“I have never heard or seen such outrageous, vicious, distorted reporting in twenty-seven years of public life.” – The President
“I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. ‘One year of xxx is enough!'” – The President
“My research assistant had canvassed prominent constitutional scholars, and the consensus was that executive privilege was not applicable in impeachment trials.” – Tom Brokaw
Are the above comments about the recently concluded impeachment trial of President Trump? No, these are comments Tom Brokaw relates in his book “The Fall of Richard Nixon: A Reporter Remembers Watergate”
I was struck with how similar Nixon’s defense and reactions were to Donald Trump’s in both of their impeachment struggles. Brokaw gives a detailed and comprehensive account of 1974’s Watergate scandal in the book. Brokaw was a young reporter at the time assigned to the White House beat.
Whether you think Donald Trump is guilty or not of his actions regarding Ukraine I feel Brokaw’s book is worth reading to see the parallels between Watergate and the controversies of today. I personally wish that the Trump administration would have been open to having congressional testimony from key players and supporting documentation as Nixon was forced to do in Watergate. Then the truth about Ukraine would have come out, one way or another.
I was a teenager during most of the Watergate era so the book was a good refresher for me in what occurred during that time. In a way Watergate is a sad story, considering the good Nixon accomplished in other ways. “There does seem to be now more praise and awareness for Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the War on Cancer, Title IX (which expanded women’s rights), lowering the voting age to eighteen, and eliminating the draft, in addition to his diplomatic masterstroke in China and arms control treaties with the USSR in his first term,” Brokaw writes. “That roll call of accomplishment makes his participation, language on the tapes, and deceit in the long Watergate scandal all the more perplexing and unforgivable.”
“To this day, the essential question defies a rational answer: Why did the president’s men organize a nighttime invasion of the Democratic Party headquarters when they were so far ahead of George McGovern in all the polls?” Brokaw writes. The Fall of Richard Nixon doesn’t provide an answer, but leaves the readers to ponder that question for themselves.
