The Watergate saga that ended in President Richard Nixon’s resignation shares some key similarities with impeachment efforts against President Trump — but this time it’s unlikely to result in the commander in chief’s early departure from office, said a son-in-law of Nixon.
Ed Cox told the Washington Examiner that Democratic dislike of Nixon, a Republican, was just as strong in 1973-74 as it is now with Trump, who likely faces impeachment charges related to his pressure campaign on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, a top-tier 2020 Democrat.
“There were huge majorities of Democrats in both houses,” said Ed Cox, 73, who married Tricia Nixon, eldest daughter of Richard Nixon, in a 1971 White House Rose Garden ceremony. “Now he worked with them and got things done, but I have to tell you, they were still Democrats. They were still very partisan and every success he had, rankled them.”
Cox, a former New York Republican Party chairman and current national coordinator of Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for the president’s 2020 reelection bid, cited stark differences between the politics surrounding Watergate and the Ukraine whistleblower affair.
“Now we have a majority in the Senate. That’s going to go through their own process on their own,” Cox said. “We don’t accept hearsay.”
As for House Democrats, “While they have a majority, it’s a very weak majority in the House, and they’ve got 31 Democrats who are in Trump-won districts,” Cox said. “And those 31, they know they’re going to be vulnerable with Trump at the top of the ticket.”
There isn’t a large data set of impeachment data in American history, with the proceedings against Trump only the fourth in American history. In 1868, Radical Republicans impeached Democratic President Andrew Johnson over conflicts about Reconstruction policies after the Civil War. Johnson was acquitted in his Senate trial by a single vote. In 1998, House Republicans impeached Democratic President Bill Clinton on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges in the Monica Lewinsky episode. The Senate in February 1999 voted to acquit Clinton on both charges.
Ken Hughes, a researcher with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, sees similarities between the 1974 impeachment effort and the present. Recent closed-door depositions of witnesses that led to public hearings before the House Intelligence Committee are comparable to Watergate-era House Judiciary Committee executive sessions held behind closed doors that did not become public for several weeks, Hughes told the Washington Examiner.
“That was the structure. That was actually a structure that was laid down in a resolution by the House. It was just the structure that the majority Democrats decided upon, according to Peter Rodino, who was the chairman at the time,” Hughes said. “It was a way to ensure that people were not defamed by having their testimony in public first and then, you know, having to backtrack things later. In 1974, as now, Republicans complained that their witnesses were not called. Now Republicans called it a kangaroo court and a witch hunt.”
Back then, though, House Republicans didn’t know how to fight aggressively for Nixon, even if they were impossibly outnumbered, Cox said. At that point, House Republicans were about halfway through their 40-year exodus in the House minority, which finally ended with the 1994 midterm elections.
Hughes said dominant Democrat majorities in both chambers made a difference in their push to oust Nixon.
“By the time Nixon resigned, the Democrats were not worried that impeaching the president would backfire against them,” he said. “But at the start of the process, Democrats were very worried that investigating a president who was reelected by such a large landslide as Richard Nixon had been in 1972 might backfire.”
