On this day in 1974: US supreme court orders Nixon to hand over Watergate tapes
On this day 51 years ago, the US supreme court dealt a serious blow to executive privilege when it ordered to hand over hours of tape recordings relating to the Watergate scandal. It’s interesting to wonder how Donald Trump would respond to such a demand today, says Eliot Wilson
Fifty-one years ago, Richard Nixon, President for more than five years, was embattled, and well on the way to being beleaguered. What had started in May 1972 with a break-in to the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex had spiralled out of control into “the Watergate Scandal”. Although Nixon had won a second term that November by a landslide, carrying 49 of 50 states, now his presidency was unravelling.
There is comic tragedy in the fact that Nixon had almost certainly not known about the break-in before it happened, much less ordered or approved it. And if ever a presidential campaign had needed no underhand assistance, it was Nixon’s re-election over Democrat George McGovern. The senator for South Dakota had been carried to the nomination at a chaotic convention by a coalition of left-wing activist groups, but his liberalism was too much for the electorate at large.
McGovern’s chances were not improved when his chosen running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, stood aside after it transpired that he had received electro-convulsive therapy for depression some years before. Five leading Democrats turned down the chance to replace him until the former US ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, accepted; he was the brother-in-law of Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy, but the lustre of Camelot was gone.
Watergate was the ultimate demonstration of the adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Nixon had not been involved in the ham-fisted pseudo-espionage supervised by White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman and presidential adviser Chuck Colson, both of whom would serve prison sentences. He could have disavowed all knowledge.
Nixon was thin-skinned, forever marked by his narrow, perhaps even fraudulent, defeat by John F Kennedy in 1960’s presidential contest. He did not particularly disapprove of what his subordinates had done, and was fully prepared to use the weight of the federal bureaucracy to hound those he saw as enemies. So he decided instead to allow an attempted cover-up, lying, obfuscating and eventually dismissing his attorney general and deputy attorney general until he found someone at the Department of Justice who would fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.
A ticking time bomb
The ticking bomb under his presidency was the tape recording system in the Oval Office. Many previous presidents had recorded conversations and telephone calls as the only practical way to maintain a permanent record of what was going on. Nixon had ordered Lyndon Johnson’s devices removed in 1969 but then relented, realising their worth, and a new system was installed in 1971. But the new system was voice-activated; as much as anything else, Nixon was too physically clumsy to switch a recording device on and off reliably. It captured everything.
By the time the Senate committee investigating Watergate was informed of the existence of the recording system in 1973, 3,700 hours of conversations and calls had been recorded. It asked for the tapes to be handed over, but Nixon refused, citing executive privilege and national security. In April 1974, the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for the tapes, dismissing Nixon’s proposed compromise of edited transcripts, and Cox’s replacement as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworksi, appealed the matter to the Supreme Court.
For Donald Trump to come third in a test of ethics behind Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton is an extraordinary achievement
On 24 July 1974, 51 years ago today, the Supreme Court gave its judgement. By a unanimous 8-0 verdict, it ruled that executive privilege on the basis of a “generalized need for confidentiality” was not sufficient reason to refuse a subpoena. Nixon had to hand over all of the tapes.
It is interesting to wonder how Donald Trump would have reacted. He would probably have written off the justices as “horrible people”, demanded their replacement with MAGA loyalists and ignored the court’s ruling.
Nixon was cut from different cloth. Fearsomely clever and hard-working, he was a genuinely brilliant and deep thinker, capable of daring and imaginative foreign policy gambles like his groundbreaking visit to China in 1972.
Nixon had become cynical and malign but he still had a sense of constitutional order, and his support was melting away. On 5 August, the tapes were released: one proved that Nixon had been told about the Watergate burglary and had approved plans to interfere with the FBI’s investigation. Congressional Republicans told him that impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate were all but inevitable. Four days later he became the only US president in history to resign.
At that time, only one president, Andrew Johnson in 1868, had ever been impeached, and the Senate did not convict. Nixon resigned to avoid the personal humiliation of impeachment, but also the potential institutional damage. Since then, President Clinton was impeached but not convicted in 1998/99; President Trump has been impeached twice, in 2019/20 and 2021, and has not been convicted. Coming third in a test of ethics behind Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton is an extraordinary achievement.
Eliot Wilson is a writer