Quote of the Day (Bill Moyers, on a Prior Presidential ‘Arrogant Disregard for the Rule of Law’)

“There in brief is the Watergate morality embedded in the Nixon White House—belief in the total rightness of the official view of reality and an arrogant disregard for the rule of law, the triumph of executive decree over due process. By arbitrarily and secretly invoking the national security, the President or his men can nullify the Bill of Rights and turn the Constitution into a license for illegitimate conduct. The President is set above ordinary standards of right or wrong. What's right is what works. And he alone decides what that is. One man, in effect, becomes the state. It was close. It almost worked. And it would have changed things for keeps: the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged. The President would have been free to dictate the popular morality for his own ends. And we would have been at the mercy of unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules. It was close. It almost worked. But not quite. Something basic in our traditions held.”— American journalist, political commentator, and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers (1934-2025), “An Essay on Watergate,” Bill Moyers’ Journal, original air date Nov. 7, 1973, directed by Jack Sameth

I was fortunate enough to meet Bill Moyers at a local promotional event for Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft—one of his book/PBS series tie-ins in which he interviewed cultural figures such as Joseph Campbell. He signed my copy of this particular book, and immediately followed up with a response to a question I had asked about the source of a quote.

Late last month, when I heard about Moyers’ death, I realized with a shock that I hadn’t heard about him for a while. His commentaries had become lower-profile, largely confined to his Website, after his retirement from PBS in 2015.

That year, I remembered with a start, coincided with Donald Trump’s descent down the escalator at Trump Tower and into a political arena that he quickly defiled more than many of us dreamed possible. 

I badly missed Moyers’ soft-spoken, earnest, but piercing insights into the culture of Washington and what the changes about to ensue in American life meant for the survival of the republic.

The memories forged in youth endure the longest. So it was for me, as, I suspect, for many others, in my first exposure to Moyers—not as the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson (a tenure that began 60 years ago this month), but in my early teens, watching Bill Moyers’ Journal.

From his time in government, and even as part of major news organizations (Newsday, PBS, CBS), Moyers knew how addictive power could be. He was hardly a naif, giving, for instance, the go-ahead to the ethically dubious “mushroom cloud” commercial used against Barry Goldwater in LBJ’s 1964 Presidential race.

But, as a Baptist deacon's son and ordained minister himself, he also recognized that at some point, it was necessary to one’s soul to cease participating in evil. When he couldn’t continue defending a Vietnam War policy he knew to be wrong, he resigned after only a year as press secretary, even if it meant incurring his boss’s wrath to the end of the Johnson’s life.

“An Essay on Watergate” outlined in detail, through conversations with Presidential historians, how LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, sought to expand the prerogatives of his office as a means of striking at his enemies. 

But neither Johnson nor Nixon could even conceive of the lengths to which Donald Trump would defy the Constitution, trampling norms and pushing, pushing, pushing against laws, daring Congress and the courts to rein him in.

What Moyers warned could have come to pass had Watergate gone undetected and unpunished—" the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged,” not to mention “unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules”—has occurred with Trump’s second coming to power.

In a 2022 podcast interview with Dr. Bandy See, Moyers laid out a case for how a notably psychologically disturbed Trump had posed a threat to the Constitution. 

But fewer people were aware of this discussion compared with the audience he could reach in his years on television—and it’s a sign of our political fragmentation that, even if he had reached the old numbers, many people would not have paid attention to the message.

Such is the plight of our time—or, as the biblically conscious Moyers would have known, a prophet is without honor in his own country.

(The image accompanying this post shows Bill Moyers speaking with attendees at a special screening and discussion of his documentary, "Rikers: An American Jail", at the First Amendment Forum at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ. It was taken Apr. 19, 2017, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

Flashback, March 1974: Nixon Imperiled as Watergate ‘Unindicted Co-Conspirator’

A 50-page grand jury report in early March 1974 shattered the relative calm that had descended on Washington after Richard Nixon had appointed Leon Jaworski four months earlier as the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal.

Nixon may have felt that at last, the firestorm ignited by the firing of Jaworski’s predecessor, Archibald Cox, and the resignations of Attorney General Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus in protest during the “Saturday Night Massacre” had settled down.

He had stated in the annual State of the Union message that “one year of Watergate is enough,” and Jaworski’s crackdown on leaks from his office even as he sifted through evidence surrounding the coverup of the June 1972 break-in at Democratic national headquarters allowed the President to catch his breath and believe that he could hold onto his office.

But the sealed grand jury report altered the political atmosphere immediately, as noted by New Yorker reporter Elizabeth Drew, in in one of the best contemporary accounts of the crisis that drove Nixon from office, Washington Journal:

“Even though the indictment was expected, it came as a hammer blow. That keeps happening: the impact of the actual event is sharper and more disturbing than was anticipated. We can anticipate the facts but not their impact, their emotional reverberations. So we are unnerved when seven former Administration and reelection-committee officials—including the President’s closest associates, men who held great power—are indicted.”

Those figures included Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and special counsel Charles Colson, all of whom were convicted for their role in the affair.

But the big bombshell was contained in a bulging briefcase that passed from the jury to Judge John Sirica, then to the House Judiciary Committee: the naming of Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case—a dubious first for the American Presidency.

The President’s career was in mortal danger now, as Capitol Hill had been notified that his involvement in the coverup was extensive—enough that it might constitute evidence that he had committed the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that could trigger impeachment.

The question at the heart of Watergate—is the President above the law?—was now posed inescapably.  It would not be answered clearly even with the resignation of Nixon, once his political support had evaporated, five months later.

His pardon by successor Gerald Ford left an imperfect denouement, with the President out of office but never having been brought to trial, let alone found guilty by a jury (though Ford would emphasize that the pardon constituted admission of wrongdoing).

Even before then, however, the case had, to some extent, been clouded with ambiguity. Though impeachment had been mentioned in the Constitution, that document had been silent on whether the President could be indicted.

In fact, as related in Win McCormack’s article in the March 2024 New Republic, the answer had developed out of another investigation of the time, involving bribery charges against Spiro Agnew.

The Vice-President had moved to sidestep the investigation into his conduct as governor of Maryland (with, as it turned out, Agnew continuing his larcenous ways as he moved into the nation’s second-highest office) by demanding a trial by the Senate.

The Justice Department had wanted a determination that the Vice President could be indicted. The Veep, every bit as corrupt as Nixon but more bombastic and less capable than the President, would otherwise be left in charge with his own corruption charges pending if Nixon were indicted.

Left unsaid by Richardson and his lieutenants but clearly implied, however, was that the wish for a finding that though a Veep could be indicted, a sitting President could not.

While Jaworski was eager to accept this solution, many in the group of prosecutors he had inherited from Cox were not. Jill Wine-Banks, for instance, a young assistant prosecutor, disagreed with her boss.

A few years ago, in promoting her memoir, Watergate Girl, she pointed out the injustice of Nixon’s men going to jail while their boss suffered no such penalty.

The makeshift solutions meant to ensure, as the cliché of the time went, that “the system worked” were not without critics even then, as Wine-Bank’s example demonstrates.

Americans' tendency to forgot (or, for some youngsters, never learn) their history has meant that many might even regard the scandal, in the dismissive phrase of Nixon press secretary Ronald Ziegler, as a "third-rate burglary."

Drew's account offers a useful reminder of why the crisis involved far more than a mere break-in, even that it wasn't simply that "the coverup was worse than the crime":

"The problem for the White House, as we keep learning, was that there was so much to cover up. The break-in at the Watergate combined the elements of covert operations, espionage, secret funds, hidden contributions, and aggression against political opponents (real and perceived) which also characterized other activities carried out under the Administration.”

But, in deciding to review Donald Trump’s claim of Presidential immunity from prosecution, the Supreme Court may well make a greater hash of things than occurred in 1974 under Chief Justice Warren Burger, when the justices' unanimous decision might have  upheld the doctrine of executive privilege but not in the case of a criminal prosecution.

In contrast, now the court contains one associate justice (Clarence Thomas) whose wife connived behind the scenes to keep Trump in power—a conflict of interest if there ever was one.

The End of the ‘Consensus Churchman’: Billy Graham and the Evangelicalism He Left Behind

Recently, idly watching Chris Hayes’ “All In,” I was dumbstruck by a guest as startling in his inanity as in his moral obtuseness.

Amid credible claims about Donald Trump’s affairs with a porn star and a Playmate (not to mention more than a dozen women who had accused the President of inappropriate advances), David Brody, a Chief Political Correspondent for CBN News from the Christian Broadcasting Network and author of The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography, told MSNBC viewers about the “spiritual journey” on which Trump had been engaged in the last dozen years.

I could hardly blame Hayes for grinning as he concluded the interview by observing that if Trump had been on a spiritual journey, then “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” 

The exchange made me wonder, as I have done increasingly in the weeks after the passing of the Rev. Billy Graham, at age 99, how the late televangelist would have responded to that moment of television and to the larger moment in which the evangelical movement he led now finds itself. For Trump’s “Christian Soldiers,” as Amy Sullivan called them in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, show every sign of following the President into a spiritual valley of death.

More responsible than perhaps any other religious figure of the past century for leading this movement away from cultural irrelevance and toward political engagement, Graham found his moral authority weakest when he came closest to the center of power, as what George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has called “the uncritical priest to the powerful.” 

Luckily, when he sensed he had made a grave mistake, Graham’s tendency was to pull back and retrench. Without that same reflex, the evangelical movement risks losing the gains he spent years to achieve.

Graham’s death carried an echo of a far-off time and place often viewed with nostalgia: America in the early postwar period. For all the talk of a nuclear-generated “age of anxiety,” it was also a time when a broad swath of the nation’s intellectuals and politicians leaders united against the Soviet threat. 

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. hailed this ascendant “end of ideology,” and that political trend increasingly carried over into the religious sphere. The last honor accorded to Graham—i.e., being only the fourth civilian ever to lie in state in the Capitol—testifies not only to his being what longtime religious commentator Kenneth L. Woodward “America’s Preacher,” but also to his instinct to console rather than to confront, to wield his mighty ministry by the smooth handle.

It’s easy to understand Graham’s appeal. There were his good looks, with a sharp bone structure and piercing eyes that gave him the nobility of an eagle; a resonant voice that could reach every of a hall and every corner of a listener’s consciousness; and a vocabulary that could be understood by anybody.

Youthful work as a salesman prepared Graham for his calling in a way he could never imagine. Nothing else mattered if he could not even get through the door of a potential convert. Whether selling mops or Jesus, Graham wouldn’t stop until he’d ingratiated himself with virtually everyone.

Onstage, all of that made him a commanding figure. Offstage, in the 60 years of his active ministry, it was nearly impossible to find anyone who did not remark on his friendliness and humility. Not surprisingly, “America’s Pastor” came into his own in the administration of “America’s Grandfather,” Dwight Eisenhower. 

The Spiritual Trap of Accommodating and Obeying Authority

Garry Wills might have had that President in mind when he wrote, in Under God, of the “golf-course spirituality” that extended in the Fifties from the corporate boardroom to the White House. That instinct, the historian sensed nearly 40 years later, was “becoming restless and spiritually adventurous,” and Graham ended up giving it a channel and outlet, a quarter century after the Scopes Trial had confined evangelicalism into a narrow, precarious space.

The access to power needed to facilitate that reversal required Graham to accommodate authority and to overlook moral lapses he might not have done under normal circumstances. If the charge sounds familiar, it should: It is the same one that liberals have made, more loudly, bitterly, and with greater justification, about the Religious Right’s transactionally based embrace of Donald Trump.

You hear faint echoes of this liberal rage in the counter-image of Graham that has persisted since close to the start of his ministry. They might have been primed to do so when they saw one of his initial public supporters: publisher William Randolph Hearst, the arch-conservative aging Yellow Journalist who, after attending one of Graham’s early crusades incognito, reportedly wired his editor, “Puff Graham.” 

At that time, one very prominent liberal was disobliged to assist: In 1950, annoyed by the 32-year-old preacher’s intimation to reporters that he had spiritually counseled him, Harry Truman called Graham “counterfeit.” (The President and the preacher later reconciled.) 

In the immediate aftermath of Graham’s death, one of my Facebook friends likened him to Seth Pecksniff, the self-serving, sanctimonious hypocrite of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit, who resembled “a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there."

At that height of the televangelist’s influence, that adaptability annoyed more than a few secular liberals, best exemplified by Philip Roth, who evoked him first as an unnamed “Spiritual Coach” and then as The “Reverend Billy Cupcake” in a bitter satire on the Nixon Administration, Our Gang. 

The name “Cupcake” signifies the suspicion that there was something soft and gooey about the preacher that manifested itself as an obsequiousness that encouraged Richard Nixon’s worst instincts. (“Mr. President, if I may, in your eagerness to do the right thing for the nation…”) It took the form of meaningless gush in the (barely) fictional minister’s sermon style: 

“I read a letter only three weeks ago Thursday that a radical young person wrote to his girlfriend disparaging and scoffing and laughing at the leaders of this world. Now he may laugh. They laughed at Jeremiah, you know. They laughed at Lot. They laughed at Amos. They laughed at the Apostles. In our own time they laughed at the Marx Brothers. They laughed at the Ritz Brothers. They laughed at the Three Stooges. Yet these people became our top entertainers and earned the love and affection of millions. There are always the laughers and the scoffers. You know there used to be a top tune in all the jukeboxes called ‘I'm Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside.’ And I read an article in a news magazine only Sunday before last by one of our top psychologists which says that eighty-five percent— eighty-five percent!—of those of those who laugh on the outside cry on the inside because of their personal unhappiness.”

Roth was hardly through with Graham and the hypocritical politician he counseled. The quote above came from the Rev. Cupcake’s eulogy for “Trick E. Dixon.” A generation later, after the real Nixon passed away, in a case of real life imitating fiction, Graham did speak at the President’s funeral, and in I Married a Communist the novelist evoked a tableau of a half-century of political posturing and intellectual slumbering, witnessed by a morally blind preacher:

“[The] whole funeral of our thirty-seventh president was barely endurable. The Marine Band and Chorus performing all the songs designed to shut down people’s thinking and produce a trance state: ‘Hail to the Chief’, ‘America’, ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, and, to be sure, that most rousing of all those drugs that make everybody momentarily forget everything, the national narcotic, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Nothing like the elevating remarks of Billy Graham, a flag-draped casket, and a team of interracial pallbearing servicemen – and the whole thing topped off by ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, followed hard on by a twenty-one gun salute and ‘Taps’ – to induce catatonia in the multitude.”

At the time he wrote these books, Roth did not realize exactly how close Graham was to Nixon, but even the public record existing to that time was enough. The novelist’s satire on this subject was already Swiftian; it is impossible to imagine what he might have done once other facts came to light.

For instance, Graham had nearly gotten called out in 1960 for secretly organizing a group of Protestant leaders in Houston to get out the vote for Nixon (in the name of “religious liberty,” or thinly veiled code for traditional Protestant suspicions of Catholicism in power), after having assured reporters that he’d be on the sidelines in the Nixon-Kennedy contest. Only his absence in Switzerland led the press from laying principal responsibility at the feet of Graham rather than the on-the-scene scapegoat, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale.

Yet Graham was hardly done with Nixon, and the latter’s Presidency led the minister to the lowest moments in his career. Watergate mortified Graham almost as much as Nixon. Though the minister seemed more shocked by the profanity expressed on the tapes than the crimes authorized, he realized that his naivete had led to him being used, and he drew back thereafter from anything that could be regarded as frank support for one candidate or party. 

(The essential wisdom of his concern for how closeness to Nixon could harm his reputation was confirmed in 2002, when the National Archives released non-Watergate audiotapes revealing Graham remarks that encouraged rather than challenged Nixon’s anti-Semitism. “They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country,” Graham said in criticizing what he saw as excessive Jewish influence on the media. When the remarks saw the light of day, Graham immediately—and correctly—apologized.)

Why had Graham come continually to grief over Nixon? It wasn’t simply that he shared elements of the President’s conservatism—Graham’s wife Ruth was as conservative, if not more so, than her husband, but she had displayed remarkable foresight in warning him about being perceived as too close to any one party. 

