WATERGATE? AS ZHOU ENLAI NEVER SAID ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, “TOO EARLY TO SAY:” Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned.

What have I learned in the 50 years since? Although we are a long way from the summer of 1974, the Watergate pieties haven’t changed, and the media retrospectives this week will likely be repeating all the clichés about saving America: “The system worked.” “No man is above the law.” But a genuine retrospective of Nixon and Watergate needs to be shorn of cant and caricatures, unburdened by the clockwork bromides of “crook” or “resigned in disgrace.”

I hope new generations are open to some different thinking—or at least a balanced treatment that goes beyond the story of bungling burglars and political damage control. It must include how the “Watergate affair” was also the culmination of Nixon’s political opponents’ long-yearned-for goal of destroying him. Nixon had a political target on his back from his congressional days of vanquishing the communist Alger Hiss, a favorite of Washington’s intellectual left. Through his entire presidency, Congress was controlled by opposition Democrats, with confrontation aggravated further by Nixon’s determination to end the Vietnam War he had inherited from the Kennedy and Johnson administration planners at the State and Defense departments.

Sen. Edward Kennedy set up the Senate Watergate Committee. Three months later John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign director of opposition research against Nixon, Archibald Cox, was hired as Watergate special prosecutor with a staff seeded from the ranks of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. The subsequent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, expressed concern in an internal memorandum that his chief deputy reflected “an attitude I discussed with you before—the subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost.”

Watergate scholar Geoff Shepard has unearthed further damning evidence that the special prosecutors had several unethical private meetings with Judge John Sirica in the absence of attorneys for Nixon and Watergate defendants—each violating the most basic legal protections. Nixon’s adversaries weren’t looking only for the truth. They were looking for a scalp.

As Glenn wrote last year, “Recent events have made me doubt the entire Watergate story.” Much more on that topic from him here: Nixon’s Revenge.

UPDATE: “Reconsidering United States v. Nixon,” from Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy.