Nixon supporters found opportunities within Republican administrations, however, and they leveraged their roles to rewrite the history of Watergate. Nixon’s former speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan argued as early as 1975 that Nixon’s resignation “looms as less a victory for morality in government than a triumph by one set of politicians over another.” He added, “When Mr. Nixon said his Administration was being judged by a double standard, he was indulging in uncharacteristic understatement.” Buchanan wore his Nixon loyalty as a badge of honor throughout his career as a conservative firebrand. During his tenure as White House Communications Director under Reagan, he acquired a mahogany desk bookcase that belonged to Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Halderman, for his office. When a guest asked why he had a Watergate symbol in his office, he replied, “The statute of limitations has run out.”
Buchanan wasn’t alone. One of the organizers of the Watergate burglary, G. Gordon Liddy, regularly backed Watergate conspiracy theories in public. When he became a conservative talk radio host, Liddy defended Nixon at a time when few did the same. Hugh Hewitt, who also became a talk radio host, briefly served as the first director of the Nixon Library in the president’s birthplace of Yorba Linda, Calif., in 1990. He made national news for a screening process that would deny anti-Nixon researchers access to his records, and even named Bob Woodward as someone who would not be welcome in their reading room. Hewitt returned to Yorba Linda in 2019 as President of the Richard Nixon Foundation. He stepped down in 2021 but still serves on the Foundation’s board and has mentored his successor, Jim Byron.
Nixon’s most vocal supporters who were part of a persistent strain of American conservatism believed Watergate was proof that the liberal establishment would do anything to destroy their leaders. Despite that, they did not come close to overturning the public’s perception of Nixon. As historian David Greenberg concluded in Nixon’s Shadow in 2003, “dark Nixon—whether seen as crook or conspirator, liar or Machiavellian, or some combination of the above—remained his most enduring identity.”
President Trump’s numerous scandals, including his two impeachments, inspired a wave of Nixon-Trump comparisons and different forms of Watergate nostalgia. Liberals who wanted to find a precedent for Trump’s abuses of power looked to Watergate as a moment that could be replicated in the late 2010s. Initially, even Trump showed signs of fearing a legacy similar to Nixon’s. In 2019, when Trump was asked why he did not fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, he replied, “Firings didn’t work out too well for Nixon.” While Trump hasn’t suffered the same fate as Nixon, his defeat in 2020 suggests that the public rejected Trump’s willingness to use the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge.