I didn’t think I would need to have an opinion on whether current Department of Justice employees should spend any time or money reviewing Watergate or the impeachment of Richard Nixon . . . but here we are.
The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon’s resignation.
Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: “Watergate As Lawfare.”
I have no interest in spending another cent of taxpayer money on an issue that was resolved in 1974 and that historians have been arguing about for my entire lifetime.
My overall take on Nixon, and the mini-resurgence his reputation is enjoying in some corners of the American right, aligns well with the conclusion of Dan McLaughlin’s recent piece:
If Nixon was less successful than Reagan in both policy and politics, why do some of today’s Republicans prefer him as a model? Most of the possible answers are depressing. Some resent the ideological, intellectual, and moral capital of the conservative movement and wish to be unburdened by principle or by policy coherence. In order to make it safe and cool to be a moderate again in a polarized age, one must have a theory of how the moderates are actually the true hard-liners. If you aim to rule through the federal administrative state, Nixon’s expansion of the agencies looks more tantalizing than Reagan’s deregulatory initiatives and jokes about bureaucrats and welfare programs.
Worse, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that some of Nixon’s new admirers like him precisely because he is such a scandalous figure. To embrace him is to shock, while Reagan’s success in defeating the Soviets forced the political mainstream to treat him, belatedly, as respectable. In that sense, the completeness of Nixon’s fall and the pointlessness of its causes only make him more appealing. If your politics are built around being edgy and playing with fire, Nixon’s still the one.