With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

How Neo-Conservatives Helped Bring Down Richard Nixon

To talk about Watergate and the Nixon presidency over 30 years after the break-ins, cover-up, resignation, and pardon, one has to ask a completely different set of questions than was asked in the last half of the 1970s because there is so much more information available about those events. Because we know more, we must question the mainstream interpretation about the importance of Watergate in relation to the overall significance of the foreign and domestic policies of Richard Nixon.

I initiated this reinterpretation a decade ago with my book, Nixon Reconsidered, which was not well received by reviewers because it praised Nixon’s liberal domestic policies (which I had been surprised to find out about) and his innovative attempt to diplomatically engage both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. At same time, I criticized other aspects of his foreign and domestic policy, but concluded that Nixon’s administration was about much more than Watergate. As a result, both liberals and conservatives criticized the book for quite different reasons.

More recently Iwan Morgan and David Greenberg have made a similar case, that Nixon achieved more than he is usually given credit for, but they both conclude that Watergate will remain the negative scrim through which those achievements must be viewed because it so tarnished his image and reputation. As long as Watergate continues to be considered a greater constitutional transgression and abuse of power than Iran/Contra, then the standard version among scholars and journalists that Watergate is the single worst violation of executive power in American history and, thus, the only way to view the Nixon presidency will continue to prevail. I find this somewhat perplexing since there is a now a large body of information from tapes and memoirs and documents declassified under the FOIA that casts serious doubt on this interpretation. Some of it makes Nixon look worse; some of it makes him look better. Let me start with an example of the bad news about Nixon and Watergate.

I call it the “Nixon/Dean Conspiracy Nobody Knows About.” It is based on previously ignored tapes showing that both John Dean and Richard Nixon were intensely involved in a cover-up earlier than the initial congressional hearings or Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) revealed. In particular, tapes for March 13, 14, 16, 17, and 20, 1973, show Dean and Nixon working together preparing a general version of Watergate to cover-up the involvement of top White House personnel. It was on March 13 that Nixon found out from Dean that Haldeman might be involved in Watergate because Haldeman’s assistant Gordon Strachan was. We hear the president saying: “Well then he probably told Bob [Haldeman].” Then several sentences later Nixon exclaims: “I will be damned! Well that is the problem in Bob’s case.” At this point, to avoid obstructing justice, the president had a couple of choices. He could have said, Well I am going to ask Haldeman about this to find out the truth or he might have assumed the worst and said: OK, that’s it. Heads are going to roll beginning with Haldeman. But he did neither. Instead, he made a conscious decision to commit the crime of obstruction of justice by beginning to lead this stage of the Watergate cover-up–a full week before Leon Jaworski, head of the WSPF, thought he did–all because of Dean’s famous March 21 conversation with the president in which he said: “We have a cancer–within–close to the presidency, that’s growing.”

Dean simply mislead Congress by testifying that Nixon knew of the cover-up as early as September 1972. Subsequently, no evidence was found on the tapes by the WSPF or on later tape releases to prove this. In truth, we now know that for seven days after March 13 Dean and Nixon were co-conspirators in devising a cover-up story with the president initiating this action and Dean following along contributing ideas of his own. Dean, of course, who prepared the original bare-bones list of 49 tapes subpoenaed by the Ervin committee did not include the March 14, 16, 17, 20 tapes which incriminated him along with the president. He only chose those tapes, like the March 13 and March 21 ones, which showed him in the most favorable light.

Remember, Dean had been working on a cover-up story for seven days with the president, assuring him at one point that “we will win.” Then suddenly on March 21 there is a “cancer on the presidency.” Among other things Dean had never spoken in such colorful metaphors before so to open his conversation about Watergate this way on that day sounds, in retrospect, rehearsed and self-serving. Indeed, we now know that the “cancer” Dean was referring was to the cover-up that had been going since June 17, 1972–the cover-up that he had mislead the president about for nine months. Remember also that he was asking Nixon for a million dollars to take care of this “cancer,” and certainly this was one way to get the president’s attention. Finally, Dean may have suspected by this time that Nixon was taping conversations and he was creating his own best legal defense on March 21.

In fact, the March 21 tape actually shows an almost passive Nixon listening to Dean divulging details in almost stream of conscious fashion about the Watergate break-in and cover-up that began back in June 1972. In this sense the tapes of the week before contradict the position Dean took with the president on March 21, 1973. When testifying before the Ervin committee, Dean conveniently forgot to mention these earlier March conversations and he played down the importance of the news about Strachan’s involvement and whether he might have informed Haldeman. To reveal what they had been doing for the seven previous days would have incriminated Dean as well.

