WI: World without Watergate?

wilcoxchar said:
The 25th amendment says that the President's pick for VP to a replace a vacancy has to be confirmed by both houses of Congress.. :)
Bah, Constitutional law. Nixon would just ignore it.:p
 
Something I should note which I forgot to.

What this means is that taping systems remain a facet of the presidency. They began in 1939 and continued up until 1974 when Nixon resigned. They obviously fell out of vogue as Ford, nor Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush or Obama have had a taping system or recorded meetings since then, nor is any future president likely to do so. The reasons for tape systems varied, as did the extent to which they were employed. I think Roosevelt, for example, only recorded selective things whereas you had Nixon who recorded everything. The reasons for recording was generally for the memoir when it was to be written later, though Kennedy had it installed also to keep his fellows in the administration from lying. After Bay of Pigs, he was annoyed that the people in the administration were saying to anyone that asked that they had opposed the plan, when in reality Kennedy knew damned well what they had actually said and they hadn't. So he had the recording system to make sure that sort of thing wouldn't happen again. And Nixon may have had his nefarious reasons.

On a quick side note, that's a major point about the truthfulness concerning Kennedy which does get some criticism: "Kennedy men" have lied about things to the historical record, but it's usually not about making Kennedy look good in an untrue way, it's about saving their own ass. They said to do something, Kennedy said no and did something else, they disagreed with it and history proved Kennedy right and they (like with Bay of Pigs situation I mention above) tell the historical record that they were on the right side right with Kennedy. Such was the case with the Cuban Missile Crisis where everyone was saying attack Cuba and Kennedy was alone in doing it the way he did.

It really is a tragedy that we don't have taping systems now, because it means it's much more difficult to get what was really going on; not impossible (we do have people saying what they saw...at least if that's trustworthy) but very difficult. There's always the public face they present the press at the time and what we know, but that's bullshit and there's all the unknown unknowns going on, and that's the real truth. I mean, you can take it at face value and think Nixon thought Reagan was great and wonderful because that's what his public face was, but the reality is he seems to have thought he was a bit thick. There are so many layers of manipulated image to cut through to get to the core truth of what things really are, and the tape recordings of the presidents do that. We get the intimate reality.
We don't have that for Ford, we don't have that for Carter, we don't have that for Reagan, we don't have that for Bush Sr, we don't have that for Clinton, we don't have that for Bush Jr, we don't have that for Obama.

If Nixon doesn't go down, then that means that taping systems don't come to be viewed as a massive liability by subsequent presidents and administrations. That means that have recordings for your memoir (and whatever other purposes) remains a common tradition of the modern American presidency, and as a result we will have that historical record for whatever alternate presidents follow.
 
Top