I don’t think it was just, as Graham thought, a matter of his naivete overthrowing his caution, nor even desire for access where he could preach his vision of salvation. I think it was Graham’s own narrow notion of the Christian relation to authority.

“I'm for change,” Graham said in introducing Nixon to a congregation of 88,000 in Knoxville at a 1970 “Crusade,” “but the Bible teaches us to obey authority.” 

Graham may have had in mind Romans 13 (“All of you must obey those who rule over you. There are no authorities except the ones God has chosen”). Yet this invocation not only ignored the origins of the Protestant revolt against the papacy, but also far more extensive biblical documentation about men of the Bible who spoke out against authority, often at enormous danger to themselves, such as the prophets Jeremiah, Daniel, Amos, and Joel.

That path was seldom Graham’s. Hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, a Mormon multimillionaire, regarded Graham as “the leading religious man of our time”—especially, Marriott explained, “because he is non-controversial.”

The limits of that approach could be found in Graham’s attitude toward the civil-rights movement. For his own crusades, Graham insisted on nonsegregated seating and on hiring more African-American staffers—and, most dramatically, publicly welcoming Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his 1957 “crusade.”

Yet he found it enormously difficult to push toward anything further that might anger sizable portions of his congregation. In 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, the protests King organized unnerved Graham, leading him to urge the civil-rights leader to "put the brakes on." 

King’s response, Letter From a Birmingham Jail, rained its rhetorical thunderbolts not so much at recalcitrant racists such as Sheriff “Bull” Connor but at well-meaning white minister friends such as Graham who urged a restraint on the movement not being exercised by the other side. 

Replacing a Fallible Giant

After the turn of the millennium, Graham’s increasing absence from the public sphere, hastened by the infirmities of old age, allowed other ministers to step forward—including his son Franklin—who lacked his tendency toward consensus. 

At times, that penchant left Graham unable or unwilling to push his broad audience much beyond where he thought it would go, subverting his prophetic witness. But that same instinct restrained him from the worst excesses of the evangelical movement in the last few decades.

Many of those who followed him into this ministry wandered off his well-worn pathways, plunging the movement into darkness. In the immediate postwar period, the evangelical movement could have done far worse than Graham—and, as time has worn on, that is precisely what has happened, again and again.

In 1973, the same year that Graham, profoundly uneasy over the Watergate crimes of the President he had most befriended, Richard Nixon, began to pull back from overt partisanship, a new generation of evangelical preachers—dismayed by a Supreme Court ruling against a segregationist religious educational institution, Bob Jones University—rushed to fill the vacuum by becoming the vanguard of the “New Right.”

Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their ilk exerted their new-found political strength on the broadest possible front—not just “culture war” issues such as abortion but also matters with far less of a clear moral component, such as the Panama Canal Treaty—matters that Graham would have been far more reluctant to weigh in on, even before he had not been burned by his association with Nixon. In the past year, evangelical conservatives have not only become soiled by backing Trump--who has not even met the character tests they applied so rigorously (and yes, rightly) to Bill Clinton--but by supporting Judge Roy Moore for the Senate.

In the end, Graham may have been more important for what he was not—what other evangelicals all too easily became—than for what he actually represented:

*He was not Elmer Gantry, all too readily addicted to the flesh. The “Graham Rule”—i.e. not to be alone in a room with a woman not one’s wife—has been given additional currency in the past few years by one of its professed adherents, Vice-President Mike Pence. But Graham’s zeal to avoid even the appearance of temptation did not stop there. According to Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy’s 2007 biography, The Preacher and the Presidents, Graham had other associates traveling with him on the road case his room first, to ensure that “no overeager fan or tabloid bait” was there already.

*He did not lay his hands on donor contributions. Not only immune to the sexual temptations that might have led him to succumb to blackmail attempts, but also personally frugal, Graham was doubly armed against living high off the donations that came his way. But a newspaper article rich in innuendo led him to require all his employees--and him—to publicly disguise their salaries. 

*He did not incite hatred against minorities. The same could not be said about son Franklin, who, after 9/11, darkly warned about the “wicked” religion of Islam, and then, two years later, as the U.S. plunged into its Iraq quagmire, said bluntly that “the God of Islam is not the same God” worshiped by Christians and Jews.

