This is an election primer for anyone born after 1955, and that is most of you.
I was a second-year journalism student on Aug. 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as president of the United States. I remember a newsroom of very young journalism students huddled around televisions as the nation watched the end of a three-year scandal called Watergate.
It was a very different time. There was no internet, no websites, no Facebook, no Twitter, no iPhones, no blogs, no talk radio as we know it today and no 24-hour news cycle. No one screamed about media bias. Informed citizens read newspapers on real paper and listened to Walter Cronkite every night.
The series of events that led to Nixon’s resignation began on June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing the “Pentagon Papers,” the Defense Department’s secret account of the Vietnam War. Nixon was in the third year of his first term and beginning to gear up for his re-election campaign in 1972. On Sept. 3, a group of operatives that would become know as the “plumbers unit” – named for their orders from the White House to plug leaks in the administration – burglarized a psychiatrist’s office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. On June 17, 1972, five men, one of whom said he used to work for the CIA, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel and office complex.
Thus, the name of the scandal was born, and it was the beginning of the end for Nixon. He would resign 25 and a half months later, primarily due to the investigative reporting of two reporters at the Washington Post, as the media uncovered one part of a cover-up after another.
There are those who believe that today we are seeing the beginning of the next presidential crisis in America. And, yes, I said president because barring something that pollsters cannot identify, Hillary Clinton will be the president-elect Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning.
The crisis will not be all about emails. It will be about the Clinton Foundation and the web of influence, power and money that the Clintons have created since President Bill Clinton left the White House in January 2001. And, it will not take 25 months to come to a head. In the early 1970s, there were months between the reporting of events, and most of the early events in the timeline were placed inside the newspaper. In today’s internet-driven world where a lack of quality news reporting has been replaced with a frenzy to get something on air or in print, events as they are uncovered will move quickly and oftentimes be initially wrong.
So it behooves us on the eve of this unprecedented election where we will elect, no matter who wins, the most unpopular president in history, to look back to get perspective on where we are today. While Watergate centered on a sitting president and the controversy surrounding the Clintons is focused on a probable future president, there are parallels.
The obvious connection is that Watergate was the result of partisan politics designed to get Nixon re-elected; today, information critical of Hillary Clinton is based on partisan politics.
In 1972, America was a divided country, having come out of the turbulent 1960s and nearing the end of a 20-year war in Vietnam. Yet, Americans elected Nixon in November 1972 with a massive landslide where he won every state except Massachusetts. Today, with a country divided over many issues including long military campaigns in the Middle East and a near depression in 2008, President Obama enjoys impressive approval ratings from the American public.
On July 13, 1973, Alexander Butterfield, the former Nixon presidential appointments secretary, revealed in congressional testimony that since 1971 Nixon had recorded all conversations and telephone calls in his White House offices. Today’s tapes are Hillary’s emails from a private server stored in her home’s basement that detail how the former secretary of state handled national security documents. In addition, yesterday’s Nixon tapes are today’s WikiLeaks documents from the email of longtime Clinton supporter John Podesta that give insight into the goings-on in Clintonworld.
From the break-in at the Watergate to Nixon’s resignation, there were constant drips of information that came to light through the media about the administration. It was death by a thousand cuts as the spotlight shined brighter with every new revelation. Today, the drip is more like a fire hose as WikiLeaks sheds light with statements like campaign chairman Podesta saying that Clinton’s emails needs to be “dumped” on the same day the server was first revealed. And as more information continues to come from WikiLeaks, it adds a conspiracy tone to the deleting of 33,000 Clinton emails two days after a congressional subpoena was issued to preserve all documents relating to Clinton.
On Sept. 29, 1972, the Washington Post reported that John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats. Before he left the attorney general’s office, Mitchell had entertained a proposal from G. Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate burglars, to use prostitutes and electronic listening devices to get information from Democratic officials. He turned that proposal down but later approved giving Liddy and his co-conspirators $250,000 for the break-in and bugging of the DNC’s Watergate headquarters.
While space does not allow a detailed compilation, what is emerging is that today’s Justice Department, just like Nixon’s, may be complicit in protecting its candidate. One begins with the reality that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was first appointed as a federal prosecutor by then-President Bill Clinton. Currently, while there is a FBI investigation underway about the Clinton Foundation, according to the Wall Street Journal, it is Lynch’s former prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York office who denied the FBI the ability to inspect electronic devices of people like Clinton confidant Cheryl Mills for information about the foundation. Also, after FBI agents investigating the foundation requested to move their investigation to another attorney general’s office in New York, the request was denied by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to the Journal.
McCabe’s wife received more than $600,000 for a state senate race from PACs associated with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, one of the Clintons’ closest allies and a former board member of the foundation. Thus, while FBI Director Jim Comey is looking at the Huma Abedin emails for mishandling of classified information, perhaps the more important information may relate to the Clinton Foundation and ties to a play-for-play connection to former Secretary of State Clinton. If that is not enough, one of the Justice Department lawyers involved with the Clinton investigation, Peter Kadzik, is the former defense attorney for Podesta.
The burglary of the DNC offices at Watergate by political operatives connected to Nixon was a criminal act. Today, the Veritas Project of James O’Keefe shows video of political operatives saying they are connected directly to the current DNC and Clinton campaigns, alleging dirty tricks and voter fraud.
What those not familiar with Watergate may not realize is that the most explosive and dramatic congressional hearing in my lifetime was the Watergate hearing chaired by the late Sen. Sam Ervin, which began on May 18, 1973. The scandal was brought into our living rooms. It was this hearing that gave prominence to the political career of Tennessee’s Howard Baker. Today, intensive congressional hearings are a norm; if Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives on Tuesday, you can bet Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Rep. Trey Gowdy and others will hold weekly hearings relating to a now-President Hillary Clinton.
Just like the Nixon team, the associates around the Clintons are all intermingled among politics, jobs in government and the Clinton Foundation. Nixon had associates like Mitchell, Liddy, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, James McCord and John Dean who were associated with the administration and the campaign and who later either resigned or were convicted. Today, the Clintons’ world includes associates like Abedin, Podesta, Mills, Doug Band and Robby Mook, among others, who have intertwined relationships among the State Department, the presidential campaign and the foundation.
One of the most intriguing relationships is that of Abedin, who at one time was drawing a paycheck from the State Department, the foundation and a Doug Band company called Teneo. From the WikiLeaks emails, it is clear that Band’s consulting firm created incredible wealth for the former president and easily connected clients with the State Department and the foundation.
No one knows what the end result will be for a President Clinton, her famous husband and her associates. But we do know that President Nixon’s demise provides an outline of what may come. What is certain is that voters going to the polls on Tuesday need a historical perspective to attempt to digest all that has and will continue to be thrown at them in the days, weeks and months to come.
W. Davis Lundy is director of the Small Cities Coalition of Hamilton County, a former small business owner in Chattanooga and practicing journalist for 20 years.