{"id":850,"date":"2026-08-13T23:39:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T23:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=850"},"modified":"2026-08-13T23:39:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T23:39:16","slug":"forty-years-later-our-long-national-nightmare-is-far-from-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=850","title":{"rendered":"Forty Years Later, Our \u2018Long National Nightmare\u2019 Is Far From Over"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<div>\n<div>\n<article>\n<header>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>Books &amp; the Arts<\/li>\n<li>August 5, 2014<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>Forty Years Later, Our \u2018Long National Nightmare\u2019 Is Far From Over<\/h1>\n<h1>Forty Years Later, Our \u2018Long National Nightmare\u2019 Is Far From Over<\/h1>\n<h2>\n<p>Watergate itself is \u201csmoking gun\u201d proof of that old axiom about the corruption of power.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=848\">The Fight for Special Education<\/a><\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<section>\n<time>August 5, 2014<\/time><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><em>This is an excerpt from the new e-book<\/em> Smoking Gun: <em>The Nation<\/em> on Watergate<em>, a unique real-time history of the rise and fall of Richard Nixon and the consequences for American democracy. The book is now available in paperback as well as on tablets, smartphones and computers\u2014download yours today. <\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a 2013 television special, Louis C.K. drew a line between those Americans who had lived through Watergate and those who had not:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>We saw the President of America cry and then quit being the President! That shit was crazy! \u2019Cause none of us knew what would happen next! Today people are like, \u201cThe President\u2019s kinda disappointing.\u201d Really? Our President wept\u2014like an insane person\u2014and then got in a helicopter [<em>L.C.K. flashes the Nixon V-sign<\/em>] and flew away! And the whole nation just watched him go.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>At first glance, Watergate seems like one of those rare episodes in American history secure from the predatory embrace of nostalgia. Who longs for a time when an assortment of former CIA officials and anti-Castro Cubans working for the American President\u2019s re-election engaged in a massive criminal effort to defame, discredit and destroy his political opponents? When the sworn executor of American laws believed they were inapplicable to his own actions? When people seriously debated whether the United States was at risk of a fascist takeover? Even Gerald Ford, Nixon\u2019s successor, called it a \u201clong national nightmare,\u201d mere weeks before pardoning its villain and thus becoming one himself. Why wish a return?<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2019Cause none of us knew what would happen next.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHistory,\u201d Stephen Dedalus says in <em>Ulysses<\/em>, \u201cis a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.\u201d The same was true of the American public in the early 1970s, and the <em>Nation <\/em>articles reprinted in <em>Smoking Gun <\/em>are the record of that effort. In forty-one editorials, investigations and articles ranging over nearly sixty years, the collection aims to provide a uniquely grounded but reflective account of this pivotal moment in the American story\u2014a moment which, to adapt the old song, we\u2019ve forgotten to remember to forget.<\/p>\n<p>Download<br \/>\n<strong><em>Smoking Gun: <\/em>The Nation<em> on Watergate<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\n\tto read it instantly on your tablet, eReader, smartphone or computer.<\/p>\n<p><em>Smoking Gun <\/em>is divided into six parts. \u201cThe Prelude\u201d begins with a review of Nixon\u2019s famous \u201cCheckers\u201d speech during the 1952 campaign: lying, obfuscation, cheap appeal to patriotic emotion\u2014it was right there from the beginning. <em>The Nation <\/em>headlined its editorial response, \u201cA Handbook for Demagogues.\u201d A 1959 essay by the late presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns wonders whether Nixon was immoral or merely amoral; a 1965 architecture review of the Watergate complex questions its backers\u2019 claim that they had produced a new \u201cpower center of the Western world.\u201d<\/p>\n<section>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h2>Popular<\/h2>\n<p><span><span>&#8220;swipe left below to view more authors&#8221;<\/span>Swipe \u2192<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>One Woman\u2019s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                One Woman\u2019s Message From the Hell of ICE Detention<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nMaryam Tahmasebi <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>The Gaping Hole in El-Sayed\u2019s Progressive Agenda<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                The Gaping Hole in El-Sayed\u2019s Progressive Agenda<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nElie Mystal <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today <\/span><\/p>\n<p>                How Occupy Wall Street Still Explains Politics Today <\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nYotam Marom <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3>\n<span>Francesca Hong: \u201cOur Movement Is Strong, and the Work Isn\u2019t Done\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p>                Francesca Hong: \u201cOur Movement Is Strong, and the Work Isn\u2019t Done\u201d<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n<p>\nJohn Nichols <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<p>Part Two, \u201cThe Break-In,\u201d chronicles the immediate response to news that employees of the Committee to Re-elect the President (known as CREEP) were involved. It includes repeated pleas for the press and the American people to pay more attention to the scandal before the presidential election that November; it is tempting to think of how things might be different if they had. In \u201cGaudy Night at the Watergate,\u201d from September 1972, Robert Sherrill\u2014soon to appear on the Nixon administration\u2019s \u201cenemies list\u201d\u2014summarizes what was known about the \u201cburglars\u201d and their protectors, coyly employing German compound-nouns to illustrate George McGovern\u2019s early observation that \u201cthis is the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Part Three, \u201cThe Cover-Up,\u201d <em>Nation <\/em>editor in chief Carey McWilliams unpacks the explosive revelations of spring 1973, including John Dean\u2019s testimony about Nixon\u2019s involvement, and the resignations of John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and Dean. McWilliams lays out \u201cThe Case for Resignation,\u201d and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, in \u201cWatergate: A Brush With Tyranny,\u201d argues that under Nixon the Justice Department had been converted into a political machine. Former Senator Wayne Morse declares that the scandal\u2019s \u201cugly disclosures of political corruption should awaken [Americans] to the reality that their government is being rapidly undermined by police-state techniques and procedures.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Part Four, \u201cThe Showdown,\u201d intertwines profound reflections on American democracy with real-time coverage of the battle over the White House tapes. Yale law professor Michael Reisman suggests in his August 1973 essay, \u201cResponse to an Insiders\u2019 Coup d\u2019Etat,\u201d that one of the states ought to bring a lawsuit to the Supreme Court alleging that the 1972 presidential election was stolen and therefore void; new presidential elections would ensue. The article is a reminder of how frightened mainstream legal thinkers were about the fate of the Republic if the presidency remained in Nixon\u2019s control. For many scary months, neither impeachment nor resignation seemed likely, or even possible. (\u201cNone of us knew what would happen next.\u201d) In \u201cThe Hitler Analogy\u201d that fear becomes more palpable. Herbert Levine, a scholar of the Third Reich, draws attention to its similarities with the United States in 1973 before concluding that a major component of fascism evidently wanting in Nixon was anti-Semitism. (Tapes released decades later, of course, would show that was decidedly not the case.)<\/p>\n<p>The section continues with coverage of the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973 and editorials arguing against \u201cThe Clamor for Resignation,\u201d on the grounds that only an impeachment trial could force a thorough and public investigation of the truth. As the fight to release the tapes and the House Judiciary Committee\u2019s impeachment proceedings escalate in the spring and summer of 1974, <em>The Nation <\/em>excoriated \u201cThe Continuing Conspiracy\u201d and \u201cThe Huckster President.\u201d When the Supreme Court finally ruled against Nixon in late July and forced the release of the tapes, including the conclusive \u201csmoking gun\u201d demonstrating Nixon\u2019s involvement in the cover-up from the very beginning, it appeared there was no way he could remain in office. The Judiciary Committee voted in favor of impeachment, and conviction seemed certain. <em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s editorial, \u201cNixon\u2019s Sick Confession,\u201d went to press in the days between the release of the \u201csmoking gun\u201d on August 5 and his resignation announcement three days later. These were perhaps the most unsure days the Republic had faced since the Civil War; rumors abounded that Nixon would attempt a military coup. The editorial shows how close political apocalypse seemed before it suddenly dissipated and, with Nixon, flew away.<\/p>\n<p>The concluding section of the book, \u201cThe Afterlife,\u201d begins with outrage over Gerald Ford\u2019s pardon of Nixon, including the editorial \u201cBut Who Will Pardon Ford?\u201d It also contains a review by Robert Sherrill of Nixon\u2019s mendacious memoir, <em>RN<\/em>, and the famous 1979 editorial \u201cBehind the Nixon Pardon.