The skills and failings that Graham displayed as he ascended to a wider stage can best be appreciated by setting him against two other preachers who vaulted to a position of prominence in the Fifties: Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

While Graham helped found one of the principal intellectual forums for evangelicalism, Christianity Today, his own preaching was not designed to reach listeners at an intellectual level. In contrast, Sheen frequently referred to philosophers in his talks, so that audiences had the various sense, through him, that they had wrestled with serious critiques of their faith before embracing it again.

As for King, he was “able to maintain his distance, his prophetic distance, from power and from the lures of power,” noted Rev. Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion, on the PBS documentary series God in America. His willingness to cooperate with the White House on civil-rights legislation had its limits; but his unwillingness to simply go along with whatever it asked actually increased his leverage, as both Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson knew they had to come through for him.

The loneliest position he may ever have taken might have been his full-throated, uncompromising opposition to the Vietnam War—a move that not only earned LBJ’s wrath but split the civil-rights movement. 

It is inconceivable that the Rev. Graham would have risked anything of similarly high import. He aimed for the broad middle of American spiritual life, a ground that shifted and split due to the culture wars even before he retired.

Dangling Conversations: Scandals, Tapes, and Two Presidencies in the Balance

Forty-five years ago this past week, after the discovery of what his press secretary dismissed as a “third-rate burglary,” Richard Nixon told Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman that the CIA should head off the investigation by telling the FBI to stay away from it. The conversation, long sought by the special prosecutor of the scandal, was caught on a tape that, when revealed, became the “smoking gun” that ended Nixon’s Presidency.

Watergate was without parallel in American history. It was unlike even the two scandals that subsequently caught three Presidents in their messy coils: Iran-contra, in which figures associated with Ronald Reagan and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush attempted to create a government within a government, and Monicagate, in which Bill Clinton paid for an intern’s sexual service not with money but with public mortification, disrupted family life, and the near loss of his job.

Yet these scandals, which involved special prosecutors like those who investigated Nixon, did not hinge on taping systems that could prove or disprove sworn testimony implicating a President in misdeeds. After seeing Nixon brought low by them, nobody thought that another President would have them or even hint at having them. 

Only a fool with no political background, let alone a sense of history, would be capable of that, and such a person could never occupy the Oval Office.

Enter Donald Trump. 

Many people whose careers touched on Watergate—notably, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—have warned that it is premature to compare the scandal that undid Nixon with the one now afflicting his GOP successor several times removed. True, it is still early in this investigation, and Nixon and Trump differ markedly in experience, intellect and even temperament.

But when all is said and done, it is extraordinary how loudly the once-faint echoes of Watergate are reverberating now. The question of White House taping systems alone proves the old adage that history doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell recently pointed out that the same legal issue that brought down Nixon—use of the CIA to stop the investigation of a crime before it could get fairly started—had now emerged as a crucial matter in Trump’s massive political distraction.

The Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats informed associates that Trump had urged him and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers to intervene with Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser. In sworn Senate testimony, Coats and Rogers would only say they had never felt “pressured to intervene or interfere,” while skating away from the more direct, specific question of whether Trump requested that they downplay any possible collusion between his campaign and the Russian government.

Words and context matter, as O’Donnell pointed out in drawing attention to the fateful Nixon-Haldeman conversation on June 23, 1972. You can read the whole transcript of that tape here, but, for our purposes, I thought that this substantial excerpt would throw several points in sharp relief:

Haldeman: “Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to the-in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because [Director L. Patrick] Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them, and they have, their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money, not through the money itself, but through the bank, you know, sources – the banker himself. And, and it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go. Ah, also there have been some things, like an informant came in off the street to the FBI in Miami, who was a photographer or has a friend who is a photographer who developed some films through this guy, [Bernard] Barker, and the films had pictures of Democratic National Committee letter head documents and things. So I guess, so it’s things like that that are gonna, that are filtering in. [Former Attorney General and Nixon campaign manager John] Mitchell came up with yesterday, and John Dean analyzed very carefully last night and concludes, concurs now with Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it, ah, in that and that…the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC…they did a massive story on the Cuban…”

    Nixon:   “That’s right.”

    Haldeman:   “…thing.”

