The legacy of Watergate in 2026: Does it still mean anything?
Does the vast scale of more recent Presidential wrongdoing mean Nixon's scandal is irrelevant?
Fifty-four years ago today, on June 17, 1972, five burglars were caught red-handed breaking into Democratic Party offices at the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. to steal files and plant surveillance devices. As is well-known, or at least was generally well-known among Americans until perhaps fairly recently, this event eventually flared into a two-year political scandal and Constitutional crisis in the United States that culminated with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon on August 9, 1974. I was born shortly after the burglary but while the scandal was still fulminating, and in the era I grew up, the very word “Watergate” was a shorthand for political corruption, duplicity and dishonesty. Everyone knew what it was. Nixon was the most-disgraced President in American history, if Watergate did not make him flat-out the worst (apologies to James Buchanan or Millard Fillmore). Watergate was part of our cultural and political source code. Now, more than half a century later, it sadly feels a bit quaint. Let’s talk about why that is.
I’ve “done” the substantive story of Watergate itself enough on this blog over the past 3½ years, and I don’t need to do it again. This article, in fact, was the genesis of one of my most popular videos on my YouTube channel which came out in November 2023. So I’m not going to go through the facts again. Instead I’m thinking about what—if anything—Watergate means in America, to us living through this unique and very challenging moment in our political and cultural history. Given the obvious fact that it’s been eclipsed many times over by far greater scandals and far more brazen crimes by various of Nixon’s successors, does Watergate matter anymore? I think it does, and it may even be more meaningful now than it was in the 1970s and ‘80s, in the immediate aftermath of it. History is not a zero-sum game where you cease remembering events as significant when something “worse” comes along. Therefore, today’s historical anniversary is meaningful.
