Nixon gets away with it

So, the chaps conducting the Watergate break-in get away with it. Nixon's shennanigans are never exposed (at least not during his Presidency) and he serves out the rest of his term- what would he do? What would America look like given that, ironically, the conservative Nixon was probably the last competent liberal President that the US would have until Clinton.
 
Well as I said in another thread, since nobody was able to discover the Watergate situation, Nixon would've ended his second term in office, probably riding on a nice wave of popularity, specially since he brought about the end of the Vietnam War in and around this time.

Since there was no Watergate, and Vietnam was pretty much over with, the Hippie and Counterculture movements would've run out of their own steam.

But what I'm wondering is, with Nixon still there come electon time, and no real blemishes (that anyone would know of) on his record, would Jimmy Carter have even been elected? Nothing big and bad to throw a wrench into the Nixon Administration, specially not having to resign, would Carter have had much luck AT ALL at getting elected?

Unless Nixon screws up in this second term, and with a major issue (Vietnam) done with, i'm pretty sure America would've voted for whoever was set to succeed him, because I just don't see Jimmy Carter having much of a chance of winning in a world where the Watergate Scandal never came to pass.

So there'd probably be a President Ford, or (ironically) President Reagan, or a President Buckley, etc. etc. instead of President Carter.

Now what THEY woulda done with the situations that arose during OTL Jimmy Carter's administration... is something up for debate.
 
From what I have read, Carter was a outsider who came from nowhere. Without the Watergate scandal I think Carter is definetly out.

President Ford is likely.
 
What I'm wondering is this- with a successful Nixon could we possibly avert the growing right/left gulf in American politics?

I mean with Nixon you have the seeds of the scheming corrupt Republican followed by Carter, emblematic of the wishy-washy Democrat (I'm leaving Ford out of the equation here). Each of these two men represented a slanderous archetype of sorts for people on the opposite political wing.

However, couldn't a successful and unblemished Nixon be seen as "The Great Unifier"? After all, he'd be a man who while conservative still pushed necessary progressive reforms, who made great steps in foreign affairs and domestic ones. Couldn't an untarnished Nixon take the position of a great Elder Statesman in the 80's. Perhaps instead of the theatrical blustering of Reagan you have Nixon sent on diplomatic missions by whichever President is around in the turbulent 80's- he could be the man who could stand between Democrats and Republicans, between America and the world and be seen as a communicator, respected by all sides.

I know I might seem to be a bit over the top but personally I do think that Nixon was a great President whose only failing was that he got caught.

Plus, this may well give us an America with a functioning public healthcare system (if not socialised medicine) which alone butterflies all kinds of things.
 
What I'm wondering is this- with a successful Nixon could we possibly avert the growing right/left gulf in American politics?

I mean with Nixon you have the seeds of the scheming corrupt Republican followed by Carter, emblematic of the wishy-washy Democrat (I'm leaving Ford out of the equation here). Each of these two men represented a slanderous archetype of sorts for people on the opposite political wing.

However, couldn't a successful and unblemished Nixon be seen as "The Great Unifier"? After all, he'd be a man who while conservative still pushed necessary progressive reforms, who made great steps in foreign affairs and domestic ones. Couldn't an untarnished Nixon take the position of a great Elder Statesman in the 80's. Perhaps instead of the theatrical blustering of Reagan you have Nixon sent on diplomatic missions by whichever President is around in the turbulent 80's- he could be the man who could stand between Democrats and Republicans, between America and the world and be seen as a communicator, respected by all sides.

I know I might seem to be a bit over the top but personally I do think that Nixon was a great President whose only failing was that he got caught.

Plus, this may well give us an America with a functioning public healthcare system (if not socialised medicine) which alone butterflies all kinds of things.

That makes sense, and I agree.

I wonder what happens after Nixon's term though. Could Ford have won the presidency on his own, perhaps due to a popular predecessor?
 
I wonder if Nelson Rockefeller would have made another run for the presidency. I imagine that George Wallace would have made another run in 1976, but I think that Jerry Brown would have been the Democratic nominee.
 
Say Nixon become this great unifier, what happens with the democrats? Would they turn toward the free market, less goverment regulations and so on?
 
How would Nixon have dealt with Agnew's resignation, I wonder? He wasn't personally close to his VP, but politically the scandal would have been quite damaging to Nixon. Also, the economic troubles of the mid 1970s and the North Vietnamese victory over the South would have been damaging to RN.
 
Say Nixon become this great unifier, what happens with the democrats? Would they turn toward the free market, less goverment regulations and so on?

Good question, but I don´t think so, the Dems have already by then established themselves as the leftleaning party.

I´d say whoever succeeds Nixon in the GOP will win. But he´d still be bound to face a bad economy.

He´ll probably handle Iran very differently, supporting the Shah maybe enough to prevent the revolution, at least for a few years.

The oil crisis takes place anyway, I´d say, Israel is still there and the arabs are still pissed about it. The GOP president is seen as being unable to handle the economy, and some Dem beats him 1980. "The economy, stupid" meme might appear ten years earlier...:p;)
Besides after 12 yrs people will be keen on change. (But if the Dems nominate a total dork and the current one manages to be seen on top of things, maybe the GOP wins a narrow victory, but I´d say the other option is more likely).
 
Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975, and parodied Ford quite a bit. VP Ford could still say/do something klutzy, and gets defeated.

What about Mondale, Dukakis, or Al Gore?
 
Good question, but I don´t think so, the Dems have already by then established themselves as the leftleaning party.


It depends, though perhaps ITTL the labels of "right" and "left" in American politics become a little more twisted. After all Nixon was right wing but established a lot of more left wing policies (such as healthcare and environmental acts). Perhaps the right/left divide becomes seen as less important than the populist/technocratic divide? After all Nixon had a very top-down style of government, he was one of those who created the modern Imperial Presidency. Perhaps the Democrats could adopt a populist "states rights" stance as opposed to the Nixon Republicans "Listen to the Great White Father in Washington" stance. The Republicans would become the party of the urban middle and upper classes as well as the intelligentsia (the former hippie radicals of the 60's, now all grown up, realising that it's the Republicans who are pushing progressive reform on healthcare, the environment and so on) while the Democrats would be the blue collar Party of the People.
 
The Republicans would become the party of the urban middle and upper classes as well as the intelligentsia (the former hippie radicals of the 60's, now all grown up, realising that it's the Republicans who are pushing progressive reform on healthcare, the environment and so on) while the Democrats would be the blue collar Party of the People.

One should mention that Nixon played perhaps the largest role in turning the Democrats into "elitist socialist out-of-touch pro-commie eggheads". Amusingly, Republicans won college educated voters until the last twenty odd years.

Nixon was the guy, more than anyone, that started the grand shift of blue collar voters into Republican ranks. They had been uneasy with Stevenson, and Catholic Kennedy, but Johnson had kept them on board.

He helped cement the South, but that had been trending Republican, and Goldwater kept the Rocky Mountain libertarians loyal for the next forty years but Nixon (coupled with the Democrats melt-down) brought in the blue collar voters that gave Reagan his majorities (despite them not agreeing with most of his policies).


I outline below ways both the Republican and Democratic Parties might end up, but the Democrats aren't winning back blue collar voters without shifting sharply right on economics (too much money to the poor/minorities) and social issues (too much time spent on rights for the poor/minorities).




One important thing to remember is that Watergate trashed the Republican Party.

Yes, it was growing more conservative; yes, it was winning the South and inheriting those problems. However Watergate killed old-line Republicanism. Not the Roosevelt/Progressive/Eastern/Establishment wing of the Republican Party—that finally lost in '64[1]—but the Dole/Ford Midwest "balance the budget" conservatives.

After that they were sidelined so much so that Ford, the most conservative Republican President since Calvin Coolidge, was disliked because he wasn't "conservative enough".

With a non-scandal Nixon the conservative wing of the party retains an equal footing with both the new wings: the neoconservatives and the religious conservatives of the South. Combined with the Goldwater-won libertarians of the Rocky Mountain states whose sympathies are with the Midwest conservatives that leaves the Republican Party with the same tent—but a more balanced one.

Notably supply-side economics conservatives and anti-government conservatives will be weaker, while neoconservatives will still have to fight both the Taft isolationists and the Kissinger realists instead of basically beating them both into the ground.

This leaves the Republican Party with a very different flavour. President Reagan or Ford (or at least their nominations) but Ford would be more acceptable and Reagan would probably lean more to balancing the budget over supply-side tax cuts.



At the same time the Democrats may go off in any of several directions. A neoliberal Democratic Party delivering social welfare though non-government programs (negative income tax, say) would attract those Republican libertarians. Perhaps if Daniel Patrick Moynihan gets a Presidential nomination or Presidency. Despite being socially liberal, he'd be attractive to "values voters" because of the way he framed issues that would be important—black crime because of family breakdown, in a widely attacked but agreed later on to be correct paper he did in the '60s.

A strongly anti-communist Democratic Party (if, say, Scoop Jackson got a nomination at some point) would retain a bunch of neoconservatives that left IOTL, and probably hang on better in the South (Carter/Clinton performance, instead of Dukakis performance).

(Remember that post-'68 the Democratic Party was broken just as the Republicans were broken after Watergate. IOTL McGovern/New Leftists seized temporary control until the old-line "New Dealers" reasserted some sort of control. In the ATL it is entirely possible for someone else to lead the Democrats in a new direction…*or at least an altered one.)


A key point on no Watergate is that faith in government officials, and more importantly in Washington, won't collapse. Yes Viet Nam + Great Society + Civil Rights/black riots hammered it, but Watergate finished it off. No Watergate means the anti-Washington/anti-government people don't have quite the cachet, and a broader pro-reform (in both parties) movement probably does.

So one can run against Washington in the sense of reforming it, but running against it as something to be demolished is harder.



One more point in this disjointed post: the press. IOTL Watergate made the press think they were special in a different way, just as Nixon demolished them in the eyes of a great deal of the public. Watergate confirmed to liberals that the press was right, just as it confirmed to conservatives that the press was wrong.

A press not forced through Watergate will still be hobbled by false objectivity (as that was, and is, endemic), but at the same time the press will retain (I believe) a greater sense of legitimacy.





[1] For fifty years after the 1912 Republican/Progressive split the Progressives showed up for Presidential elections, demanded their moderate-to-liberal candidate, lost (and when a conservative like Hoover won, the Republican Party was dead for a couple decades proving the Progressives point), and then went away for four years.

(Technically it was Calvin Coolidge that screwed up, but conservative Herbert Hoover did try to do something… he was just so bad at press relations it never appeared that he was doing something to help.)

This led to a mostly conservative Republican Party, especially in the House, with a big influx of moderates and liberals in the Senate and every four years for the Presidential race.

Couple that with a locked out South they had to win 2/3 of all other electoral votes to take the Presidency—which they did consistently, pre-FDR, losing only to Grover and to Wilson because Taft/Roosevelt split the party—the Republican Party was heavily conservative most of the time but starting with the election of Teddy Roosevelt they stopped getting what they wanted because of those darn Progressives coming back every four years.

Conservative activists woke up in the late '50s/early '60s, conducted a hostile takeover of the party, ran Goldwater and broke the liberal Republicans back in 1964 with the defeat of Rockefeller.

Every liberal Republican after that was just lingering on, though moderates would survive in the Northern states until now, more or less.
 
Last edited:
Nixon was very unpopular

I was a college student during the Nixon years. My recollection was that Nixon was wildly unpopular before Watergate. A huge number of people connected him both with the huge lose of life in Vietnam and our ultimate defeat in Vietnam. I don't think Watergate actually made much difference other than to put a time and place to focus our anger at Nixon.

I think the present political divide in this country goes back to the cold war / Vietnam war era. On the one side were those who chose to focus on communism and military might as the cause and answer answer to our problems. On the other side were those who prefered a less confrontational and more productive approach.

I was a B-52 pilot in the 1980s and the feeling of impotence and lack of purpose in the military was palpable. Vietnam, and the additional military humiliations of that time left us in the military and civilians alike, feeling that the US didn't have answers anymore. For various reason Nixon more than any other President was the focus of these feelings, with or without Watergate.
 
I was a college student during the Nixon years. My recollection was that Nixon was wildly unpopular before Watergate. A huge number of people connected him both with the huge lose of life in Vietnam and our ultimate defeat in Vietnam. I don't think Watergate actually made much difference other than to put a time and place to focus our anger at Nixon.