\u201d The piece quoted Ford\u2019s forthcoming memoir\u2014much too liberally for Ford\u2019s publisher, Harper &amp; Row, which sued <em>The Nation. <\/em>The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where the magazine, unjustly, lost. The section concludes with two dispatches, two decades apart, by Jon Wiener on how the Watergate story is told at the Nixon presidential library, a Nixon obituary from 1994 by <em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s then-new columnist Katha Pollitt, and an investigation from 2005, by David Corn and Jeff Goldberg, about how W. Mark Felt, newly revealed as the mysterious Woodward-Bernstein source \u201cDeep Throat,\u201d managed to evade detection as the prime leaker to the press of Watergate information.<\/p>\n<p>* * *<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this summer, the neocon provocateurs of the 2003 invasion of Iraq returned to their familiar berths in green rooms and on op-ed pages, banging the same old drums and blowing the same old fifes in service of the same old cause, with grayer hair but otherwise not much changed. They are the public officials my generation grew up distrusting: their lies led to the deaths of nearly 4,500 Americans and a half-million Iraqis, and the de facto establishment in recent months of just the kind of Mesopotamian terror state whose existence needed to be fabricated in the approach to war more than a decade ago. The phrase \u201chigh crimes and misdemeanors,\u201d from the impeachment clause of the Constitution, scarcely rises to the level of understatement. But on the question of legal accountability for Bush and his deputies, everyone pretty much knew what would happen next: nothing at all.<\/p>\n<p>Though comparisons of our current President with Nixon, or Benghazi with Watergate, are absurd insults to history, there is a sense that President Obama has been afforded a level of immunity that likely would have raised a blush to his predecessor\u2019s formidable jowls. To recall that the phrase \u201cthe imperial presidency\u201d was coined by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. not to describe the executive\u2019s self-declared right to execute American citizens without the slightest gesture of respect to due process, but rather to the authorization of inept snooping missions against electoral opponents, to reflect on how Watergate might have ended quite differently had Nixon claimed such powers, is to arrive at a halting recognition of how the times they have a\u2019changed, and not for the better.<\/p>\n<p>Perusing <em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s writings on Watergate is an education, not only in how the scandal unfolded, giving the reader the impression of experiencing it in real time\u2014which is entrancing enough\u2014but also in what a watchful press and engaged civil society looks like. <em>Smoking Gun <\/em>is a demonstration of what it would mean to awaken from a political nightmare. The major scandal with Watergate, as <em>The Nation <\/em>showed at the time, was not the break-in itself; it was everything else. The whole Watergate saga was \u201csmoking gun\u201d proof for the old axiom that power is abused in direct proportion to how absolutely it is possessed. Louis C.K.\u2019s bit was predicated on the strangeness of the image of power finally called to account; that shit must have been crazy, indeed. But that four decades later it should still seem such an anomaly is more than \u201ckinda disappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nixon\u2019s successors have been expanding the powers of the presidency for four decades now. <em>Smoking Gun <\/em>is a thrilling history, but it is also a user\u2019s manual for how a democratic society under threat can wake up and take those powers back.<\/p>\n<p><em>Download the new e-book<\/em> Smoking Gun: <em>The Nation<\/em> on Watergate, <em>a unique real-time history of the rise and fall of Richard Nixon and the consequences for American democracy, to read it instantly on your tablet, e-reader, smartphone, or computer. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=846\">The Gaping Hole in El-Sayed\u2019s Progressive Agenda<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<footer>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>                Submit a correction<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>                Send a letter to the editor<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>                Reprints &amp; permissions<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>\n<p><span> John Nichols<svg>\n<\/svg><br \/>\n<\/span>John Nichols is the executive editor of <em>The Nation<\/em>. He previously served as the magazine\u2019s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the <em>New York Times<\/em> bestseller <em>It\u2019s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=844\">Is a Trump Endorsement Becoming a Liability?<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n<\/div>\n<p><input\/><br \/>\n<input\/><br \/>\n<\/footer>\n<\/article>\n<p>Ad Policy<br \/>\n<!-- <a class=\"inifiniteLoader\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/new_infi_loader.gif\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a> -->\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":849,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Forty Years Later, Our \u2018Long National Nightmare\u2019 Is Far From Over - 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