What if Nixon apologizes?

Keenir

Banned
Walter Cronkite, in the Discovery Channel marathon this past week, noted that, had Nixon gone on camera and apologized for what happened at the Watergate Hotel, the whole thing would've blown over after a day or two -- that it was the denial which led to him having to leave office.

What if Nixon had apologized?
 
Nixon would have had to fire some staffers and assure the people such antics would not happen again. It would help if he destroyed the tape recordings.
 
I would say it would eventually all still come out, in some form. Considering the people involved (or who knew about different aspects of it) things would leak.

Depends on how much evidence is destroyed or 'lost' by the different parties over time in the case. Maybe it remains one of those conspircy theories that are put about, and it remains only a minor remark in the footnotes of Nixon's Presidency.
 
Had Nixon done so sometime in 1972--that is, gone on TV with a public acknowledgement and apology, coupled with throwing Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and a few others under the train--he still would have won by a landslide. (OK, he might not have carried Rhode Island, Hawaii, and a few other states that went Republican in that aberrant year but still...)

Chances are most of what the fired staffers had to say in terms of accusations would have been brushed aside as coming from disgruntled former employees, at least in the short term. As I recall, Ehrlichman and Haldeman both died in the late '80s: at that point, one suspects that a lot more dirt might have surfaced. Nixon's historical stock would have fallen, but one suspects that would have been temporary: he would have had his reputation ameliorated with the end of the cold war/fall of the Soviet Union assuming that happened as it did in OTL, given that he was a consummate cold warrior in his own right. (One can almost see an interview with Nixon on CNN on that night in 1989 when citizens were taking sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall.)

In summary, Nixon would probably be recalled today as an above-average president, given that he opened relations with China and (projecting) ended the Viet Nam war. Watergate would be viewed in the US as the less savory part of his character shining through, mitigated by his apology; abroad, that would be shrugged off as business as usual.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Also, the United States wouldn't be having its current debate on healthcare, as Nixon's goal for his second term was to establish some form of universal healthcare.
 
Let's look at the chronology. The Watergate break-in was foiled on June 17, 1972, as five men were charged. On September 15, Hunt and Liddy were subsequently charged. All this time, the whole scandal appeared to the public as the work of over-zealous staffers who had gotten out of control in the campaign.

Then, on October 8, Nixon announced a plan to withdraw from Vietnam, further padding a projected landslide victory in the November election. We must remember that the vote margin was the result of the Democrats' choice of George McGovern, a man who proved as out-of-touch and un-electable as Barry Goldwater eight years earlier.

Not until March, 1973 did investigators implicate Attorney General John Mitchell and ultimately link a cover-up to the president. So, an apology followed by firings would have helped, but to save his presidency, Nixon needed to destroy the tape recordings that eventually implicated him.
 
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