Perhaps the best indication that Nixon feared the criminal implications of these March tapes can be found in his own memoir where he says he reviewed his conversations with Dean for February and March and reached the same conclusion as the WSPF; namely, that Dean did not tell him about his own role or that of others in the cover-up until March 21, 1973. He concluded all he and Dean had talked about was “Watergate, the Ervin Committee, executive privilege, and political retaliation against the Democrats as political problems,” and that Dean had assured him “that he himself had had nothing to do with campaign activities.” He called Haig and Ziegler in to tell them he “felt enormously relieved” because “tapes proved Dean was lying [about what the president knew and when],” and so he told them: “Really, the goddamn record is not bad, is it?”

Nixon was right, except he also chose to ignore his own role in the five incriminating conversations from March 13th to the 20th. As a lawyer, Nixon recognized that he could be indicted for them. This explains why he was insistent upon obtaining a “full, free, and absolute pardon” from Ford on September 8, 1974, and was even willing to trade his tapes and papers in order not to be subject to prosecution for obstructing justice once this information came out.

What mainstream historians and journalists have assiduously ignored, however, is that Nixon discerned the incriminating evidence on these four March tapes. Unlike the “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, which a number of historians, including Stephen Ambrose, have argued he could have avoided indictment over, these he could not. The question that cries out to be answered is why scholars and journalists, especially those who have long disliked Nixon, have ignored these damning tapes and clung to the pro-Dean March 21 tape and why they have not systematically pointed out the other contradictions (and actual lies) that exist in his testimony to Congress, in his many self-vindicating books, and the new tape releases. Because this has not happened Dean has been able to pollute history as a consultant on all media productions about Watergate and to capitalize on perpetuating his reputation as the hero of the Ervin committee.

Another and more positive view of Nixon coming out of asking new questions based on new information is this: the search for the identity of Deep Throat has for too long proved a diversion from rethinking the meaning of Watergate and the Nixon presidency. Here again, Dean has greatly helped in the perpetuation of that search with several books and online postings naming different individuals as possible candidates for the honor of being Deep Throat. One way to ease people’s minds about whether Deep Throat was one source or a composite and why he knew what he did, I would like to ask Bob Woodward today to agree to video or audio tape Deep Throat or Deep Throats confirming his or their role so that when he or they die we will have more than a Washington Post obit to authenticate his or their identity.

More important, however, instead of continuing to ask WHO leaked the information, we should ask WHY one or more individuals within the executive branch would leak such information. The answer lies with those who strongly disagreed with Nixon’s major diplomatic initiatives involving Russia and China, and his failed pursuit of victory in Vietnam. A group of both civilian and military anti-Communist extremists (those Norman Podhoretz referred to as subscribing to “hard anti-Communism") could not tolerate Nixon’s attempt to go beyond containment and try to bring both nations into the international community. Nor could these Cold War hawks support his policy of Vietnamization designed to turn the war over the South Vietnamese.

New research has shown that their dissatisfaction set in motion the formation or birth of a radical conservatism inside and outside the Nixon administration. Détente and rapprochement (and ultimately defeat in Vietnam) prompted these early neo-conservative Republicans to organize against Nixon’s foreign policy (and to a lesser degree his liberal domestic reforms). These were the men (initially Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, James Schlesinger, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and Admiral Thomas Moorer) who wanted Nixon weakened and who ultimately supported his resignation. Watergate thus facilitated their opposition to the most enlightened aspects of his foreign policy. From this nucleus emerged the full-blown neo-con movement within the Republican party that dominated Reagan’s foreign policy in his first term and completely took over George W. Bush’s after September 11.

Viewed in this light, Watergate and the Nixon presidency has a contemporary importance that has been largely ignored. This new interpretation also finally confirms the obvious about Richard Nixon’s political career: he had never been an arch conservative on either domestic or foreign policy. Instead of his conservatism being the cause of his downfall, as so many have claimed, his more liberal or enlightened policies so alienated radical conservatives (many of whom urged him to resign) that they contributed to his downfall and vowed to reverse and/or discredit both his foreign and domestic policies.

In essence, Watergate killed Republican centrism and opened the door for the take-over of the Republican party by neo-conservatives. This is the most important contemporary significance of the Nixon presidency in relation to Watergate, regardless of the fact he should of been indicted and convicted for obstructing justice. His downfall represented the beginning of a conservative coup and this is much more important than concentrating on the nonproductive pursuit of the identity of Deep Throat.