From Watergate's bipartisan courage to today's cowardice on the Epstein files

The Last Time Congressional Republicans Remembered Who They Really Served

Fifty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court delivered one of the most important rulings in American history. In a unanimous decision, the Court ordered President Richard Nixon to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor, establishing once and for all that not even the president was above the law.

I was eight years old in the summer of 1974, living in the Netherlands but somehow aware that something monumental was happening across the Atlantic. Even Dutch children who weren't reading newspapers knew about "Nixon" stepping down. The name stuck in my young mind partly because of its sound. In Dutch, "niks" means nothing, and "niksen" is the verb for doing nothing, often associated with being lazy.

As a child, I enjoyed the art of niksen, but my parents were from the generation that rebuilt our country after the devastation of fascist occupation, and they didn't want me to develop an affinity for it. So I learned the skill of pretending to be busy while quietly enjoying my ‘niksen’. Although I couldn't follow the complex political drama, that name evoked associations of doing nothing at the top level and thus carried weight, even for a child.

That reputation extended into family life. It was also a name that often got mentioned in hushed conversations between parents while we kids were busy with our play. I don't recall the mention of Ford and Carter's names in the years that followed, even though my memory of those years is much clearer. Nixon's name carried weight that transcended politics. The burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex led to investigations that revealed illegal wiretapping, laundered campaign contributions, and a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage. Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment because he understood he had lost the support of his own party.

As early as summer 2017, James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, stated at Australia's National Press Club, "Watergate pales really, in my view, compared to what we're confronting now." Jill Wine-Banks, who served as assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation, put it even more starkly: "The actions of Donald Trump leading up to January 6 and continuing to this day to me are much more dangerous to democracy than anything Richard Nixon did".

The core difference between 1974 and now is that Nixon acknowledged the evidence, admitted to shame, and resigned under pressure from both parties. Watergate occurred when bipartisan respect for the law was still intact. Two-thirds of Americans agreed with impeachment. That consensus is now lost, and with it, accountability has vanished.

Years later, when I was a young diplomat visiting Washington for the first time, I stayed in a hotel where I could see the Watergate building from my window. I found it fascinating to see this place, which had become so deeply embedded in my consciousness. It was one of those landmarks you feel you know intimately from references and images, like the Statue of Liberty or meeting Buzz Aldrin (about whom I wrote earlier this week when recalling our encounter); a moment when you encounter something famous that's already part of your mental landscape.

But today that view would carry different weight. Trump has spent years dismantling the reforms Congress passed to prevent another Nixon. Where Nixon at least understood constitutional limits, we now face unprecedented challenges to democratic norms.

During Watergate, investigations relied on established facts and evidence. Nixon used the phrase "witch hunt," but Jill Wine-Banks recalls never feeling threatened by mob attacks on government offices or the Capitol building. The system maintained basic respect for institutional processes.

The Watergate system worked because all three branches of government functioned. The process was driven by government officials who saw their duty to the law and Constitution over personal loyalty to the president. Republicans like Hugh Scott and Barry Goldwater eventually told Nixon he had lost all but 15 Republican votes in the Senate.

That era contrasts sharply with today, when a government official who actually tries to uphold the law and Constitution gets fired. Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni was terminated in April after refusing to mislead federal courts about Trump's deportation program. When senior DOJ official Emil Bove allegedly told lawyers they might need to consider telling judges "fuck you" and ignore court orders, Reuveni was shocked. In his 15 years at Justice, no administration had ever suggested blatantly defying judicial rulings. His reward for maintaining ethical standards was swift termination.

Today we live in a completely different reality than in the Nixon days. Scandals that would have ended careers in 1974 barely register as news for a single day. The Supreme Court, which unanimously ordered Nixon to comply with subpoenas, would now likely give the president broad immunity from prosecution. Congressional Republicans who once told their own president he had to go now defend virtually any behavior. And when House Republicans finally faced pressure from their own constituents demanding answers about the Epstein files, representatives were sent home on a long summer break to avoid a resolution that would force the release of those documents.

Facts themselves have become partisan weapons rather than shared starting points for debate. After all, there are now "alternative facts" for those who don't like the real ones; we live in a post-truth reality.

In this climate, we read daily about attempts to use tariffs as weapons against democracy in Brazil, deportation raids targeting farm workers instead of criminals, cuts to weather forecasting that endanger American lives, and the systematic dismantling of scientific research to avoid inconvenient truths about climate change.

America once produced leaders who made impossible promises and delivered on them, think Kennedy's vow to put a man on the moon before the decade ended. Now, as I wrote in The Planet newsletter earlier this week, presidential grand promises are still made, much more so than in Kennedy's days: "I will solve it on day one," but they sound hollow and hardly anyone still takes them seriously.

The president uses his office as a personal protection racket while his supporters storm government buildings and threaten judges' families. Each scandal flows into the next without consequence. The institutions that checked presidential power in 1974 have either been captured, weakened, or abandoned their roles entirely.

Nixon's world now feels impossibly distant. Today's anniversary shows us when presidential accountability actually worked, and demonstrates how far we've traveled from a time when even presidents understood that democracy had limits they couldn't cross.

What Nixon did was illegal and wrong. But he accepted the consequences. Trump likely knows his behavior is wrong too, but he's found a system willing to do "niksen," to do nothing. The House, Senate, and much of the judiciary have mastered the Dutch art of appearing busy while accomplishing absolutely nothing in terms of accountability.

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