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Speaker 2: This is a rip Current bonus episode. You don't need
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Speaker 2: provides more information, context and analysis to enhance the main
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Speaker 3: As we worked on rip Current, it became apparent that
Speaker 3: fifty years after the fact, not everyone was clear on
Speaker 3: what exactly was Watergate. To get a basic overview of
Speaker 3: the Watergate crimes and scandal and the repercussions that came
Speaker 3: out of it, I talked with Kirk Dorsey, chair of
Speaker 3: the History department at the University of New Hampshire.
Speaker 4: My name is Kirk Dorsey. I'm the chair of the
Speaker 4: History department at the University of New Hampshire. I teach
Speaker 4: US foreign Policy and US fronmental history and I'm now
Speaker 4: in my thirtieth year in the department.
Speaker 3: Can you just tell us about Watergate?
Speaker 4: So, first of all, Watergate, everybody has heard of it
Speaker 4: at some level, because every scandal is a gate. Now
Speaker 4: because of that to flight Gate with their New England
Speaker 4: Patriots fans here I probably just turned all you off
Speaker 4: by mentioned to flight Gate, but everything is Gate. And
Speaker 4: it's interesting because the Watergate actually was a building. It
Speaker 4: was a building that was still a hotel. You can
Speaker 4: make a reservation I think still in the Watergate Hotel,
Speaker 4: but it also had offices, and the Watergate building had
Speaker 4: the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: two that the people who worked for the Nixon re
Speaker 4: election campaign, who worked in the Nixon White House as well,
Speaker 4: broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in
Speaker 4: the Watergate Hotel and they actually were caught by a
Speaker 4: security guard in the summer of nineteen seventy two, but
Speaker 4: it looked like just a run of the mill burglary.
Speaker 4: So when we talk about Watergate, there is this incident
Speaker 4: of a break in at the hotel to go after
Speaker 4: the Democrats campaign strategy for nineteen seventy two, which apparently
Speaker 4: was to lose as badly as possible since only won
Speaker 4: one state. But then it spiraled out into all these
Speaker 4: other things that the Nixon administration was doing that were secret,
Speaker 4: So that Watergate is much more than just the break in.
Speaker 3: Can you kind of talk about the scope of the
Speaker 3: things that have sort of collectively been under the Watergate banner.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So it really started in nineteen seventy one. So
Speaker 4: there was a guy named Daniel Ellsberg who released a
Speaker 4: collection of documents put together by the Defense Department that
Speaker 4: were known as the Pentagon Papers. And the Pentagon Papers
Speaker 4: were an attempt by the Defense Department to understand how
Speaker 4: the United States had gotten into the Vietnam War, which
Speaker 4: was complete mass in nineteen seventy one, and they were secret,
Speaker 4: but Ellsberg thought the America people deserved to know what
Speaker 4: the US government had done way back in the forties, fifties,
Speaker 4: and sixties, so he leaked the Pentagon Papers. They got
Speaker 4: a lot of publication. There were court cases about whether
Speaker 4: or not the newspapers were allowed to publish them. And Nixon,
Speaker 4: who was president at the time, could have said, well,
Speaker 4: these really embarrassed my predecessors. I'll just let it go.
Speaker 4: But he was really paranoid about leaks, and he was
Speaker 4: worried that things in the Nixon administration would also leak.
Speaker 4: So some of his aides assembled a group of covert operatives,
Speaker 4: guys who are known to history like Gee Gordon Liddy,
Speaker 4: who had a radio show for a long time Chuck Coulson,
Speaker 4: who later went on to become a born again preacher.
