America Should Celebrate Nixon, Not the Washington Post
On President’s Day, the American Conservative, a journal founded by Patrick J. Buchanan, one of the all too few remaining Richard Nixon loyalists, published a piece by Alan Pell Crawford about the demise of the Washington Post that waxes lyrical about Bob Woodward and celebrates the takedown of one of our greatest presidents. Crawford reverently recalls Aug. 8, 1974, when he was an intern at the Post, as an editor told a hushed newsroom that Nixon would resign the next day. It was, he writes, a day of “historic importance” and “the Post newsroom had a lot to do with it.” Indeed, they did. The British historian Paul Johnson was close to the truth when he called Nixon’s downfall a “media putsch.”
Crawford, you see, accepts the conventional view of Watergate portrayed in the movie All the President’s Men. He encourages readers of the American Conservative to “get nostalgic about the world of the Post’s heyday” by watching the movie. He admits to watching it “countless times,” presumably to bring back his fond memories of his journalistic heroes uncovering the supposed scandal of the century. One wonders if Crawford has read anything about Watergate since the movie All the President’s Men hit the theaters in 1976.
There is, to say the least, a lot to read — much of it that calls into question the Hollywood portrayal of Watergate. Perhaps Crawford should begin with Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda, which came out 10 years after Nixon’s resignation and provided some evidence that Nixon’s downfall was orchestrated by what is now called the “deep state.” Hougan’s book was followed by Silent Coup: The Removal of a President by investigative reporters Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, which furthered the deep state narrative in Nixon’s removal from office, including showing Woodward’s ties to a Pentagon whose military leaders were spying on the White House. But the coup de grace to the Woodward–Bernstein version of Watergate was delivered by Geoff Shepard, who was a young White House counsel during Watergate and who has written a series of books and articles and starred in a documentary that tell a disturbing tale of Watergate special prosecutors secretly meeting ex parte with judges and conspiring with Democratic congressional staffers to develop a “Road Map” to remove Nixon from office.
Perhaps Crawford should also read Shepard’s devastating takedown of Woodward and Bernstein published in The American Spectator. It paints a rather different picture of Crawford’s journalistic heroes who printed “leaks” from a disgruntled, anti-Nixon FBI deputy director without revealing his motives, and ignored information that special prosecutors were secretly meeting with other participants in the Watergate drama (in this instance, the special prosecutor was secretly meeting with the federal judge assigned to the Watergate cases). So much for “investigative reporting.” It turns out that the real investigative reporter who should be applauded for his coverage of Watergate is Geoff Shepard.
Very few nostalgic Watergate articles tackle the larger subject of the consequences of Nixon’s removal from office. Watergate removed a president who, in Hugh Sidey’s words, “understood the men, the ingredients, the glory, the brutality, the action and reaction of power as well as anyone else of our time.” Nixon’s triangular diplomacy with China and the USSR, his outreach to Romania and other Soviet satellites, and his diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East that greatly reduced Soviet influence there set the stage for the Reagan presidency’s successful policies which brought about the downfall of the Soviet empire. Nixon had saved Israel during the Yom Kippur War and promised to come to the aid of South Vietnam if the North violated the peace agreements. Watergate doomed South Vietnam to communist rule, and led to the election of Jimmy Carter as president, the fall of the Shah of Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua, and a Soviet geopolitical offensive that included advances in the Third World and the invasion of Afghanistan.
Maybe Crawford, like an aging movie star who repeatedly watches old movies he or she starred in to relive the golden years of Hollywood, just wants to relive the golden years of journalism when newspapers like the Post didn’t have an ideological axe to grind and CBS’ Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. But the Post then, and still today, is a paper of the ideological left, and Cronkite, as we later learned, was always a lefty who was anti-Nixon, pro-liberal Democrat, and who had an “agenda-driven approach to the news” that put a lie to his famous phrase “and that’s the way it is,” which ended each of his news broadcasts.
Instead of celebrating Bob Woodward and the Washington Post on President’s Day, Crawford and the American Conservative should celebrate Richard Nixon.
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