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Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
I haven't heard of him personally, do you have any recommendations for a podcast appearance of his? I'd be interested in learning more!
I do think Graff addresses a lot of these arguments. It is extremely unlikely that Nixon knew about the break-in plan or approved it in advance, though not impossible given that we don't actually no who gave the final go-ahead.
The "missing tape" gets a lot of attention in the book, and I'm not really convinced either way. Given the stuff that did come out on the other tapes, it seems odd to think that there was one 18 minute conversation worth erasing.
What's your position on the various other Nixonian controversies? One of the problems that Nixon had, in my mind, was the variety of other scandals hiding just under the surface of Watergate and the plumbers. The Milk Price Fixing, the Chennault affair, the Ellsburg break-in. The bombing of Cambodia was considered as a separate grounds for impeachment, but pulled to try to unite Republicans around Watergate.
So for example, he was hesitant to come clean and cut Hunt et al loose because he didn't want Hunt blabbing about the Ellsburg imbroglio, etc.
Reminiscent of today: Nixon might not have done what he was accused of, but he did a whole hell of a lot else.
Then again, he was a uniquely effective president in the 20th century. Arguably the most important president after FDR, despite having only one term and change before being disabled by Watergate.
The thing that bugs me about Nixon is one of the things he often gets a ton of credit for, a rapprochement with China, we can see with retrospect totally screwed us over. Why didn't we actually resolve the Taiwan issue? Because Nixon wasn't actually negotiating from a position of strength. He wanted the electoral glory of a deal.
And now, like 50 years later, we are really, really regretting not figuring out the Taiwan issue back when we actually had leverage (a seat at the UN security council is a big deal)
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I think the podcast was this one:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-1.php
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/07/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-2.php
Shepard covers this in chapter 11 of his book, available on libgen, if you are interested.
From reading Caro's LBJ series, Flynn's book on FDR, skimming Lasky's "It didn't start at Watergate", reading an establishment history of the FBI, etc, it seems like there was a much higher-level of criminality and dirty tricks in politics from FDR onward than what the American people were aware of. The FBI performing break-ins, for instance, was something they had been doing for a long-time. I remember talking to a Trump-hater about how he stank of corruption due to all his dealings with foreigners -- she had simply no idea of that this kind of stuff is par for the course for any modern elite, see the Clinton Foundation, or Bush dealings with the Saudi's, etc. I suspect that Nixon, like Trump, was actually more law-abiding than average because he knew he was in less of a position to work the system in his favor. That is why Nixon did not just simply destroy the tapes early on (and he did not destroy them because he thought he was innocent and thought there was nothing incriminating on them).
This is an interesting case because under classical international law a 'neutral' country forfeits its rights of sovereignty if it cannot prevent one of the fighting powers from using it as a base of operations. USA was fully justified in entering Cambodia to get the Vietcong. However, it certainly makes me queasy to use bombing to get the Vietcong, a method of warfare with a very high rate of collateral damage, especially when that collateral damage is on peasants in a country that wanted to stay out of the war. I'm not sure what I would have done if I was President in that situation. Maybe just build a big concrete wall from the sea all the way to the Mekong at the 17th parallel?
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Nixon is the classic unliked by insiders president. He won 49 states while losing 90%+ of the press.
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Archibald Cox was the special prosecutor, and a long-time Kennedy man with a lengthy history as an advocate of progressive thought, who'd then gone into private practice to further what he saw as Kennedy's civil rights and union legacy.
His appointment was weird, given that: the combination of extremely wide power and Being On The Other Team is not normally what you'd expect, given that he was appointed by Nixon's attorney general. The official story is that Elliot Richardson had gone through a list and Cox was the first who could even be persuaded to consider the appointment, at the same time that the (then-Democratic) Senate was threatening to assign a clearly-partisan investigator, but Richardson's role to go after Spiro Agnew gives a lot of space for conspiracy theories.
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Nixon's Attorney General appointed a Kennedy man, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor.
From Wikipedia:
Notice that last bit of editorializing by Wikipedia ... perhaps Nixon was actually genuinely earnest when he said '"get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."' because Nixon knew that Nixon was innocent and actually wanted the real criminals rooted out and for Nixon to be cleared.
Beyond that...the entire "east coast liberal establishment" hated Nixon, and so by default if you staff a team of aggressive lawyers in Washington you are going to staff it with east coast Ivy League liberals who hate Nixon and would love nothing more than to make a name for themselves by bringing down a president. So he was likely to get an office staffed with anti-Nixon partisans unless one specifically sought ought either conservative extremely principled neutral lawyers.
If we believe Shepard's story and sympathetic to Nixon, we would say that his Attorney General Richardson dramatically underestimated just how ruthless and Machieavelians the liberal-Democratic establishment would be. Richards expected a thorough investigation, but expected that they would still be playing it fair.
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So…is that credible?
Because it sounds a lot less likely than Nixon actually trying to cover it up.
I've never done a deep-dive on Watergate, I've never read competing accounts and compared who's footnotes are getting everything right versus who is being dishonest. I did do a deep-dive on Trump's Russia-gate scandal, and basically my conclusion was that Trump was innocent of any sort of "collusion" or obstruction of justice, albeit he did lie to the public on certain things and that the special prosecutor team was on a malicious fishing expedition. So I am predisposed to believe Shepard's account, that the same thing was done to Nixon.
From the limited amount of I've checked up on Shepard's account:
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