Speaker 4: And these guys tried to make Elsberg's life miserable. They
Speaker 4: broke into his psychiatrist's office to steal his files, things
Speaker 4: like that, And apparently one of these guys relatives said well,
Speaker 4: what are you doing in the White House, And to
Speaker 4: cover themselves, they said were plumbers because their job was
Speaker 4: to fix leaks, and so they became known as the
Speaker 4: White House plumbers. And you know, the problem with once
Speaker 4: you hire plumbers is you can't really fire them without
Speaker 4: them knowing things. So the administration kept them around, and
Speaker 4: they were the ones who did the break in at
Speaker 4: the Watergate hotel, for instance. But as we discovered over
Speaker 4: the course of the next sort of two years after
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy two, so the Nixon administration was not just
Speaker 4: using the plumbers to go after its enemies. They were
Speaker 4: using the regular people in government. So John Dean, who's
Speaker 4: a regular on CNN now, is a legal expert on
Speaker 4: presidential corruption. He's there because he was a young lawyer
Speaker 4: in the Nixon White House. One of his jobs was
Speaker 4: to compose a list of enemies of the Nixon administration,
Speaker 4: which included such hard hitting political figures as Joe Namath
Speaker 4: and Paul Newman, because they were popular people who were
Speaker 4: anti Nixon. And it wasn't just to compile a list.
Speaker 4: It was, for instance, to say to the IRS audit
Speaker 4: our enemies. Use the powers of the federal government, the IRS,
Speaker 4: the FBI, and even the CIA to go after people
Speaker 4: in the domestic sphere who were potentially enemies of the
Speaker 4: Nixon administration. So what started as a break in is
Speaker 4: the investigations compounded. They discovered there was a lot more
Speaker 4: to it than just a bunch of second rate burglars
Speaker 4: getting caught trying to steal Georgian governor's campaign secrets.
Speaker 3: So then how does this start to unravel?
Speaker 4: So it starts unravel because they're a journalists who are
Speaker 4: just trying to sort out, like there's something that doesn't
Speaker 4: smell right. And as they began asking questions, there's a
Speaker 4: guy named Mark Felt who worked for the FBI, who
Speaker 4: was aware of what was going on, and he becomes
Speaker 4: a secret source, takes on the unfortunate name of Deep
Speaker 4: Throat after a pornographic film that was poker at the time,
Speaker 4: and he begins telling Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of
Speaker 4: the Washington Post details and pieces of information that are
Speaker 4: not publicly known, and that leads them to continue to
Speaker 4: ask questions over the course of nineteen seventy two. So
Speaker 4: the break in in seventy two at first is thought
Speaker 4: just to be some random burglars looking for stuff that
Speaker 4: they could steal, so it doesn't affect the seventy two
Speaker 4: election at all, and Nixon wins in a landslide. But
Speaker 4: they keep asking questions into nineteen seventy three, and they
Speaker 4: begin to reveal that the people who were involved in
Speaker 4: the burglary actually have connections back to the White House,
Speaker 4: and once they see that, that's when more journalists pile on,
Speaker 4: and most importantly, Congress decides to start holding hearings to
Speaker 4: find out what was going on. And Nixon did a
Speaker 4: pretty good job for nineteen seventy three of fending off
Speaker 4: allegations by saying I didn't know about any of this.
Speaker 4: This was all people underneath me doing these things, until
Speaker 4: in late nineteen seventy three one of his aides, justin testifying,
Speaker 4: accidentally says, well, you know, the president was taping all
Speaker 4: the conversations in the White House and nobody knew that
Speaker 4: outside the White House. And this is a guy named
Speaker 4: Butterfield who says this. When he says it, Congress are like, Okay,
Speaker 4: we need these tapes. And that becomes a source of
Speaker 4: a huge fight between Nixon and Congress over presidential immunity. Basically,
Speaker 4: does the president have the right to hang onto these
Speaker 4: things as the president or are these government documents to
Speaker 4: serviation able to see? And eventually the Supreme Court rules
Speaker 4: that the tapes have to be turned over, and that's
Speaker 4: really when that leads to Nixon recognizing that he is
Speaker 4: on tape authorizing a lot of these illegal acts, well
Speaker 4: beyond what happened in the Watergate hotel, and that he's
Speaker 4: doomed once these tapes are out, there's no way he
Speaker 4: can stay in power. And not to get two presentists.
