- The Jan. 6 and Watergate hearings have "some very important" things in common, a Nixon expert said.
- Historian Ken Hughes told Insider both hearings helped convince a sect of the public of a president's guilt.
Nearly 50 years after the Watergate hearings captured the nation's attention, history is seemingly repeating itself as Congress presents the American public with a trove of evidence and bombshell testimony in service of proving a Republican president's guilt.
The inciting scandals couldn't be more different: A break-in at the Democratic National Committee versus an insurrection at the US Capitol. The lead characters look dissimilar, too: A purely political president seeking to cover up illicit actions and a desperate chief trying to cling to power.
But for all their contrasts, the congressional hearings stemming from these separate political crises have some stark similarities.
Ken Hughes, a historian and Watergate expert at the University of Virginia's Miller Center spoke to Insider this week, offering a nuanced analysis of two primetime presentations separated by five decades.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
As you've been watching these January 6 hearings, have you pinpointed any obvious comparisons or similarities between these hearings and the Watergate hearings?
Surprisingly, contrary to what it might seem like at first glance, I think the two sets of hearings have some very important things in common. The Watergate hearings and the January 6 committee hearings convinced the majority, that is to say, the left of center and the center, that the president was guilty of wrongdoing. At the same time, the right, back during the Nixon administration, and today, remains convinced that this is all just liberal, Democratic bias, and liberal media bias. That was the case in the '70s. I think it's the case now.
People have remarked on how different the outcomes were. Nixon, ultimately, felt he had to resign. Otherwise, he would be impeached and convicted in the Senate. The difference really is more of geographical polarization.
When you say geographical polarization, do you mean, literally, where people are polarized within the country?
Yep. When Nixon was president, a sizable number of Republicans in the House and the Senate had to worry when they went to face the voters in November that they would have to be accountable to the majority. They were in states that Democrats and Republicans were both competitive in and congressional districts in which both parties were competitive. What happened in 1974 is that before the Republican primaries were over, congressional Republicans supported the Republican president because, otherwise, they would lose the support of Republican voters. They would be primaried. They would get a challenge from the right, and they would lose their jobs. That's the position that most congressional Republicans find themselves in today if they don't support ex-President Trump. If they don't support defeated President Trump, they will get primary challenges, and they'll lose their jobs.
The difference was, back then, the states and the congressional districts were competitive enough so that congressional Republicans, once they got past their primaries, had to worry about losing their jobs because the majority, the left and the middle, would vote them out of office for supporting President Nixon.
Today, Republicans in Congress are either from red states, or from red congressional districts, or gerrymandered congressional districts that insulate them from the majority. They realize that they can keep their jobs as long as they keep a majority of the right on their side. To keep the majority of the right on their side, they calculate that they have to stick with Donald Trump.
As a result, the mechanisms that kept a president from abusing power 50 years ago are not functioning. One faction of American politics — the right wing — realizes that it can be in control of the White House through a majority in the Electoral College. It can gain control of the Senate, and it can gain control of the House, and gain control of the Supreme Court without ever winning a majority of the voters. That puts us in a much more dangerous position now than we were 50 years ago because democracy can fail.
You said one of the ways in which the Watergate and January 6 hearings have been similar is that they've successfully convinced a portion of the population that the president was guilty of wrongdoing. Was the country already divided on whether they believed Nixon deserved blame heading into the hearings? Or did the hearings do the majority of the work in convincing people of that?
In 1972, when the Watergate break-in took place, Americans did consider it serious. They did condemn breaking into the opposing party's headquarters, but they thought Richard Nixon had nothing to do with it. I actually think they were right. I think Nixon didn't know about the Watergate break-in in advance. But then he found out that the people who organized the break-in were G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, people he had hired a year before when he wanted someone to break into the Brookings Institution, which is a Washington think tank that he thought had classified material.
This remained hidden, but Nixon still feared that it would come to light. The reason Nixon ordered the Watergate cover-up was to protect himself. If the FBI had an unobstructed investigation of Hunt and Liddy, it would lead back to a crime that Nixon committed when he put together the group that was known as the Plumbers, in order to break into Brookings and do other political tasks, both illegal and legal, that Nixon wanted done. When he created the Plumbers to break into Brookings, that was a crime. It was a conspiracy to commit burglary, and it was a crime that anyone could understand. I mean, it wasn't like obstruction of justice, which is never really clear. It was simple.
Now, when the Watergate hearings began in '73, that's when all the related abuses of power really started to come out. People who had been involved in the Nixon administration testified about what they were up to, and what they were doing. It became clear to most people in 1973 or 1974, that Nixon had indeed abused the powers of his office for political gain.
That's another similarity that we see with these hearings — the fact that the people testifying worked in the Republican president's White House. They were supporters of the president, and in most cases, would vote for him again. The fact that the evidence comes from Republicans is very, very convincing to the majority. It's the rule: "If your own man says so." That's sort of like the Republican side admitting what was going on. That's a similarity between Watergate and the January 6 committee hearings: the importance of Republican testimony to establishing the guilt of a Republican president.
In what ways were Nixon and Trump similar or different in their respective responses to these sprawling investigations into their conduct?
Nixon was capable of hiding what Trump is incapable of concealing. Nixon was a very shrewd, a very well-practiced politician. He had been aiming for the presidency since his young adulthood, if not his childhood. He was very, very disciplined. He was a master strategist. Trump has very obvious political strengths. He is a charismatic speaker who really connects with the Republican base. There's this very strong, emotional appeal that he makes, but to only a minority of voters.