    Nixon:  “Right.”

    Haldeman:   “That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, “Stay the hell out of this…this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.” That’s not an unusual development,…”

    Nixon:  “Um huh.”

    Haldeman:   “…and, uh, that would take care of it.”

    Nixon:  “What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?”

    Haldeman:  “Pat does want to. He doesn’t know how to, and he doesn’t have, he doesn’t have any basis for doing it. Given this, he will then have the basis. He’ll call [deputy FBI director] Mark Felt in, and the two of them …and Mark Felt wants to cooperate because…”

    Nixon:  “Yeah.”

    Haldeman:  “…he’s ambitious…”

    Nixon: “Yeah.”

    Haldeman:  “Ah, he’ll call him in and say, ‘We’ve got the signal from across the river to, to put the hold on this.’ And that will fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA.”

    Nixon:  “But they’ve traced the money to ’em.”

    Haldeman:  “Well they have, they’ve traced to a name, but they haven’t gotten to the guy yet.”

    Nixon:  ‘Would it be somebody here?”

    Haldeman:  ‘Ken Dahlberg.”

    Nixon:  Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?

    Haldeman:  “He’s ah, he gave $25,000 in Minnesota and ah, the check went directly in to this, to this guy Barker.”

    Nixon:  “Maybe he’s a …bum.”

    Nixon:  “He didn’t get this from the committee though, from [former Commerce Secretary and finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President Maurice] Stans.”

    Haldeman:  “Yeah. It is. It is. It’s directly traceable and there’s some more through some Texas people in–that went to the Mexican bank which they can also trace to the Mexican bank…they’ll get their names today. And (pause)”

    Nixon:  “Well, I mean, ah, there’s no way… I’m just thinking if they don’t cooperate, what do they say? They they, they were approached by the Cubans. That’s what Dahlberg has to say, the Texans too. Is that the idea?”

    Haldeman:  “Well, if they will. But then we’re relying on more and more people all the time. That’s the problem. And ah, they’ll stop if we could, if we take this other step.”

    Nixon:  “All right. Fine.”

Juries—and, ultimately, the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon—were undoubtedly struck by several matters in the above:

*Why didn’t Nixon, a lawyer of long training—one who had even argued before the Supreme Court—immediately tell Haldeman that the proposed scheme was illegal?

*Despite Nixon’s year-long claim that he did not know the extent of party operatives’ involvement with the break-in at Democratic National Headquarters until March 1973, the tape shows conclusively that he had been briefed within a week.

*There was no single dramatic statement such as “I want you to stonewall it, to plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else” (from the March 22, 1973 taped conversation with aides). But even Nixon’s guttural, inarticulate “Um huh” was enough to constitute his awareness and approval of the scheme to throw the FBI off the scent by corralling the CIA in the scheme.

The June 23 tape—finally coughed up when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon must do so—induced 11 GOP congressmen who had previously voted against impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee to stop supporting him. With even his last line of defense in the Senate crumbling, Nixon announced his resignation in August 1974, less than two years after recording one of the decisive landslides in Presidential electoral history.

Perhaps Trump was too busy mastering the intricacies of his father’s real estate company as its new president in 1974 to pay any attention to what was happening to the president of the whole country then. But somebody should have forced him at some point between then and now to learn what could befall him if he weren’t more careful in pursuing the Presidency:

*The dangers of way too many people ready to cut corners on his behalf. Count the names of all the people either involved directly with the Watergate break-in or knowledgeable about it. It was foolhardy to think that awareness of this and related operations could be confined only to the seven original defendants. In the end, 40 government officials were indicted or jailed in connection with the scandal. The surprise was not that James McCord and John Dean broke under the pressure of considerable jail time, but that more didn’t do so sooner. Several names have popped up, again and again, in the imbroglio over Russia: not just Trump, but also son-in-law Jared Kushner, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, longtime political operative Roger Stone, and Jeff Sessions. Who knows how many more will surface?