Speaker 4: But one of the big differences between then and now
Speaker 4: is that there were key Republican senators who turned against him.
Speaker 4: Howard Baker, who was a Tennessee Republican who was an
Speaker 4: upstanding a citizen. He worked for the Reagan administration. He
Speaker 4: was the person who famously said, what did the president
Speaker 4: know and when did he know it? And asking that
Speaker 4: question coming from the Republican side. Was an indication that
Speaker 4: there were Republican legislators in nineteen seventy three and then
Speaker 4: into seventy four who were starting to give up on Nixon.
Speaker 4: They thought he had crossed too many lines.
Speaker 3: What is he on tape, sort of authorizing.
Speaker 4: Using federal agencies to go after his enemies, knowing about
Speaker 4: the break in that he claimed he knew nothing about
Speaker 4: in the Watergate hotel. And then there's all the other
Speaker 4: stuff that he was famous for, you know, some of
Speaker 4: the just incredibly inflammatory things he said, even you know,
Speaker 4: these incredibly anti Semitic things he was saying to Henry Kissinger,
Speaker 4: his Jewish National security advisor. So the tapes were a
Speaker 4: combination of direct evidence that Nixon knew that things were
Speaker 4: being done that were illegal, not just the sort of
Speaker 4: low level petty but also using agencies in the way
Speaker 4: they weren't supposed to be used. But then also that
Speaker 4: he was a really awful person on top of it.
Speaker 4: So they were embarrassing, and you know, nineteen seventy five
Speaker 4: Congress held hearings on the CIA because of these tapes,
Speaker 4: because it was clear that Nixon had used the CIA.
Speaker 4: These are the Church Committee hearings and named after a
Speaker 4: senator from Idaho, Frank Church. And that's, for instance, where
Speaker 4: we learned all these things about the efforts to assassinate
Speaker 4: Fidel Castro in the early sixties. All sorts of things
Speaker 4: came out of these Church Committee hearings. So our current
Speaker 4: vision of the CIA is a bunch of you know,
Speaker 4: sort of semi rogue guys go around trying to execute people.
Speaker 4: That all comes out of the Church Committee hearings, because
Speaker 4: most of that was secret before nineteen seventy five. More
Speaker 4: than anything, what it does is damage this idea that
Speaker 4: the federal government is basically telling you the truth most
Speaker 4: of the time, because knowledge did we learn from the
Speaker 4: Pentagon papers that they lied repeatedly about the war. But
Speaker 4: then we have all these hearings, we find out that
Speaker 4: Nixon and his people were lying about the ways the
Speaker 4: federal government was being used.
Speaker 3: Can you talk a little bit about how Nixon tried
Speaker 3: to serve as presidency.
Speaker 4: Basically, the Attorney General appointed a special council to investigate
Speaker 4: what the Watergate crimes and all the assembled other crimes were,
Speaker 4: and Nixon got really frustrated that this guy was getting
Speaker 4: closer and closer to getting the truth out about him.
Speaker 4: So he ordered his attorney general to fire him, and
Speaker 4: the Attorney Onnor resigned and then there was a second
Speaker 4: command who also resigned, in the person in the Justice
Speaker 4: Department who ultimately agreed to fire Cox. The special investigator
Speaker 4: was Robert Bork. Bork would come back in the nineteen
Speaker 4: eighties as a nominee for the Supreme Court, and he
Speaker 4: was the first of this run of really controversial Supreme
Speaker 4: Court nominations, and Bork ended up getting I did not
Speaker 4: obviously get a seat on the Supreme Court. So Nixon
Speaker 4: really fought hard in the courts to protect his rights
Speaker 4: basically as president, to do what he wanted. In fact,
Speaker 4: he said after he left office at one point something
Speaker 4: to the extent of, if the president does it, it's
Speaker 4: legal again. You know, the echoes to today are really
Speaker 4: really powerful. That Nixon's base take on the matter was
Speaker 4: he could do whatever he wanted and if he wanted
Speaker 4: to take people, if he wanted to give orders as president,
Speaker 4: he could do those things, and that Congress had no
Speaker 4: power to oversee him. Of course, Congress had the power
Speaker 4: to impeach him. And what ultimately drove him from office
Speaker 4: was as these tapes were released, he recognized that there
Speaker 4: were not enough Republicans in the Senate who would vote
Speaker 4: to acquit him, that impeachment was going to go through.
Speaker 4: The Democrats controlled both houses, but they didn't have a
Speaker 4: two thirds majority in the Senate. So he recognized that
Speaker 4: he was going to lose a vote in the Senate,
Speaker 4: he would be impeached to remove from office. So he
Speaker 4: decided better to resign on his own terms than to
Speaker 4: be impeached. This is one of the things that's really remarkable,
Speaker 4: I mean, certainly about the Republican Party today. We've never
Speaker 4: had a party that's been so much in one person's pocket.
Speaker 4: Even when Reagan was running in nineteen eighty and eighty four,
Speaker 4: there were people in the party who thought he was
Speaker 4: too conservative and who argued against him. His own vice
Speaker 4: president H. W. Bush had called Reagan's economic policy voodoo economics.
Speaker 4: And then as soon as he gets the nomination eighty eight,
Speaker 4: tries to distance himself from some of Bagan's policies. And
Speaker 4: I was reading up on Jerald Ford's voting record when
Speaker 4: he was in Congress in the nineteen sixties. He voted
Speaker 4: for all the Civil Rights Acts as a Republican, and
Speaker 4: he voted for the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 4: and there were a lot of Democrats who voted against
Speaker 4: those bills. So the ways in which the parties had
Speaker 4: these sort of strange overlaps that seem different to us
Speaker 4: now is really a powerful thing. So the Southern Democrats
Speaker 4: basically all became Republicans. I think about a guy like
Speaker 4: Phil Graham, who was a long time Democratic centator, and
Speaker 4: John Tower, both of them from Texas, who switched parties
Speaker 4: and became Republicans in the nineteen eighties. And that was
Speaker 4: a pretty common thing in the nineteen eighties for these
Speaker 4: Southern Democrats to become Republicans.
Speaker 3: So can you talk a little bit about Ford and
Speaker 3: Nixon and how that all kind of played out.
Speaker 4: So Ford is a really interesting character. I mean, he
Speaker 4: was our football player at Michigan. He was a Yale
Speaker 4: law grad. He got elected to Congress in nineteen forty
Speaker 4: eight after serving in the Navy honorably in World War Two. Interestingly,
Speaker 4: nineteen forty six saw both Nixon and Kennedy get elected
Speaker 4: after serving in the Navy in World War Two. So
Speaker 4: there was this sort of influx of veterans in the forties,
Speaker 4: and then Ford spent twenty five years climbing the ranks
Speaker 4: in Congress out of the district of Michigan. He was
Speaker 4: the House Minority leader in nineteen seventy three, and his
Speaker 4: dream was to someday be Speaker of the House. When
Speaker 4: it didn't look like Republicans whatever, we'd get to take
Speaker 4: control of the House. And in seventy three Richard Nixon
Speaker 4: lost his vice president to a completely different scandal. So
Speaker 4: his vice president was a guy named Spiro Agnew from Maryland,
Speaker 4: and Nixon and Agnew ran in nineteen sixty eight. One
Speaker 4: of their central campaign planks was law and order because
Speaker 4: Agnew had helped keep order in nineteen sixty eight in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty seven after some of the urban riots, particularly
Speaker 4: after King's assassination in April sixty eight, so they were
Speaker 4: running on this law and order campaign, and investigators in
Speaker 4: Maryland eventually uncovered that Governor Agnew had been taking kickbacks
Speaker 4: to give contracts to various supporters, so he was a
Speaker 4: classic bribery scheme. So Agnew was forced to resign because
Speaker 4: it was obviously a drag on Nixon to have it
Speaker 4: somebody who was almost as corupt as he was in
Speaker 4: the White House, and they had to find somebody who
Speaker 4: could help the Republican Party and try to restore some
Speaker 4: of the image of the Republican Party in the middle
Speaker 4: of nineteen seventy three, and Gerald Ford was exactly the guy.
Speaker 4: He had never done anything con to recy in his life.
Speaker 4: He had managed to annoy Lyndon Johnson, which is probably
Speaker 4: something on his side. Linda Johnson said something like he
Speaker 4: was too dumb to chew gum and walk at the
Speaker 4: same time. So Lynda Johnson didn't like him. So Ford
Speaker 4: was seen as a guy without a lot of ambition,
Speaker 4: but very clean, and he would bring some credit back
Speaker 4: to the Nixon administration. And of course, shortly after that,
Speaker 4: about a year later, it was when Nixon finally found
Speaker 4: that he had to resign, and so Jared Ford found
Speaker 4: himself President of the United States after never having gotten
Speaker 4: a vote outside his district in Michigan. The thing about
Speaker 4: Ford is because he was unsullied by any sort of corruption,
Speaker 4: and he was a negotiator in Congress. He wasn't a
Speaker 4: legislation writer. He was a guy who sort of brought
Speaker 4: people together. I think there was a sense that Ford
Speaker 4: also could be a guy who could heal some of
Speaker 4: the divisions if for some reason Nick sent to leave office.
Speaker 4: You know, and when Ford was appointed in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 4: you know, the Watergate scandal was brewing enough that you know,
Speaker 4: reasonable people could see that Nixon might not serve out
Speaker 4: his whole second term. That would not you know, that
Speaker 4: wouldn't have been a surprise to anybody. And you know,
Speaker 4: both the Senate and the House had to vote to
Speaker 4: confirm him, and they voted overwhelmingly to confirm him. So
Speaker 4: I understand Haldeman's position, But I think also the people
Speaker 4: in Congress recognized and Gerald Ford they had a guy
Speaker 4: who they could trust the presidency to if Nixon got
Speaker 4: forced out of office, which was plausible in the summer
Speaker 4: of nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3: So about Ford's pardoning of Nixon.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is the great question about Ford's legacy. So
Speaker 4: Nixon resigned in August ninth, nineteen seventy four, and al
Speaker 4: Hague had called Ford about a week in advance and
Speaker 4: said Nixon's going down. Basically, get ready to get sworn in,
Speaker 4: because it could happen anytime. So Ford had maybe a
Speaker 4: week's notice that it was coming, and he made a
Speaker 4: decision in September, so, about a month after he had
Speaker 4: been in power, to issue a formal pardon for any
Speaker 4: crimes that Richard Nixon might have committed, which made sure
Speaker 4: that Nixon wouldn't be tried in any court. And Nixon
Speaker 4: accepted the pardon, and there was a huge explosion about
Speaker 4: the pardon because people thought that maybe Nixon and Ford
Speaker 4: had made some sort of deal that, for instance, maybe
Speaker 4: Nixon agreed to step down on the understand that Ford
Speaker 4: would pardon him, or maybe even further back than that
Speaker 4: Nixon chose Ford in nineteen seventy three, because that's really
Speaker 4: when Nixon had some bargaining power and if he'd be
Speaker 4: Ford would pardon him for something. I think one of
Speaker 4: the things that fuels the pardon conspiracy theory is that
Speaker 4: Ford was in fact on the Warren Commission, which draws
Speaker 4: a lot of conspiracy theorists about what he might have
Speaker 4: known and what he might have covered up he might
Speaker 4: have been capable of it. So I don't think there
Speaker 4: was any evidence I think Ford made of a conspiracy.
