Being a victim of partisan lawfare and being guilty of impeachable offenses are not mutually exclusive.
The discussion of Richard Nixon’s legacy on The Editors podcast today is fascinating. I also commend Rich’s piece on the homepage, and Charlie was right to tout Dan’s excellent essay in the November issue of the mag, “Nixon’s Not the One” (published on our site in mid-September).
Like my fellow Reagan conservatives, I am not a fan of Nixon’s policy preferences — not the statist domestic policies that, in some ways, grew the government in ways that would have made the JFK and LBJ administrations blush, not the economic mismanagement, and not détente with the Soviets. I mostly agree with my colleagues’ observations about Nixon’s China policy (and how ludicrous of President Trump to recently claim that China was our ally in World War II when our actual ally was Formosa — now democratic Taiwan — which today’s Communist China is actively scheming to gobble up); but I would give Nixon and Henry Kissinger more of a nod on the strategy of driving a wedge between Mao and Moscow. Nixon’s Vietnam War chapter is too complicated to summarize in a sentence or two, so I won’t try.
What I want to say in this post is that I am an admirer of Geoff Shepard, the Nixon administration official who reportedly made the big presentation to the Trump Justice Department. Geoff is a great lawyer who worked on Nixon’s defense of the special prosecutor(s)’ investigation, and I recommend his book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (Bombardier Books, 2021). He makes a compelling case that the investigation of Nixon was abusive.
I’m not surprised that this theory has gotten a warm reception in the Trump administration, which makes the same fallacious contention made by Nixon’s more ardent apologists: The probe was patently politicized; ergo, he was innocent. As with Trump, Democrats politicized the Nixon probe, yet he was still guilty, at least of impeachable offenses — I’ve always doubted that Nixon would have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial, although I believe President Ford was right to pardon him and try to move the country past the scandal.
In any event, back in 2022, I was invited by the fabulous online magazine Law & Liberty to participate in a symposium regarding Watergate on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and in it I assessed many of Geoff Shepard’s contentions. In the main essay, I offered this summation:
In the final analysis, in 1972, the combination of the media and the political class was unbeatable. Nixon had no margin for error, and he made profound errors. A quarter-century later, though progressives were beginning to lose their steely grip on the media, the bottom line was the same: The media-Democrat complex that savaged Nixon into resignation circled the wagons around Clinton, saving his presidency. The organized bar and its Ivy League vanguard, which had lionized Cox and zealously staffed his team, abominated Clinton’s prosecutor, Ken Starr.
This is not to plead President Nixon’s innocence. His advocates stress the niceties of divisions of authority—the contentions that the political campaign operation and the White House governing administration are distinct, and that corruption in the former does not necessarily mean corruption in the latter, get them only so far.
Put aside that Nixon critics, heavily reliant on Dean, insist the White House abused its powers in ways that transcended the Watergate break-in, and abetted the campaign’s illegality. The remorseless fact is that it was Nixon’s campaign and the Nixon administration. He was responsible for the actions of his subordinates, including their lawlessness. The buck stopped with him. And while interfering in a criminal investigation to honor a legally questionable confidentiality promise to donors would not be egregious as interfering in a criminal investigation to conceal an administration’s connection to a felony break-in to facilitate political spying, it would still be obstruction of justice.
The full piece, and the superb contributions of other participants, is here.