Nah. As of April 6-9, 1973 Nixon maintained a positive approval rating. Note that this is well into the Watergate scandal (of which rumblings appeared during the '72 campaign) albeit this is the point just before Nixon's approval ratings collapse.

Approve, Disapprove, No Opinion.
54, 36, 10

The growing Watergate scandal tanked him.

The American public associated Nixon with getting the troops of Viet Nam, and remember that South Vietnam did not fall until the US cut off all support post-Watergate. How long it would have survived is a debatable point, but it was not Nixon that lost the war in Viet Nam.
 
Good question, but I don´t think so, the Dems have already by then established themselves as the leftleaning party.

I´d say whoever succeeds Nixon in the GOP will win. But he´d still be bound to face a bad economy.

He´ll probably handle Iran very differently, supporting the Shah maybe enough to prevent the revolution, at least for a few years.

The oil crisis takes place anyway, I´d say, Israel is still there and the arabs are still pissed about it. The GOP president is seen as being unable to handle the economy, and some Dem beats him 1980. "The economy, stupid" meme might appear ten years earlier...:p;)
Besides after 12 yrs people will be keen on change. (But if the Dems nominate a total dork and the current one manages to be seen on top of things, maybe the GOP wins a narrow victory, but I´d say the other option is more likely).

Parties changes over time or become obsolete. Look where the Democrates came from or for that matter the shift in policy in the period we are talking about, from Nixon to Reagan. Couldn't the Democrats pull a similar change assuming the Republicans doesn't given all that economic problems? (I admit that the fall of Nixon might have helped the Rep's reform). The ideas where around then with Milton Friedmans nobelish (not a real Nobel prize) price and all.

Or could we see a 3rd party rise?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Economics
 
I would imagine that nixon would finish off his term as an unpopular president. He had plenty of scandels and corruption Watergate not withstanding. However the Republican party, and by that I mean the old Republican party is not shattered, which keeps the New right from taking it over and bringing about a political seachange. The Democrats probably won't win the election in 76 as they were still weak and divided after the shock of 68. This would a good thing for them, as it saves them from being the ruling party when things economically went to hell in the late 70's. The overall effect of this would probably be a leftward shift of American politics. Both the Republican and Democratic parties would have internalized most of the new deal social policies, as the old republicans remain in existence, Reagan's presidency is likely butterflied away, and with that the hyper conservatism of the 1980's.
 
Didnt Nixon win a landslide in 1972? Also, it seems to me that Clinton was sort of like Nixon in that he "triangulated" and appeased the middle 1/3 knowing that the 1/3 right and left wingers had nowhere to go. I think the Repubs take the WhiteHouse with ease in '76. Afterall, even with WaterGate and Nixon resigning, Gerald Ford almost won and he did win a majority of states.

As a conservative I view the Nixon presidency as a failure since he governed as a liberal and much like LBJ his personality was so bad I find it hard to sympathize over Watergate. I remember Alan Greenspan on "60 Minutes" saying that Nixon was the most foul mouthed person he had ever been around and that Nixon seemed to dislike everybody.

However, with all that being said I think if Watergate never happens he probably goes down as a "near great" President having opened China and ending Vietnam, etc., etc.,
 
Didnt Nixon win a landslide in 1972? Also, it seems to me that Clinton was sort of like Nixon in that he "triangulated" and appeased the middle 1/3 knowing that the 1/3 right and left wingers had nowhere to go.
You're saying Nixon is ultimately responsible for New Labour?
BASTARD! I knew it must be something to do with him...

"Hello, Morbo. How's the family?"
"Numerous, and belligerent."
"Good; Nixon's pro-war and pro-family..."
 
From what I have read, Carter was a outsider who came from nowhere. Without the Watergate scandal I think Carter is definetly out.

President Ford is likely.

He can focus on health care. He can get a program with Democratic support. it angers conservative Republicans and insures Reagan's nomination. In the bad economic times of 1976, Reagan has a difficult time winning the election. h He does not face Jimmy Carter in that election. The Ill never lie to you was a reaction to watergate.
 
Last edited:
Top