Nixon without Watgate: When Are His Sins Revealed?

Watergate was a dirty little scandal that brought down the Nixon White House and revealed part of Nixon's dark side to the world and the dirty deeds, planned and executed, of the Nixon administration. In the years after, we became more and more aware of those things, more aware of their depth and fullness, and more and more was revealed.

One of the questions I don't recall really seeing on the topic is if Nixon survives Watergate or if there is no Watergate, when do all the sins of the Nixon White House get revealed? How do they get revealed? And what will get revealed and what will not? And what will the reaction be to them?
 
Good question.

I think some of this rests on Agnew's fate, actually. If he flies through scandal-free, it helps Nixon a bit, but it also means he might mount a presidential bid, putting him under increased scrutiny and possibly exposing them latter than OTL - which would damage Nixon a little, maybe even a lot if it leads to a later discovery of his Watergate involvement.

I'm no expert on this shit, though.
 
I'm no Nixon expert, but my guess would be after he dies. He'll still be somewhat controversial during his life, and he'll doubtlessly whitewash or try to defend his more questionable actions in his inevitable autobiography, but once he dies his personal papers will be turned over to either his presidential library or the National Archives. Someone will inevitably look at those records in the course of writing a book and conclude that Richard Nixon was an amoral SOB.
 
I'll submit this horrific thought to you: what if they never get revealed? Or at least most of them. Certain things will probably come out because of first hand accounts among non-Nixonite partisans and documentation that will remain, but the Nixon people can do an awful lot to edit and destroy what they need to. Certainly the ardent Nixon defenders and the Nixon library have shown that sort of thought process and effort to suppress and destroy before, even with the nastiness revealed, and they still try to whitewash Richard Nixon after all that's been shown about him. And Nixon fleeing the White House made a secret deal with some man (I can't remember who it was) to give said person his tapes to hold onto; a dirty deal Congress found out about and made sure the tapes were taken by the government. There is an evident thought process of a Richard Nixon and people around him who will edit history, distort history and destroy history to make Richard Nixon look good, at least if they can manage it.
 
Until Nixon dies and someone from the his administration writes their memoirs.

The memoirs can tend to selectively remember, conflict with other accounts, and go out of their way to alter history and improve Nixon's image, as well as their own if they can manage it. And that's OTL where Nixon as what he really was and did are out in the open. I don't know if you'd get the explosive story from those, because who would reveal the dirt? A frightening part is that even if they do, so much may have been destroyed or locked away by the Nixonites with impunity (no Watergate, no one asks to get the tapes, and all of Nixon's personal materials are his to do with as he pleases) that the whole truth never managed to get out.

In the meantime, you may have Nixon die like Citizen Kane: murmuring "Watergate" while people funnel old reel-to-reel tapes taking up room into an incinerator and wondering what he meant by it.
 
I wonder what Nixon's reputation would be like without Watergate...

One thing's for sure. Jimmy Carter would probably never be president.
 
I'll submit this horrific thought to you: what if they never get revealed?

Hard to do. You see, it seems from a number of sources that Nixon was just as Gov. Pat Brown came to the realization when facing each other in 1962: "I was worried. Here was a guy who went all over the world to visit world leaders and with me just getting by. Then it came out that instead of being attractive, he was the opposite, what ever that is." (quote approximate to memory).

Or as Nixon said of himself said, 'an introvert in an extraverted profession.'

For these and other reasons, he would have always been a lightning rod to much deeper investigation. Facts are, it is not that difficult to put together original and ground breaking research, especially with the help of a great memory track, more so the library of congress or now with the internet. I have done some pretty ground breaking research myself of famous people, parts apparently never put together before which was endlessly gone over by the media (not a politician of my best work, but a public figure who was tarred horribly at a very young age). We will see if it is ever found fault with, as it has been going on a decade now.

With those deemed 'right' and 'popular', it is easier to slip something under the rug. With those deemed 'bad' or good fall guy, it is the good or saving grace that needs to be gotten out. To really see history is to see all the blemishes and angles and good points (with those who are ill famed, usually with very accurate reasons).

Nixon was his own worst enemy, and most certainly was a complex and with a pronounced dark side, though his methodological (method-- illogical?) and telegraphed bark was much worse than his bite, though neither was that nice on average. As a successful politician with keeping secrets, one normally does as reported of 1948 Chiang Kai Shek "kill them all, keep it quiet" but in smaller scales, not to do a Nixon and openly in cabinet meeting etc. mull over issues and never seriously thinking of doing the ultimate. At the time, lots of liberals had quite valid reasons to expect the jackboots ready to march.

At the level of a modern US presidency with an adversorial electorial system, at least psychologically/verbally, every politician even Carter uses lots of ways to put streneously and at least some what heavy handedly put down threats, or has since Calvin Coolidge or maybe Harding. Everyone is either a threat or a tool, to some extent as the saying puts it with politicians. It looks bad, very bad to do things as Nixon did, almost amateurish as in H.L. Meneken's 'Not much is worse than the situation when a good boy becomes corrupted by the world' (meaning he does not know what is being dealt with or the safer limits. And much was done by order and worse by insinuated order in Nixons presidency.

Were it not for his accomplishments (Detente, first known to be mulled over in 1954) and some other issues of complicated sorts, he would entirely deserve without reservation many of the charges against him as one of the worst presidents wholly inadequate to the times. If he got away with it, by some chance, it might encourage others to follow in the footsteps, but I wonder. Politics has never been bean bag. That said, this subject belongs to those who have two or three lifetimes to research the subject from nearly every angle, much more complicated than my more limited research subjects..

President Spiro Agnew worries me. No telling if that would lead by example to just as some posters here suggest. It could have happened, and the man was popular with the right wing no question about it. The trajectory of the Nixon administration would have been latched onto by Agnew AFAIK.

So to put it in another way, if Nixon got away with it past leaving office, it could have easily laid the ground work for an even greater epic flop like Agnew (if he really was that bad. I only have what a variety of people had impressions of him, like Casper Weinberger.) At that point, far more political stones would be overturned, to find where the bodies lay. But damage control is much easier after out of office and stautes of limitations a big issue. It smacks of vindictiveness and is a bad precedent.

That is my impression for what it is worth.
 
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