Nixon – More Than Just Watergate?

Hi, everybody. My name is Dr Kevin You'll.

I am associate professor of American history at the University of Sunderland,

and I'm going to talk to you today about Richard Nixon, who is a fascinating,

enigmatic character who I think bears more scrutiny than he gets.

The first thing I'm going to talk about is

about how Nixon is more than just Watergate.

When we hear the word Nixon,

we tend to think of Watergate.

We tend to think of the plumbers of Deep Throat of all of these

parts of the scandal that happened in the early 19 seventies with Richard Nixon,

and we use the word gate as a suffix for almost all scandals these days.

Um,

and I think it's a very, very important thing, and I am going to come back to it.

But I also think that Nixon should be understood in his own terms,

and not simply in terms of the greatest scandal that has ever hit

the United States presidency.

So just to remind everybody of what the Watergate scandal is,

five men were caught breaking into the

Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D. C.

On June 17th, 1972.

So with a minor story,

really in the in the until the Washington Post dug deeper and found a

connection that all of the men who had been arrested had with Richard Nixon,

it relied on the evidence of Mark Felt, who rather Fascinatingly in 2005,

shortly before he died,

revealed himself as the deep throat source that was subject to so much speculation.

Uh, in the 19 seventies and and really since then, uh,

this was the source that gave all of the details to The Washington Post to the

two reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for

their their work in uncovering the Watergate scandal

and what we found very interesting.

This man, Mark Felt, was the associate director of the FBI,

and it gives you some indication of the relationship of

many of the institutions of government with Richard Nixon.

At that time, it was tenuous. It was uncertain.

Richard Nixon trusted nobody, and nobody trusted Richard Nixon.

So we had Mark felt giving information the FBI had heavily infiltrated.

Mark Felt was the associate director of the FBI, uh, second only to J.

Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the FBI, the rather, uh,

famous director of the FBI and, um, who was revealed.

And Mark Felt was revealed only as a source in in 2005. But the J. Edgar Hoover was the

went back.

Uh, he was the director of the FBI right from its inception in the 19 twenties,

and he had a reputation for being able to control presidencies.

Richard Nixon had attempted to, um, retire. Uh, this this gentleman J.

Edgar Hoover, and J.

Edgar Hoover, of course, had everything on everybody and could bug anybody.

And, uh, there's a lot of evidence that, for instance, the FBI infiltrated

the Nixon White House, but Nixon brought himself down. There is no question of that.

And I think it was a little bit like a Shakespearean

tragedy where Nixon alienated many of the people around him.

Uh, 48 people 48 officials were convicted of wrongdoing during this period of time,

and the FBI brought the the whole thing down.

And it's this Shakespearean tragedy with Nixon sort of alienating one and

disassociating himself to one of the people who

are extraordinarily loyal to him were given up,

and suddenly then Nixon was all on his own.

Before he had to resign in August of 1974

Nixon had introduced a very fascinating, um uh, system of of taping, which went on.

And it's the most extensive taping that

has taken place in the presidency before because

of technology or since because of the whole Nixon White House and the scandal.

And so you can understand that Nixon had wanted to tape everything,

and it was very warts and all, uh, it had him with being foul mouth,

berating various different people a little bit like

what Donald Trump does in his ordinary emails.

Uh, Nixon did, uh, in on the tapes.

But Nixon also had, for instance,

racially bigoted discussions about various different groups,

including Jews and blacks.

Um, and this was with his aides.

Uh, it was similar.

Johnson, uh, the previous Lyndon Johnson, the the predecessor to Richard Nixon.

It also had a taping system.

But technology had not quite got to the stage

where it was easy to tape every single conversation.

So one of the tapes

recorded soon after the break in demonstrated that Nixon had

been told of the White House connection to the Watergate

burglaries soon after they took place and revealed the discussions

that Nixon had had to try and cover up.

And the scandal is, of course, really about covering up rather than anything else.

So the smoking gun tape, as it was known, was released on August 5th, 1974

and precluded five days later,

Nixon became the first president in history to resign.

It was an ignominious and humiliating end to an interesting president.

There's no question that Nixon should be at the bottom of historians,

as he usually is historians.

Presidential rating.

Nixon was not simply grossly incompetent like, for instance,

Harding or ineffectual like Jimmy Carter is accused of being.

But he committed a crime in office, and he deserves, uh,

to be at the very bottom of the presidency table.

I think that's not to say that these kind of crimes don't happen

in office.

There was evidence, for instance, that JFK even ordered, for instance,

taping of various different people, uh, within his office.

And um,

you know that he didn't commit similar

crimes in taping various different people,

certainly ordered the taping of Martin Luther King and cooperated

with the FBI when they were attempting to discredit King.

But the key thing is Richard Nixon was caught. He committed a crime in office.

There was no worse president in the history of the presidency.