The New York Times reports:

Vice President JD Vance downplayed the significance of the Watergate scandal during a speech on Thursday, saying that the controversy that toppled President Richard M. Nixon would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.

“The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance added, saying he had been joking backstage about the scandal before his appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Mr. Vance, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, compared himself to Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after his administration tried to cover up its involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

“Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Mr. Vance said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.” [Continue reading…]

Garrett Graff writes:

What I tried to do more than anything in my book [Watergate: A New History] is reframe Watergate from an “event” into a “mindset.” Instead, the Watergate burglary was really the loose thread that, once pulled, began the unraveling of ultimately a dozen or more other separate, specific, and distinct-but-related scandals with overlapping players, some of which we didn’t fully understand until the 2010s (and some of which weren’t placed in context until my book in 2022). As I list them in the book, the distinct scandals included: The Chennault Affair, the Huston plan, the Kissinger wiretaps and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, milk-price fixing, campaign “rat-fucking,” Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud. You could even add in some others — like illegal campaign donations from the CIA-funded Greek military junta in ’68.

The “story of Watergate” isn’t about a burglary — it’s about the paranoid and conspiratorial mindset that Richard Nixon brought to the White House and that, in turn, slowly poisoned his presidency as it permeated his whole administration. The challenge was that by the summer of 1972 that there were so many separate crimes and conspiracies underway inside the Nixon White House that no one could safely disentangle the Watergate break-in and bungling burglars — which was ironic, of course, because there really is no evidence to believe that Nixon knew about that particular crime in advance.

But to think that the Watergate break-in was some odd, discreet, and minor scandal is to ignore its origins as we now understand them: Nixon couldn’t cut the burglars loose in 1972 because they’d been part of the 1971 planning for a burglary that Nixon is actually on the White House tapes personally ordering — the 1971 firebombing of the Brookings Institution! — which, in turn, Nixon wanted in hopes of covering-up his 1968 participation in the still opaque Chennault Affair, which represents one of the only instances of credible treason allegations in US history, as he and his campaign manager John Mitchell stalled and interfered with the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War to help his presidential campaign.

I became convinced in my research that the Watergate-era mantra “The cover-up is worse than the crime,” the belief that it was Nixon’s bungling efforts to cover-up this minor break-in that forced his impeachment and resignation, is actually completely wrong. The crimes were worse than the cover-up; Nixon’s crimes were the worst we’ve ever seen by a president until the present era. Sure, there are some legitimate questions and evidence that we don’t still understand the full motives and knowledge about the burglary itself, but the accumulated crimes of Nixon’s presidency by 1972 were shocking. [Continue reading…]