this, the Democrats’ media spectacle failed to alter the course of economic development or fundamentally challenge the emerging social order—a historic failure for which the ablutions of impeachment hearings have never quite absolved American democracy.
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