Nixon was a much more disciplined, calculating, strategic politician. He was capable of realigning the country from one where the Democrats had a kind of a ruling coalition. Donald Trump is overall, strategically, a very weak candidate. He's not able to attract a majority. In fact, he polarizes the majority against him. He doesn't have even the normal discipline of a Republican candidate running for state assembly, or state Senate. While he's got an incredibly strong connection to the Republican base, he's not able to reach out beyond that particularly well.
What role did Nixon's Congress play in affecting the ultimate outcome of the hearings? Are you able to draw any comparisons to Trump and the Congress we see now leading these present-day hearings?
In both cases, the Democratic Congress took the lead. It was a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate. The Watergate Committee's majority was Democratic, just as the January 6 committee's is Democratic. In the Watergate era, Republicans at least took part in the investigations. They wanted to demonstrate to the public that they did take corruption in government seriously, they took law-breaking seriously. Again, that was, in part, because they depended for their jobs, on persuading not just the right, but the American center. The center did not have a vested interest in electing Republicans. The center had a vested interest in preserving democracy and having honest non-corrupt government. Today, the Congressional Republicans are accountable mainly to their base, and very rarely to the middle. Most of them are insulated from democratic accountability.
So, in the '70s, we didn't really see the sort of animosity from the Republican lawmakers that we see today, where nearly all of them said they didn't want anything to do with the Jan. 6 investigation?
Right. In the '70s, the Republicans in Congress realized that they at least had to act like they were willing to hold the president accountable, even if at first, they didn't want to do it. They did take steps. I mean, they supported subpoenaing Nixon's tapes. That was an important thing that they did. The difference was that back then, once the Republican primaries were over, congressional Republicans really had to focus on appealing to the middle in order to win the November elections. Otherwise, Democrats would take their jobs.
Now, most congressional Republicans never have to worry about that. Their only concern is whether they hold onto their base. We have a situation where a very sizable minority can gain control of the majority of offices in both houses of Congress, and can gain a majority in the electoral college, without ever getting a majority of the popular vote, and can gain a majority on the Supreme Court, despite not winning the majority of the popular vote, only winning it once in the last couple of decades.
The Jan. 6 hearings are taking place long after Trump was defeated, but the Watergate hearings were happening while Nixon was the sitting president. What effect did that have?
For a while, it was the only thing people talked about. I mean, it was a much different media environment. As you know, there were only three networks on broadcast television. When they started doing gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings, the details of Nixon's abuses of power just became very familiar to most people. It was impossible for people to ignore it.
Today, we've got many, many alternatives so it's much harder to get people's attention for long, involved congressional hearings. I think, actually, the January 6 committee has done an excellent job of giving focused hearings and presentations of information, and making sure that it's not just telling a story. It's providing evidence and letting people see, and hear, and read, for themselves what was being said and written in secret at the time. Despite the structural handicaps, despite the difficulty of gaining mass attention to very complex aspects of government, I think they're doing about as well as it can be done.
Why did Nixon finally decide to resign? Was there any sense of legitimate shame or wanting to do right by the country? Or had he just accepted his fate?
He would've stayed in office as long as he could. That meant as long as he had the support of a sufficient number of congressional Republicans. What happened, with the release of the "Smoking Gun" tape in August 1974, was that congressional Republicans realized their primaries were behind them. They no longer had to worry about losing their jobs to primary challenges. They had to worry about losing their jobs to the outrage of the majority in November because the middle and the left were convinced by the evidence that Nixon was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. So, congressional Republicans told Nixon, "You're going to get impeached. If there's a Senate trial, we're not sure you're going to get 34 votes. We're not sure you're going to get 20."
How are the Watergate hearings remembered when it comes to the impact they had on the nation? What legacy did they set?
The Watergate hearings had a positive and a negative impact. The positive impact was that people realized that no one is above the law in America, that even the president of the United States, the most powerful public official in America, can be held accountable to the people and to the law, and has to obey the law, and comply with subpoenas. The Supreme Court ruled during these Watergate hearings that President Nixon did have to turn over evidence, his tapes, to the special prosecutor. That was a very important moment in the history of our democracy. Otherwise, without that evidence, Nixon might have remained in office to complete his entire second term. Without those tapes, people might not have been convinced that Nixon was guilty.
At the same time, while the Watergate hearings, and the way Watergate played out, demonstrated that our democracy can survive and can function, it also showed that our democracy is vulnerable to abuses of power by unethical presidents. While it's possible to hold a president accountable and make a president uphold the law, it's also possible for a president to abuse power, and get away with it for a very long time. A lot of things had to go right in order for Nixon to be held accountable. You had heroic efforts by journalists, by the Judiciary, which asserted and demonstrated its independence as its own branch of government, by members of Congress who had a lot to lose by taking on a president, who in 1972, won an historic landslide.
At the same time, we saw that a large political faction, the right wing, just refused to accept the evidence of their senses. They convinced themselves that the Republican president was the victim of liberal media bias, of liberal democratic witch hunting in Congress. They basically convinced themselves of conspiracy theories. That, we see continuing to today. The difference is that back then, Congress remained accountable to the majority of voters. Today, it's just barely. The Republicans could very easily take control of Congress in the midterm elections of this year, without coming anywhere near to having a majority of the voter's support. Donald Trump could win in 2024 as he won in 2016, without getting a majority of the voters.
We are in a precarious position, where what's at stake in elections isn't merely what policies will be enacted, but what's at stake is: Will we have majority of rule? Will we remain a Republic, in fact, as well as in name? We have a lot of work to do just to preserve our heritage.