Washington Is Waging a War: First Nixon, Now Trump
In 1972, President Richard Nixon won 60.7 percent of the popular vote (an 18 million vote margin) and carried every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. He had previously spent four years in the House of Representatives, two years in the Senate, eight years as vice president, and four years as president. Within weeks of his election as the clear choice of the American people, he was under siege from the courts, the news media, the bureaucracy, leftwing activists, and Congress.
Forty-four years later, in 2016, a newcomer to politics ran as a complete outsider. Donald Trump defeated 16 other Republicans for the nomination (including governors and senators with significant national reputations). He quickly found himself under assault by the same leftwing Washington coalition, which employed lies and manufactured conspiracies to smear and defeat him. Despite all the attacks, Trump won a narrow majority. As president, he faced ongoing investigations, allegations, and impeachment efforts. As a former president and front-runner for the Republican nomination, he is still subjected to unending legal assaults from Democrats in New York and Georgia state courts — and from an out-of-control federal prosecutor seeking to try him in Florida and Washington, D.C. (READ MORE from Newt Gingrich: Trump Should Learn From Watergate)
At one level, Nixon’s and Trump’s stories are quite different — the old pro and the new outsider. Nixon had worked with the federal bureaucracy his entire career, Trump focused on business and approached Washington with virtually no experience in leading large government systems.
But the two had a shared experience. They both sought to change Washington, and Washington responded by trying to destroy them.
Deep Bureaucrat Resistance in Washington
Jeffrey Tucker’s phrase “entrenched administrative state hegemony” captures the depth of resistance built into a massive government with millions of employees and trillions to spend. Surrounding the entrenched administrative state are the symbiotic lobbyists and special interests. Further entrenching the old order is the degree to which House and Senate members (and even more their staff members) are allied with and influenced by the bureaucracies and lobbyists.
Finally, this entire entrenched, self-serving coalition is supported and protected by the left-wing media, which is sustained by the information leaking from the bureaucracies. How much about Watergate did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein discover and how much was developed by government agencies and fed to them? Remember, “deep throat” turned out to be the number three man in the FBI who had been passed over for the top job.
The natural tendency of large bureaucracies to defend themselves and to avoid or minimize change is compounded in our era. The Left has come to see government as the primary mechanism for controlling and coercing the American people. In addition to the natural self-interest of all bureaucracies, there is an ideological fervor to eliminate any serious threat of change.
The Trump candidacy in 2016 was guaranteed to arouse enormous passion on the Left — and great fear in key bureaucracies. Given Trump’s platform and personality, it is little wonder that some in the FBI regarded his potential victory as a personally threatening nightmare. They knew they had been doing illegal things, and that Trump was likely to expose them. The Obama administration’s reshaping of the intelligence community into an arm of the Left (and the liberalism of the State Department) guaranteed that Trump would face constant opposition from government elements during the campaign and his presidency.
In hindsight, Nixon posed a parallel threat to the establishment.
The Culture War Against the Left
President Nixon had always faced substantial hostility from the Left. Herblock (Herbert Block), the famous Washington Post cartoonist, did many of his most famous cartoons lampooning and savaging Nixon. The anti-war movement focused a great deal of its efforts against President Nixon and then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger when they declined to surrender to the North Vietnamese and withdraw in total defeat from Vietnam.
With senior speechwriter Pat Buchanan and Vice President Spiro Agnew leading the way, the Nixon administration waged a relentless culture war against the Left. As Buchanan’s various memoirs and books make clear, this was a deliberate, conscious strategy to drive a wedge between working Americans and the George McGovern left. It was a process that led to the massive 1972 victory. Even after the damage of Watergate, it continued to drive moderate and conservative Democrats away from their party and toward Republicans. Ronald Reagan was the next great recipient of a massive majority.
Finding themselves in a cultural war with a politician they never liked, the Left developed an antipathy for President Nixon, unlike anything we had seen up to that time. The Left had tolerated President Dwight Eisenhower as a war hero. He managed the Franklin Delano Roosevelt-Harry Truman bureaucracies and made them more fiscally conservative, but he did not try to fundamentally change them.
Now the Left had a real opponent. Nixon’s plans to profoundly change the bureaucracy gave the Left a wide range of government and interest group allies who feared his bold reform plans. Watergate wiped out virtually all memory of how seriously President Nixon viewed the need for deep bold changes in Washington.
