The Case for Impeachment. Allan Lichtman J.

basic standards of morality and threaten the foundations of our democracy. Both Nixon and Trump exhibited a determination to never quit, to win at all costs, to attack and never back down, and to flout conventional rules and restraints. But as ambitious and headstrong as they were, they also shared a compulsion to deflect blame, and they were riddled with insecurities. They exploited the resentments of white working class Americans and split the world into enemies and loyalists. In the first month of his presidency, Trump talked more about “enemies” than any other president in history. Neither man allowed the law, the truth, the free press, or the potential for collateral damage to others to impede their personal agendas. They cared little about ideology but very much about adulation and power. They had little use for checks and balances and stretched the reach of presidential authority to its outer limits. They obsessed over secrecy and thirsted for control without dissent.

      The establishments in New York and Washington and at the elite universities viewed the two men with distaste throughout their long careers. In turn, these professed populists scorned a cultural elite of mainstream journalists, Hollywood celebrities, revered politicians, and Ivy League professors. When first elected president, Nixon had commanded his aides, “No one in Ivy League schools to be hired for a year—we need balance—trustworthy ones are the dumb ones.” But “trustworthy” to whose benefit? Certainly not to the American people, who’ve put their welfare in the hands of that government meant to represent their—and not its own—best interests. So far, with few exceptions, Donald Trump has avoided Ivy League professors for cabinet or top staff positions in his administration.¹

      Long after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon confessed to an intense admiration of Donald Trump. To the magnate in 1987, he wrote: “Whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Trump proclaimed that he would hang Nixon’s “amazing” letter in the Oval Office.²

      In 1974, two years after winning a landslide reelection victory, Nixon avoided near certain impeachment and removal by becoming the only American president to resign the office. Nixon’s story is the cautionary tale for Donald Trump.

      WATERGATE: A CANCER ON THE PRESIDENCY

      In 1972, Richard Nixon brilliantly orchestrated his reelection campaign, but he still feared that leaks of such illegal acts as a covert bombing war in Cambodia and the wiretapping of reporters and administration officials could sink his reelection and even lead to his impeachment. In 1971, he established in the White House a covert unit known as the Plumbers to plug leaks. Members of the unit doubled as dirty tricks specialists who would conduct the Watergate break-in and the burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had leaked the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War known as the “Pentagon Papers.” “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”³

      In his campaign, Nixon set a model for Donald Trump by targeting the forgotten Americans: the so-called “Silent Majority, of white voters of modest means and education, ignored and scorned by Washington’s elite.” This Silent Majority of Americans believed that “as individuals they have lost control of a complicated and impersonal society which oppresses them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration while rewarding the very poor and very rich.” Nixon would woo the Silent Majority with the “old values of patriotism, hard work, morality, and respect for law and order.”⁴

      As for minorities, Nixon said that the administration would “pay attention” to blacks, “keep some around [to] avoid Goldwater problem.” Earlier he had said, “I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they ain’t gonna make it for five hundred years.” As for Jews, they “won’t get many, but don’t write them off.” Nixon advised that they should quietly woo Jewish and black support by meeting with leaders, but should “avoid speaking publicly to groups.”⁵

      This strategy worked so well that, by mid-1972, the polls showed Nixon some twenty points ahead of the presumptive Democratic nominee, South Dakota senator George McGovern.

      Why then did Nixon or his top aides launch the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in June 1972? This foolishly bungled caper that the Washington Post labeled “Mission Incredible” could only upset Nixon’s glide to reelection. The answer lies in a trait that Nixon and Trump share: a need for total control, combined with minimal self-awareness. Nixon still feared that somehow his enemies—the Kennedys, the press, the professors—would snatch from his hands the final victory he had worked so hard to earn. No loose end could be left unattended.⁶

      What Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed as a “third-rate burglary attempt” would prove to be so much more. This was the hole in the dike that even Nixon’s Plumbers could not plug. Eventually the dike would collapse and a flood of revelations about Nixon’s corruption would wash away his presidency.

      A month after the break-in, Nixon lectured his aide John Ehrlichman on what he had supposedly learned from his crusade as a young congressman that helped convict the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss of perjury: “If you cover up, you’re going to get caught. And if you lie you’re going to be guilty of perjury. Now basically that was the whole story of the Hiss case. It is not the issue that will harm you; it is the cover-up that is damaging.”⁷

      Nixon’s words to Ehrlichman may have been delivered with breezy assurance, but he was frantically working to cover up a trail that led from the break-in to the leadership of his administration and campaign. He relied on deception posing as candor and on preemptive sallies against anyone in the press who dared to dig into the story. In a press conference filled with lies, Nixon falsely claimed that he had personally investigated the matter and settled all concerns over Watergate. He said “categorically” that a White House investigation indicates “that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” Nixon added, “What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”⁸

      When reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began investigating the break-in and other dirty tricks for the Washington Post, Nixon trotted out Ziegler to assail the press, just as Donald Trump would do more than four decades later. Ziegler was a former Disneyland skipper and guide for its popular jungle cruise with no political experience other than with the Nixon team. In 1969, at the age of twenty-nine he became the youngest presidential press secretary in history. Nixon could always count on Ziegler to get out the administration’s message of the day.

      Ten days before the election he accused the now iconic Woodward and Bernstein of “shabby journalism,’’ “character assassination,” and “a vicious abuse of the journalistic process.” He charged their employer, the Post, with a “political effort” to “discredit this administration and individuals within it.” Earlier, Bernstein had told Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell, his former attorney general, that the Post would be publishing a story linking the Watergate burglary to a secret slush fund that Mitchell controlled. Mitchell responded with an unmistakable threat: “All that crap, you’re putting in the paper? It’s been denied. Jesus, Katie Graham [the Post’s publisher] is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”⁹

      Nixon and Ziegler had set the precedent for Donald Trump and his aides when confronted with news reports of repeated contacts between Trump’s campaign staff and Russian officials. Deny. Lie. Threaten. And blame the messengers in the press, not the message itself, for the scandal.

      In 1973, the reelected president could not stanch the flood of revelations that poured out in the spring of 1973, indicating that high officials of the Nixon administration and CREEP had directed the break-in and pressured the defendants to remain silent. On March 21, White House counsel John Dean warned Nixon that “We have a cancer within—close to the presidency, that’s growing.” A month later, Nixon’s lies had become so tangled that Ron Ziegler had to declare all of the president’s