ONE OF THEM:

How Neo-Conservatives Helped Bring Down Richard Nixon (Joan Hoff, History News Network)

To talk about Watergate and the Nixon presidency over 30 years after the break-ins, cover-up, resignation, and pardon, one has to ask a completely different set of questions than was asked in the last half of the 1970s because there is so much more information available about those events. Because we know more, we must question the mainstream interpretation about the importance of Watergate in relation to the overall significance of the foreign and domestic policies of Richard Nixon.

I initiated this reinterpretation a decade ago with my book, Nixon Reconsidered, which was not well received by reviewers because it praised Nixon’s liberal domestic policies (which I had been surprised to find out about) and his innovative attempt to diplomatically engage both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. [...]

Another and more positive view of Nixon coming out of asking new questions based on new information is this: the search for the identity of Deep Throat has for too long proved a diversion from rethinking the meaning of Watergate and the Nixon presidency. Here again, Dean has greatly helped in the perpetuation of that search with several books and online postings naming different individuals as possible candidates for the honor of being Deep Throat. One way to ease people’s minds about whether Deep Throat was one source or a composite and why he knew what he did, I would like to ask Bob Woodward today to agree to video or audio tape Deep Throat or Deep Throats confirming his or their role so that when he or they die we will have more than a Washington Post obit to authenticate his or their identity.

More important, however, instead of continuing to ask WHO leaked the information, we should ask WHY one or more individuals within the executive branch would leak such information. The answer lies with those who strongly disagreed with Nixon’s major diplomatic initiatives involving Russia and China, and his failed pursuit of victory in Vietnam. A group of both civilian and military anti-Communist extremists (those Norman Podhoretz referred to as subscribing to “hard anti-Communism") could not tolerate Nixon’s attempt to go beyond containment and try to bring both nations into the international community. Nor could these Cold War hawks support his policy of Vietnamization designed to turn the war over the South Vietnamese.

New research has shown that their dissatisfaction set in motion the formation or birth of a radical conservatism inside and outside the Nixon administration. Détente and rapprochement (and ultimately defeat in Vietnam) prompted these early neo-conservative Republicans to organize against Nixon’s foreign policy (and to a lesser degree his liberal domestic reforms). These were the men (initially Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, James Schlesinger, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and Admiral Thomas Moorer) who wanted Nixon weakened and who ultimately supported his resignation. Watergate thus facilitated their opposition to the most enlightened aspects of his foreign policy. From this nucleus emerged the full-blown neo-con movement within the Republican party that dominated Reagan’s foreign policy in his first term and completely took over George W. Bush’s after September 11.

Viewed in this light, Watergate and the Nixon presidency has a contemporary importance that has been largely ignored. This new interpretation also finally confirms the obvious about Richard Nixon’s political career: he had never been an arch conservative on either domestic or foreign policy. Instead of his conservatism being the cause of his downfall, as so many have claimed, his more liberal or enlightened policies so alienated radical conservatives (many of whom urged him to resign) that they contributed to his downfall and vowed to reverse and/or discredit both his foreign and domestic policies.

In essence, Watergate killed Republican centrism and opened the door for the take-over of the Republican party by neo-conservatives. This is the most important contemporary significance of the Nixon presidency in relation to Watergate, regardless of the fact he should of been indicted and convicted for obstructing justice. His downfall represented the beginning of a conservative coup and this is much more important than concentrating on the nonproductive pursuit of the identity of Deep Throat.

Conservatives did understand during his presidency that Nixon had sold them out, but it took until Tom Wicker wrote One of Us for the Left to begin reckoning with the fact that they'd help take down our most liberal president.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 21, 2005 9:56 AM