Instead of the Watergate legend raising the moral standing of the media, today deep distrust of the media has cast Watergate in a new light. So has the revelation that Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s key insider source, “Deep Throat,” was a man who aspired to the power once wielded byJ. Edgar Hoover and brought down the president who refused to make him director of the FBI.
Hoover was a man above the Constitution, thanks to his ability to intimidate and blackmail members of the elected government – Congress was afraid to touch him. Mark Felt believed he was entitled to what Hoover enjoyed, and when Nixon defied him, Felt, through Woodward and Bernstein, showed the president who really had the power to destroy whom.
An unelected government within the government ought to be the subject, not the sponsor, of media investigations. The relationship between the media and those parts of government in agreement with the liberal-leaning news industry’s own biases is a scandal unto itself. Nixon’s reputational recovery is the flipside of the media’s dwindling authority. Rising esteem for Nixon is reciprocal with the plummeting of newspaper circulations.
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance told an audience at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in June. Yet the Nixon saga isn’t ancient history: “If you look at the story of how the Deep State took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration,” the Vice President argued.
Nixon was a tragic figure – almost an American Macbeth. His story is human in a way that moves the young right, who have been subjected all their lives to stories that are mere ideological morality tales. It’s not Nixon’s ideology they admire; they admire him for not being easily reduced to inhuman “principles.”
* Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, and/or the NBC executives who likely told him that it might be a bit off-putting to ‘80s TV viewers if Alex P. Keaton was seen worshipping Ronald Reagan on a weekly basis might like a word here:
The OG Nixonmaxxer was GenX. https://t.co/76SLBUY6sa pic.twitter.com/Wyn4TTW1oK
— Christopher J. Scalia (@cjscalia) July 21, 2026