Speaker 4: I think Ford just made a decision that putting Richard
Speaker 4: Nixon on trial for one thing was going to be
Speaker 4: a zoo that the things that got revealed in a
Speaker 4: trial might be pretty damaging for the nation as a whole,
Speaker 4: and pretty divisive for the nation as a whole. You know,
Speaker 4: we have to remember that Nixon stood for election on
Speaker 4: a national ticket five times, twice as vice president, three
Speaker 4: times as president. I mean, I remember my dad saying
Speaker 4: he was so disappointed Nixon because he voted for him
Speaker 4: five times, and then he had to find out that
Speaker 4: Nixon was this guy. I think there were a lot
Speaker 4: of people like that. You know, the seventy two election,
Speaker 4: Nixon got sixty percent of the vote, and there were
Speaker 4: still sizeable numbers of people who were like, wow, everybody
Speaker 4: does it, you know, and Nixon shouldn't have to leave office.
Speaker 4: So I think Ford made the decision that it was
Speaker 4: the right thing to do, even if it was a
Speaker 4: politically damaging for him, because you know, once you're in
Speaker 4: the White House, you can't help but think, well, maybe
Speaker 4: I'll run for president in nineteen seventy six. And I
Speaker 4: don't know how soon he decided that. I suspect it
Speaker 4: was about August tenth, about the day after he got
Speaker 4: into the White House. I think he started thinking I
Speaker 4: could be president too, and I'm gonna stick around. So
Speaker 4: he made the decision to parton Nixon. There were never
Speaker 4: any trials. When Nixon got to write his memoirs and
Speaker 4: that it explained what he did, he got to get
Speaker 4: interviewed by David Frost and other people and explained his
Speaker 4: what he did and why he did it without the
Speaker 4: power of potential being charged with perjury. And so, you know,
Speaker 4: this is one of those great what ifs. Should Ford
Speaker 4: have let Nixon go on trial, I think generally, while
Speaker 4: people at the time were pretty upset about it, most people,
Speaker 4: I think over time the decision to pardon Nixon probably
Speaker 4: his worked out as the less bad of those two choices, because,
Speaker 4: in part, in some ways, if you accept a part
Speaker 4: and you're sort of acknowledging that you were guilty and
Speaker 4: you're taking it. You know, Nixon never did that directly,
Speaker 4: but I think there was something to that. Having Nixon
Speaker 4: accept the pardon was his way of saying, yes, I
Speaker 4: did the wrong things, and now I'll go back. And
Speaker 4: I think also the pardon weirdly gave Nixon the opportunity
Speaker 4: to do this elder statesman thing, which is still kind
Speaker 4: of remarkable to me that not long after that, people
Speaker 4: were going to Richard Nixon for commentary on foreign policy
Speaker 4: in particular, And you know, it was okay for presidents
Speaker 4: to consult with Richard Nixon to talk about foreign policy
Speaker 4: because most of the scandals were seen to be domestic
Speaker 4: and not foreign policy. So Nixon managed to retain this
Speaker 4: elder statesman quality. And you know, I remember when he died,
Speaker 4: people were saying, well, you know, you know, we shouldn't
Speaker 4: be so harsh on Nixon. Everybody did those things, And
Speaker 4: you know, the reality is everybody didn't do those things.
Speaker 4: There were some you know, Johnson did some bad things,
Speaker 4: but nothing on the level that Nixon did them.
Speaker 3: So how about legacy of Watergate? What do you think
Speaker 3: kind of survives from that?
Speaker 4: Well? What survives? Actually, it's interesting because for many years
Speaker 4: there were all these reforms in government that Congress passed.
Speaker 4: For instance, campaign finance reform was one of the big ones.
