On Thursday, Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Nixon Tapes: 1973,” joined Neil Cavuto to talk about similarities between Hillary Clinton and President Richard Nixon.
“Both Hillary Clinton and richard nixon like to keep things covered up,” noted Brinkley. He added that both are brilliant people who have a sense of entitlement to secrecy. “You don’t want to be called ‘Nixonian,’ but there are good things about it. Nixon was very brilliant. Hillary Clinton is very brilliant.” Both also seemed to feel entitled to secrecy with regard to Nixon’s tapes and Hillary’s emails, respectively—”that idea of kind of always feeling the privilege of keeping stuff that nobody else has.”
Brinkley also said they both had a rapid fall from grace. “It utterly destroyed his presidency. But Hillary Clinton has to get ahead of this, and if she doesn’t or if a felony charge is brought against her—remember—all of Nixon’s men started falling.” He adds, “December ’72 Nixon says ‘I’m on top the world, I just won the biggest landslide, I just did the China deal.” “He felt like everything was perfect. Weeks later, all he is worried about is Watergate.” This resembles Clinton’s rapid decline in the polls, and dripping scandal.
Some are skeptical of how Clinton’s scandals will impact her, as they see no definitive smoking gun. But when asked if there are any smoking guns, Brinkley cautioned to remember that with Nixon, “there wasn’t a smoke gun at first. He actually gave 1,200 hours of ‘here’s a bunch of tapes’ and then they found the missing seconds of the tapes.” This doesn’t deviate much from Clinton, who has released innumerable emails, but withheld some.
And just like Hillary Clinton, “Nixon’s problem in watergate was that he could never get ahead of the issue.”
