Notes

The Watergate scandal will forever taint Nixon’s presidency. It was not the original deed (authorising a break-in into Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate building during the 1972 presidential race) that did for him, but the lies and the cover-up. You know the situation is serious when you have to appear on TV and declare “I am not a crook”, and after a congressional investigation, prompted by groundbreaking investigative journalism from the Washington Post, Nixon became the first, and so far the only, president to resign from office.



But Watergate was a symptom not just the problem in itself. Nixon was an unusually hated politician long before Watergate, and the basic problem was his insecure, narcissistic, paranoid personality. Liberals saw Nixon capitalise on the traumas of the late 1960s – the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the deep divisions over the war in Vietnam – and saw him winning by appealing to people’s fears. Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ aimed to win support for the Republican Party in the South, where in the wake of the black freedom struggle, white voters were fearful of newly enfranchised African-Americans and felt alienated from the Democrats who had pushed Civil Rights legislation through.