Speaker 4: All the rules about how much money could give, who
Speaker 4: could give it, how it had to be disclosed. Because
Speaker 4: one of the things that came out was that the
Speaker 4: Nixon campaign team was just getting scads of cash from
Speaker 4: corporations that was not being reported. They were using that
Speaker 4: cash to pay the plumbers. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of stuff below board. So in some ways, the conviction
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump in New York State was a post
Speaker 4: Watergate thing because he was taking campaign donations to cover
Speaker 4: up the I don't want to call it an affair
Speaker 4: with Stormy Daniels, that meeting with Stormy Daniels, that brief interaction.
Speaker 4: So there's that. There was also, I think this larger
Speaker 4: sense in the public between the Pentagon papers and Watergate
Speaker 4: that the government was just repeatedly lying and couldn't be trusted.
Speaker 4: And I think we talked about this with your previous podcast.
Speaker 4: You know, there's that Pew poll like do you trust
Speaker 4: the federal government to do the right thing? Most of
Speaker 4: the time? And in the early sixties was like eighty
Speaker 4: percent of the American people said that. By the early eighties,
Speaker 4: it's down to twenty percent. So ironically, one of the
Speaker 4: beneficiaries of all this, well two beneficiaries. First was Jimmy
Speaker 4: car in nineteen seventy six, who had almost no experience,
Speaker 4: I mean, not that it seems to matter about experience anymore,
Speaker 4: but he had been the governor of Georgia, and he
Speaker 4: parlayed that into his electoral victory over Ford, largely by saying,
Speaker 4: I will never lie to you. And there was a
Speaker 4: sense that we want people who are honest but maybe
Speaker 4: more competent than Gerald Ford. And Carter was a nuclear
Speaker 4: engineer and he was a farmer and all these things.
Speaker 4: So Carter was definitely a post Watergate president. I don't
Speaker 4: think he could have won under other circumstances, and I
Speaker 4: think it equally Reagan is a post Watergate president with
Speaker 4: a very different set of policies. But what really propelled
Speaker 4: Reagan to victory was saying, basically, government is not the
Speaker 4: solution to the problem. Government is a problem. Well, it's
Speaker 4: a lot easier to believe that after you've read the
Speaker 4: Pentagon papers or read about what Nixon did with the
Speaker 4: IRS and the CIA and the FBI, and you started saying, well,
Speaker 4: you know, I can't trust any of these people, so
Speaker 4: maybe a smaller government is a good thing. Of course,
Speaker 4: the government didn't get smaller, kept getting bigger, but in
Speaker 4: terms of the rhetoric, and then I think there was
Speaker 4: just a general sense that our whole institutions were really
Speaker 4: shaky right before for the bi centennial, because the whole
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy six was like, we're going to celebrate two
Speaker 4: hundred years of American independence, But it was impossible to
Speaker 4: escape the fact that we had just appointed a guy
Speaker 4: from Michigan to be president who, you know, really wasn't
Speaker 4: that qualified to be president. I think Ford turned out
Speaker 4: to be a pretty good president, but we're talking about
Speaker 4: our election. These choices really good? Well, Ford and Carter
Speaker 4: didn't look like, you know, nineteen twelve, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
Speaker 4: William Howard Taft. It looked like, well, this is the
Speaker 4: best we can do, and that sense of, you know,
Speaker 4: does the political system unraveling? And we just you know,
Speaker 4: we're not getting the best anymore. We can either have
Speaker 4: Richard Nixon and Lindon Johnson, who are effective but you know,
Speaker 4: breaking the law left and right, or we can get
Speaker 4: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who seemed pretty honest, but
Speaker 4: they can't get anything done. So is there some sort
Speaker 4: of resolution to that? And I think a lot of
Speaker 4: our skepticism about the American political system comes out of Watergate.
Speaker 4: So there's some legal changes, but also more than anything,
Speaker 4: cultural changes.
Speaker 3: So is there anything that we haven't touched on that
Speaker 3: you think is particularly important or interesting for people to
Speaker 3: know about.
