Despite the efforts of my grandfather and his investigators, and those of the press and Watergate committees, basic questions about the scandal remain unanswered. It is still unclear what, if any, prior knowledge Nixon had of the robbery. Although the president is on tape approving hush money payments to the defendants, it remains unknown whether he personally played a role in raising the funds. In fact, the extent to which HR Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and Attorney General John Mitchell conducted illegal activities on a day-to-day basis has not come to light.
Such questions, of course, are analogous to those currently facing the January 6 committee.
Richard Ben-Veniste, one of my grandfather’s top deputies who was at the meeting, said the January 6 committee asked him to offer advice. “Jan. 6 was the Saturday night massacre on steroids,” he said. “It was far more dangerous than we thought unthinkable: the onset of a coup as pure power replaced the rule of law. Nixon, for all his criminality and authoritarian sensibilities, he possessed a sense of shame.”
The continuum from Watergate to the present presents some ironies. During and after the Nixon scandals, congressional checks on the executive branch were enacted, including the War Powers Act of 1973 and amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act. Those legislative initiatives led to charges of overreach and a countermovement by some Republicans who wanted to restore power to the executive branch.
One of them, a former Nixon White House aide named Dick Cheney, was elected to Congress four years after Nixon resigned. Mr. Cheney, of course, was a vice president during the George W. Bush administration, and his daughter, Liz Cheney, is the vice chair of the January 6 committee that has harshly criticized Mr. Trump as an abuser of executive power. .
An additional irony that followed Nixon’s secretive presidency was the push for more transparency in government: more sunlight, fewer smoky rooms. But that effort has not necessarily translated into more efficient governance. To take a recent example, House conservatives led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right freshman from Georgia who was born three months before Nixon resigned, have used the virtue of legislative transparency as an argument to delay the agenda of House Democrats by insisting on roll-call votes for everything on the legislative calendar.
At the gathering, Rep. Deborah Ross, a Democrat from North Carolina, mingled among the guests as she recalled listening to the Senate Watergate hearings at the age of 10 while driving cross-country in her family’s pickup truck. Pointing to the coincidence of the Watergate anniversary taking place in the middle of the January 6 committee hearings, Ms Ross said that “the obvious thing that the two scandals had in common was that we are talking about two men who wanted to cling to the can”. It does not matter that. The irony is that Nixon would have won in 1972 anyway, if he hadn’t been so paranoid about the Democrats.”
Reference-www.nytimes.com