JD Vance, the vice president of these United States, missed the whole Watergate thing.
He was born in 1984, whereas the scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon came out of a botched operation that took place on the night of June 17, 1972, when operatives associated with Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign were nabbed burglarizing and planting bugs in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex.
It was without a doubt the stupidest bit of crookery ever attempted by an American politician, but that’s what paranoia will get you. Richard Nixon could not have lost his re-election campaign if he tried. George McGovern, his Democratic opponent, was viewed as a left-wing peacenik by most Americans of voting age. Nixon won 49 states that November— all but the pinko libs of Massachusetts put him back into office, smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War.
(The South Dakota senator and history professor, who I once ran into at a party and had the great honor of shaking his hand, was in fact one of the finest Americans of our time. As a B-24 Liberator pilot in World War II, he flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe from a base in Italy. Among the many medals he received was a Distinguished Flying Cross for making a hazardous emergency landing of his damaged plane and saving his crew. He was against the Vietnam War because, unlike his war, it was a bad war.)
Tricky Dick had no need whatsoever to plant listening devices at the DNC in order to suss out the Dems’ strategy to beat him. But that’s what too many martinis late at night will do to a fellow who already had a persecution complex. Nixon, it turns out, was crazed with the notion that he might lose to McGovern, and was all in, for no reason at all, on anything that might help guarantee his victory, including being party to a tacky burglary.
As anyone who can read the newspapers knows, the president, after being re-elected so overwhelmingly, was brought down by really great reporting at the Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose Deep Throat source led them to the story of how the mostly Cuban Watergate burglars led by former intelligence agents E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were actually backed by money from the Committee to Re-elect the President—CREEP—and the White House.
But in a recent speech at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda to promote his new book, “Communion,” about how he went from atheist to Catholic, and which is really about how he wants to be the next president himself, Vance, who is somehow a Yale Law School graduate, showed himself to be a complete ignoramus about Watergate.
“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” he said, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first administration. There is a parallel.”
There is not a parallel. The deep state did not take down Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon took down Richard Nixon. (Of course, neither did it take down Trump, but that’s another story.)
That great legal and journalism scholar JD Vance also intoned here in SoCal on his book tour: “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
How is it that a person who has aspirations to become commander in chief could believe such nonsense? Even people who believe that there is such a thing as the “deep state” don’t believe that commie bureaucrats destroyed the Nixon presidency. It was Nixon himself who taped every word spoken in the Oval Office, including the “Smoking Gun” tape, showing that Nixon ordered the CIA to stop the FBI’s investigation into Watergate.
Where are the serious people who want to become our next president?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.