*A Justice Department in the President’s pocket will contaminate those at the top without sidelining any scandal. Mitchell, Nixon’s law partner turned Attorney General, and Richard Kleindeinst, Mitchell’s successor, could not stem the investigation. In the end, they were brought down because of their attempt to placate Nixon through either false public testimony (Kleindeinst) or through conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice (Mitchell). Similarly, Jeff Sessions’ recommendation that Comey should be fired only helped trigger a special prosecutor—and Trump has whined so bitterly about this that Sessions has only felt compelled to offer to resign his Cabinet post after only a few months in office. A rather large price to pay for giving up a Senate seat he could have retained with little difficulty.

*A fundamental misreading of people. Nixon agreed with Haldeman that “ambitious” Mark Felt would be amenable to curtailing the FBI investigation. In fact, Felt would shortly become “Deep Throat,” Woodward and Bernstein’s crucial informant about the crimes of the Nixon administration. In thinking that Comey, who had complicated Hillary Clinton’s quest for the Presidency twice in the last five months of the campaign, might be amenable to doing his stated bidding, Trump made a similar disastrous misreading.

*There’s a reason why investigators “follow the money” in cases like this. “Deep Throat’s” shrewd if cryptic advice to Woodward applies to the Nixon-Haldeman tape. The attempt to obstruct justice—or, as the PR-conscious Haldeman preferred to think of it, “containment” of the scandal—began with money meant to ensure the silence of the Watergate burglars (in this case, Bernard Barker). As Robert Mueller’s investigation gets underway, he will surely examine Flynn’s lobbying on behalf of a Turkish businessman with ties to Russia and Manafort’s business dealings with a pro-Kremlin government in the Ukraine.

*An election influenced through an offstage foreign actor.  If Nixon thought he could get away with impacting the electoral process, it is because he had already successfully done so. In the closing days of the 1968 election, the Johnson administration had secured a deal calling for the U.S. to cease bombing North Vietnam capital, Hanoi, in exchange for concessions from the Communist regime. Then, the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu inexplicably scuttled the agreement. For years, rumors circulated that, through Nixon aide Anna Chennault, Thieu was secretly assured he could get a better deal if the Republicans were elected that fall. It wasn’t until nearly 50 years later that Nixon biographer John Farrell discovered, in the Nixon Presidential Library, Haldeman’s handwritten notes from October 1968 indicating the candidate’s instructions to “Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam. By 1972, having engaged the “White House Plumbers” to clamp down on domestic dissenters such as Daniel Ellsberg, Nixon’s campaign employed a host of “dirty tricks” to undercut the most electable Democrat in the primaries, Edmund Muskie, and produce a nominee he could more readily depict as radical, George McGovern. The “Plumbers” were also the unit involved in the Watergate break-in. Did Trump also employ a foreign country to manipulate events to sway an American election—an “October surprise”? Those who say there is no documentary evidence of this should keep in mind that it took a half-century to confirm the Chennault-Thieu-Nixon cabal. There are far many more troubling signs already that Trump was engaged in what he so eloquently calls “the Russia thing.”

The discovery of the “smoking gun tape” doomed Nixon, but perhaps not for the reason that many pointed to in saying that “the cover-up was worse than the crime.” Oddly enough, the person who may have put his finger on the problem best was Nixon speechwriter (and future Presidential candidate in his own right) Patrick Buchanan. 

“The problem is not Watergate or the cover-up," he told his boss’s daughter and most loyal defender, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days. "It's that he hasn't been telling the truth to the American people. The tape makes it evident that he hasn't leveled with the country for probably 18 months. And the President can't lead a country he has deliberately misled for a year and a half."

Nixon—and, increasingly, Trump—“deliberately misled” the country in no small part through witness intimidation that centered around a taping system. 

Outside public hearings, Scott Armstrong, a lawyer with the Senate Watergate committee, discovered that Nixon’s lawyer was using extensive quotations from the President’s meetings alone with John Dean. Their curiosity provoked, Senate investigators learned from Presidential aide Alexander Butterfield that Nixon had a taping system in his office. The selective use of the quotations only led Congress to seek the tapes that would conclusively show the truth of his claims and Dean’s. 

Trump’s bluff about taping his conversations only led Comey to decide he must protect himself by leaking, as soon as possible, his contemporaneous notes about their conversation—a revelation that only brought on the special prosecutor appointment that the President loathed.