Lessons from Watergate

Jonathan Bernstein: “Very early on, when the original cover-up was still intact and President Richard Nixon was cruising to a landslide re-election, House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, as Fred Emery tells the story, ‘reckoned that so many bad things had been done by the Nixon men that they simply could not be kept secret indefinitely. Privately, he urged his surprised colleagues in the House leadership to ‘get ready for impeachment.’”

“But O’Neill was patient. The House didn’t move after the cover-up collapsed in spring 1973, or after dramatic Senate hearings that summer revealed that Nixon was personally involved. Only after the Saturday Night Massacre in October, when Nixon ordered Justice Department officials to fire the special prosecutor overseeing the probe, did they start moving toward impeachment. And then for months, the judiciary committee slowly gathered evidence to make its case. This strategy eventually worked, as the story gradually came out and moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats began defecting from Nixon – followed by the rest of the Republican Party in August 1974.”

“Has Pelosi been emulating O’Neill? She’s been taking plenty of heat from pro-impeachment Democrats. She’s certainly been unwilling to get ahead of her caucus. Perhaps that’s because she thinks impeachment could be avoided. Or perhaps she’s been betting that Trump’s past and current lawlessness would keep supplying new evidence pushing ambivalent Democrats toward action – and that a measured, patient process would be far stronger than a rushed one.”