When JD Vance spoke at the Richard M. Nixon presidential library last week about his new book on his journey from atheism to an allegedly devout Catholicism, he raised eyebrows by minimizing Watergate. “The idea that it [took] down a presidency is crazy,” he said. He claimed it was the “deep state that took down Richard Nixon” – not the 37th president’s implication in serious crimes.
Vance's Revisionist Claims
Commentators were shocked. Did the vice-president not know that the investigation proved Nixon directed a conspiracy to bribe the men who broke into the Democratic party headquarters to lie in court from a secret, illegal slush fund? When the president’s lawyer John Dean tried to warn him away from the attempt by suggesting it would take a million dollars that they would have to launder – “this is the sort of thing mafia people can do” – Nixon reassured him that the mafia had nothing on him: “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.”
Vance’s blithe avowal was said by commenters to represent a new low in Republican cynicism. But historian Rick Perlstein argues that Republicans have always said that – ever since Nixon’s first speech on Watergate in April 1973.
Reagan's Early Defense
At that time, a prominent Republican ally called the break-in a prank, saying it was part of the “usual atmosphere of campaigning” and that the culprits were “not criminals at heart.” That ally was then-California Governor Ronald Reagan, speaking at a reception for a visiting group of students. The media mocked him. The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker was enraged at how an “exponent of law and order” had surrendered to the philosophy that safeguards “that ‘we’ support and revere in ordinary times must be suspended or limited for the duration – but only for ‘them’.”
Reagan did not listen. After it was revealed that Nixon secretly taped many of the people he met, he called the investigation a “witch-hunt” and a “lynching.” After Nixon gave a speech insisting there wasn’t even anything to cover up, only 25% of Americans believed him. But Reagan called it “the voice of reason.”
Reagan's Political Rise
Reagan’s own anguished political aides had enough. They leaked to columnists their anguish that efforts to promote him for the presidency as “the successful architect of clean, frugal government, free of scandal” were being stymied by their boss’s insistence on treating the conspirators as “no worse than double parkers.” But they were wrong. In Perlstein's 2014 book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, he demonstrates it was precisely Reagan’s ability to rhetorically absolve his fellow Republicans of sin that made him so attractive to the conservative rank and file – so much so that he came shockingly close to defeating incumbent Gerald Ford for the party’s presidential nomination in 1976.
A Long Line of Minimizers
Reagan was hardly the only figure to rise in the Republican firmament this way. One Nixon White House aide, Pat Buchanan, testified to the Senate investigating committee that its very investigation was merely politics by other means: the liberal Washington establishment working to steal back the White House after Nixon won it fair and square with his 1972 landslide. He was rewarded with a widely syndicated column and became such a conservative hero that in 1992 he made a shockingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary against George H.W. Bush – himself a professional Watergate minimizer in his role as RNC chair.
A steady stream of books spin conspiracies that anyone but the president’s men were behind it: the CIA (Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda, 1984); a Silent Coup (Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, 1992) executed by Dean himself to hide a prostitution ring run by his wife; or The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (Geoff Shepard, 2008). Shepard then published two more tomes elaborating his version of the plot, in 2015 and 2021, and wrapped them up in a 2024 documentary that’s proven highly influential in the young MAGA circles in which JD Vance moves.
Cultural Impact of Minimization
A book called It Didn’t Start With Watergate (1977) dubiously elevated peccadilloes from past Democratic presidents to a Nixonian level of equivalency, and even claimed Democratic party foreknowledge – and indifference – to the 1972 burglary. It proved so influential that the phrase “everyone did it, Nixon got caught” became an American commonplace. Perhaps the most influential contributor was William Safire, who as a New York Times columnist invented the technique of affixing the suffix “-gate” to a series of conspicuously sub-Watergate scandals involving Democrats, from “Vancegate” to “Monicagate.”
“Everyone does it – a damned good thing, too, more brazen Republicans avowed, at least when it’s the right people doing it,” Perlstein writes. “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate,” intoned legendary conservative movement activist M. Stanton Evans at a conference during George W. Bush’s presidency, after Perlstein presented a litany of Republican rule-breaking. Evans meant that Watergate convinced him that Nixon finally understood that “we” will not be safe until “we” crack down on “them.”
Vance's Place in the Lineage
That spirit, Perlstein argues, is behind almost everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. As for his No. 2 man, Vance also said at the Nixon library: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.” One reason he is probably correct, Perlstein concludes, is precisely that unbroken lineage of Watergate propaganda he has just joined.