Undermining the Bureaucrats
The first Nixon administration had been a centrist conservative administration. It created the Environmental Protection Agency. It seriously considered a family income plan that was a huge break with conservatism (and had been authored by the Democrat in the White House, Daniel Patrick Moynihan). His first term convinced President Nixon that the structure and processes of the federal government needed a deep shakeup.
Richard Nathan, in his book The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency, begins:
While riding in a crowded airplane in the spring of 1973, I overheard a conversation about Watergate. One comment was “Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman are on the verge of taking over the government.”
In the aftermath of Watergate, we have tended to forget the ambitious plans and highly charged atmosphere as Nixon’s second term got underway.
President Nixon described his effort to decentralize government as much as possible. Nathan notes:
From the point of view of the federal bureaucracy… the essential implications of the New Federalism are clear. The idea was to weaken the federal bureaucracy.… [T]ensions between the White House and the bureaucracy grew rapidly as Nixon’s domestic policies were spelled out. Increasingly, and as was a logical outgrowth of the New Federalism, the Nixon presidency was marked by animosity on both sides between the White House and the domestic bureaucracy.
The speed and aggressiveness of President Nixon’s post-election landslide effort was startling.
The day after winning 49 states and over 60 percent of the popular vote, the re-elected commander-in-chief called a cabinet meeting. As Nathan wrote:
After thanking his associates for their help in the campaign, [Nixon] proceeded to outline dramatic plans for staff changes. He required that all political appointees submit their resignations forthwith. …Each Cabinet officer instructed to meet with the principal appointed officials of his agency and request letters of resignation that many would be accepted. Tension at departmental conference tables ran high at a time when in the normal course of events one would have expected instead a period of celebration and relaxation. Pundits in Washington had a field day.…
Rumors and leaks were widespread in this period. The uncertainty that this process produced brought government decision processes to a virtual halt.
Nathan reported that in an interview with Jack Horner, President Nixon said:
[H]e would ‘shuck off’ and ‘trim down’ social programs that in his view reflected the failures of the sixties. He talked specifically about cutting government employment: ‘I honestly believe that government in Washington is too big and is too expensive… We can do the job better with fewer people.’ He referred to some agencies as ‘too fat, too bloated’ and made it clear, according to Horner, that he was talking about domestic agencies such as HUD, HEW, and the Department of Transportation.
Nathan’s account of the attempted Nixon Revolution in government is reinforced by a remarkable book by Frederic V. Malek, Washington’s Hidden Tragedy: the Failure to Make Government Work.
Malek was the management genius Nixon had recruited to work with Roy Ashe in thinking through federal reforms and his book is a useful primer on applying management in an inherently political environment.
Malek describes the core of Nixon’s domestic political and governing strategy:
Shortly after the 1972 elections, President Nixon decided he wanted a cabinet reflective of the majority of Americans that had elected him. In his view, this included Irish Catholics, Americans of Italian descent, officials from the labor movement, veterans, and people from other walks of American life. His ambition was to dismantle Roosevelt’s Grand Coalition, and in his second term he wanted a cabinet that reflected elements of the coalition he had won over in his reelection.
Watergate must be seen in the context of this enormous, bold, and extraordinarily powerful effort to reshape the American government and the Rooseveltian coalition that had dominated America for four decades.
When you understand how big a change President Nixon wanted — and Washington’s hostility toward him — Watergate begins to emerge as a different story. It was not simply the story of a buffoonish political break-in, it was a remarkable counterattack by a system that was in danger of losing power. Anything that could be done to weaken or undermine the Nixon presidency was legitimate because he was that great a threat.
The parallels between 1972 and the current assault on President Trump are remarkable. Both men were perceived by the Left as mortal threats. Therefore, anything to stop them is automatically seen as legitimate.
The parallels of institutional dishonesty are remarkable. In both cases, the national establishment overrode the American people and destroyed an elected president. The New York Times and Washington Post also carried water for the establishment to destroy Nixon and Trump.
There is much to learn from 1972 and 1974 that applies to us today.
Similarly, the previous two Democratic administrations did far worse things than Watergate. The people who were trying to destroy President Nixon were themselves involved in far greater law-breaking and they knew it.
But that is the topic of another essay.
This is the 14th installment in a series by Speaker Gingrich on American despotism. Listen to The American Spectator’s exclusive interview with the Speaker here. Find the first in the series here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here, the eighth here, the ninth here, the 10th here, the 11th here, the 12th here, and the 13th here. For more commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.
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