By Conrad Black
Vice President Vance’s remarks at the Nixon Library last week minimizing the real gravity of the Watergate controversy was perceptive and just. He asserted that today it would not receive much attention and historically did not much compromise the remarkable success of the Nixon presidency. The counts of impeachment that were passed in July 1974 by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee were ludicrous. The first count was a farrago of pompous claptrap about how President Nixon had been uncooperative with the investigation. He handed over every tape and other object that was requested, having conducted a normal executive privilege defense (that deserved a better judicial reception). He surrendered the desired material when the courts required it.
The second count was that he “endeavored” to use the powers of his office in inappropriate ways — not that he actually had — and had violated his oath of office and infringed the constitutional rights of others. It is impossible at this remove to take these silly, picayune complaints seriously, but they were unctuously put forth as “high crimes and misdemeanors” that justified the conviction and removal from office of the president. The president retired his office before impeachment was put to the House.
Vice President Vance at the White House, June 18, 2026. AP/Jacquelyn MartinMr. Vance was born after these events, and it is, as a student of history, that he views with incomprehension the unspeakable smear job conducted by the bloodless political assassination squads in the national press against one of the nation’s distinguished presidents. I was one of those who wrote at the time that there was no evidence that Nixon had committed crimes, and that if he were railroaded out of office, it would addict the cynical political class of America to the unconstitutional practice of misusing presidential impeachment proceedings to escalate partisan backbiting.
This is what has occurred. The subsequent impeachment of President Clinton for minor if unseemly peccadilloes was absurd. The impeachment of President Trump for an unexceptionable telephone conversation overheard by dozens of people, and whose entire transcript he immediately released, was nonsense. And the further impeachment of him on the unfounded charge that he had incited an insurrection, with the goal of removing him from an office which he had already departed at the end of his term, gave new warmth, depth, and color to the concept of sleazy, stupid, and destructively partisan politics.
There is not now and never has been one scintilla of probative evidence that Nixon committed a crime. Yet he was an old-fashioned patriotic American and the country had not had a presidential impeachment trial in over a century (Andrew Johnson in 1868, another farcical proceeding), and he declined to submit the country to such an indignity.
Next to Lincoln’s term and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first and third terms, Nixon had probably the most successful presidential term in the country’s history. He was the first president since Zachary Taylor in 1848 to take office without his party controlling either house of Congress. The country was torn by race riots and anti-war riots every week. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the election year and skyjackings of commercial aircraft were frequent occurrences. There were 545,000 draftees in Vietnam and 200 to 400 were coming home in body bags every week. There was no exit strategy from the war nor any significant peace negotiations.
Four years later, as Nixon sought reelection, America had withdrawn from Vietnam while maintaining a non-communist government there, and had successfully handed over the war to the South Vietnamese, which had defeated the North when it invaded in April 1972. He had triangulated great power relations with Communist China and reintroduced the world’s most populous country into international affairs and had negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in history, which incidentally restored American nuclear superiority. He had quietly ended school segregation through private-sector negotiating panels in each state and avoided the court-ordered nightmare of moving tens of millions of school children around the metropolitan areas of America under court orders for racial balance.
He was about to abolish the draft, had reduced the crime rate, avoided inflation, founded the Environmental Protection Agency as a helpful organization, and not the tormenter of commerce that it has become, and greatly expanded the National Park system. Nixon was rewarded for his surpassing performance as president with more than 60 percent of the vote for only the fourth time in contested American presidential elections, and by a margin of some 18 million votes, which has not been exceeded since, despite the doubling of the electorate.
The Democrats had deserted their own president, Lyndon Johnson, abandoned his war, obstructed Nixon’s successful effort to save the war, and then destroyed Nixon’s presidency with unjust charges, and then delivered South Vietnam to the North after Nixon, though innocent of crimes, left his office to spare the country embarrassment. No Greek playwright, comic or tragic, has come up with such a plot.
Now that more than 50 years have gone by since that horrible travesty, Nixon is emerging as one of America’s outstanding presidents, though his most vocal journalistic enemies still fester on our television screens, bilious mythmakers to the end. As Henry Kissinger said at Nixon’s funeral in 1994: “He scaled pinnacles that turned to precipices before him. He achieved greatly, he suffered deeply, but he never gave up.” Nothing can now stop the greatest comeback in American history, though it is posthumous.
First posted in the New York Sun
One Response
Mr. Black merits criticism for this obtuse and blatantly false statement: “The subsequent impeachment of President Clinton for minor if unseemly peccadilloes was absurd.”
Most all reasonable Americans believe that the impeachment of Clinton was well deserved and was certainly NOT “absurd” as Mr. Black claims. Mr. Black’s mission-driven, revisionist view of Nixon and now of a far more undeserving Clinton is strange and bizarre.
Some people think that historians have some special insight into historical events and current political happenings. As this article demonstrates, it’s just not so.