Speaker 4: I guess the one other thing about all this that
Speaker 4: sometimes gets overlooked is that, you know, Nixon gets his
Speaker 4: narrow election victory in nineteen sixty eight because of the
Speaker 4: Vietnam War, and all this is going on while the
Speaker 4: Vietnam War is going on. So Nixon wins in sixty eight.
Speaker 4: Probably he helped sink the nineteen sixty eight piece negotiations that
Speaker 4: Lyndon Johnson was trying to pull off in parts so
Speaker 4: he could say he would solve the problem. Although that's
Speaker 4: kind of stupid, like it'd be better off if Johnson
Speaker 4: solved the war, then he could have done the aftermath.
Speaker 4: But it certainly seems like Nixon sabotage that. And you know,
Speaker 4: he ran on this campaign of trying to end the
Speaker 4: Vietnam War, but he didn't, and if anything, the depending
Speaker 4: on papers which are about the war brought him down.
Speaker 4: And then he was completely distracted in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 4: seventy three, when the war in Vietnam was coming to
Speaker 4: its end, and also there was the war in the
Speaker 4: Middle East in nineteen seventy three, and you know, there
Speaker 4: was a story circulating for a long time. The Defense Secretary,
Speaker 4: James Slessinger and the Secretary of State, who by that
Speaker 4: point was Henry Kisten, had made a deal that one
Speaker 4: of them would always be in Washington in nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: three because Nixon was so out of control that he
Speaker 4: was drinking too much, he was constantly railing about his enemies,
Speaker 4: and they were worried that he would start a war
Speaker 4: trying to you know, change the subjects from Watergate. Now,
Speaker 4: Schlessinger later denied that that was the case, but Kissinger
Speaker 4: never denied it. And what's also clear is that it
Speaker 4: does appear that one of them was always in Washington
Speaker 4: in that time period, and that they also gave military
Speaker 4: commanders orders not to do anything without consulting with one
Speaker 4: of them to make sure that it wasn't just Nixon
Speaker 4: going off the rails. You know, that's what we were
Speaker 4: worried about. In January of twenty twenty one, you would
Speaker 4: Mark Milly basically said he was worried that Trump would
Speaker 4: try to start a war with Iran to distract from
Speaker 4: the election problem. And Mark Miller was reaching out to
Speaker 4: the Chinese to try to say to them, look, we're
Speaker 4: not going to start anything, you know, don't overreact, so
Speaker 4: you know, in some ways, it was the Vietnam War
Speaker 4: that destroyed Richard Nixon and made John Ford's presidency popular,
Speaker 4: and then Ford got left with the disaster that was
Speaker 4: the end of the Vietnam War. And while this isn't
Speaker 4: directly related to Watergate, it is pretty fascinating. One of
Speaker 4: my students wrote her book or dissertation that was published
Speaker 4: about human rights policy between the US and Socialist Republic
Speaker 4: of Vietnam, and one of the things she discovered in
Speaker 4: the archives was that it was Gerald Ford more than
Speaker 4: anybody who pushed to save the refugees at South Vietnam,
Speaker 4: and that Kissinger was doubtful about it, but Ford said,
Speaker 4: we owe these people. We need to get as many
Speaker 4: out of South Vietnam as possible if they want to
Speaker 4: get out to the United States. And it wouldn't have
Speaker 4: happened without him. And actually he was more of a
Speaker 4: defender of South Vietnamese human rights and Jimmy Carter, and
Speaker 4: that he fought hard, and that the reason why they're
Speaker 4: such a huge South Vietnamese community in the United States
Speaker 4: is that Ford said, we've got a moral obligation. It's
Speaker 4: pretty clear that he was a policy guy as president
Speaker 4: and did some very important things that maybe Nixon wouldn't
Speaker 4: have done.
Speaker 3: Thank you to Kirk Dorsey, chair of the History Department
Speaker 3: at the University of New Hampshire. I'm Toby Ball. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite show. For more
Speaker 3: information on rip Current, visit the show website at ripcurrentpod
Speaker 3: dot com.