Anniversaries have a way of refocusing our minds on an old subject. By setting a fresh pair of eyes on a familiar story, new insights are brought to the surface, especially when held up to the mirror of current events.
June 17 marked the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a crime that led to an investigation that brought down a president. It arrived as Congress held hearings into the behavior of our most recent ex-president, whose scheme to overturn the 2020 election results is drawing comparisons to Richard Nixon’s perfidy.
In this episode of History As It Happens, journalist and historian Garrett Graff discusses Watergate’s enduring significance as the nation absorbs revelations that President Trump pressured the Department of Justice to declare the 2020 election fraudulent.
The Jan. 6 committee hearings have shown Watergate and Mr. Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign may have more in common than first thought. Just as the Watergate break-in was only one piece in a larger criminal enterprise designed to help Nixon win the 1972 election, the events of Jan. 6 were the culmination of weeks of pressure by Mr. Trump and his supporters on state-level election officials and lawmakers to cancel President Biden’s victory.
Both schemes resulted from conspiratorial thinking on the part of the nation’s chief executive, but each had a different target, Mr. Graff said.
“What unites Nixon’s crimes is that they were crimes against the American people. They were abuses of power weaponizing the government against political enemies. Trump’s crime was a crime against democracy, and that is a very different order of magnitude of seriousness. It’s one where we need to wrestle with in a very different way than Richard Nixon,” said Mr. Graff, the author of “Watergate: A New History.”
Listen to Mr. Graff discuss whether Mr. Trump might be charged with a crime, as well as other similarities to the Watergate scandal, by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
