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    ‘There are images no leader ever wants to be seen’: 33 pivotal US presidential moments captured on camera

    Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception. It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say. Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelihan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps: “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.” The photo op was born.But if the term was new, the thing itself had been a part of US politics almost from the start. Just as Roman emperors sought to cast themselves in stone and Tudor kings commissioned the finest artists to capture their likeness, so American presidents moved fast to harness the new technology of the age, in order that the nation might see the men who governed them. The selection of photographs assembled here is made up of a series of striking images, but a couple are extraordinary less for what they show than for the fact that they exist at all.Behold a portrait of John Quincy Adams, sixth US president and the son of its second. A daguerreotype, it dates to March 1843), when Adams had been out of office for well over a decade, but still: it is the earliest known photograph of a US president, its subject a man born in 1767 and whose father was the successor to George Washington himself. Seeing the face of Abraham Lincoln induces a similar feeling of historical vertigo. If there’s a tendency to divide human events into two broad categories – our own, modern era and everything that went before – then the invention of the photograph can often be the instinctive dividing line between the two. But here are Adams and Lincoln, jumping over the barrier and barging their way into our own times.As for Nixon himself, he appears in this collection twice. That’s fitting, and not only because of the origin story of the photo op. Nixon learned the hard way that in modern American politics, image is everything. Washington legend holds that in their 1960 presidential debate, Nixon comfortably beat the young Massachusetts senator John F Kennedy among voters who followed the contest on the radio – but, his face darkened by five o’clock shadow, he lost among those who watched on TV. After that, Nixon was ready to put himself in the hands of the image-makers.One result is the intriguing photograph of the president and the king, Nixon and Elvis, standing improbably together in the White House in 1970. Showing two men both then at the height of their powers, both to fall just a few years later, the picture was long the most requested of all those held by the US National Archives). It fascinates partly because the pair represent polar opposites – a rock legend and a man so uncool he wore a suit on the beach) – and partly because it invites you to guess at the men’s motives: Nixon surely wanted some of Presley’s stardust to land on him, while Elvis was in search of a federal agent’s badge and, it seems, a sense of purpose.The other Nixon shot is the one that etched his downfall into the public imagination. It shows his parting gesture – an oddly celebratory, double V-for-victory salute – from the presidential helicopter as he made his disgraced exit following the Watergate scandal). Nixon flew off to California and into the history books as the first US president ever to quit.Between them, Elvis and Watergate, those pictures represent the two categories of presidential photograph: the ones they wanted – the photo ops – and the ones they most emphatically did not. The first category brims with examples and they follow a pattern. They show the occupant of the White House as a heroic, even mythic figure. The exemplar is Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, a hunter and adventurer who engaged in photogenic displays of muscularity and machismo so overt, they’d make Vladimir Putin blush. But that tradition has endured. Indeed, it has turned into an expectation that a US president must not only be competent and wise, but also fit, strong and marked by conspicuous physical courage.Meeting that demand has been easy for some occupants of America’s highest office. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have to pretend to be a warrior: he had been the supreme allied commander during the second world war. When he first campaigned for the presidency in 1952, there was no need to stage a photo op: there were images aplenty of him directing the D-day mission) that had turned the war around just eight years earlier. No wonder he won.But for others, producing images of strength and command has taken some doing. The group portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta ) had to have the so-called the Big Three seated because Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down and required either a wheelchair or leg braces to get around. He and his aides went to great lengths to keep that fact from the US public and they mostly succeeded, thanks to a compliant press pack who obediently put away their cameras once the chosen image had been secured.That remained the custom for a while, the snappers keeping a discreet distance even after Eisenhower had both a heart attack and stroke in office, and as Kennedy battled crippling back pain. The images told a different story, including the silhouetted portrait of JFK standing alone at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, head bowed, a study in the loneliness of ultimate political authority). That photograph may lack the glamour or sparkle of other Camelot-era pictures, but it contributed to the Kennedy mystique – and the mythology of the presidency itself – every bit as much. This was the era of the cold war, of a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR, and that desk was where the buck stopped. Here was where the button would be pressed – and here was the man who would press it.Naturally, this iconography of president-as-hero takes different forms, depending on who’s in the job. The image Jimmy Carter treasured from his single term in office cast him as successful peacemaker, bringing together Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the Camp David peace accords. For supporters of Donald Trump, the picture that renders him a hero is the one taken a second after a would-be assassin’s bullet had brushed his ear, when he raised his fistand, with bloodied face, urged them to “Fight, fight, fight!”.Sometimes, though, the man at the top has struggled to meet that deep public need for an alpha figure in the White House. Carter’s political prospects took a hit when he was photographed “wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion” during a six-mile run in 1979). But the most recent, and serious, example is Joe Biden, whose visible frailty drove him from this year’s presidential race. The pictures showing him apparently slack-jawed during a June TV debate with Trump were enough to persuade Democrats that he had to go.Which brings us to the images no leader ever wanted to be seen. Some were photo ops whose aim was to offer a heroic, presidential figure, which went badly wrong. Michael Dukakis’s handlers wanted to project him as a potential commander-in-chief when they put him in a tank during the 1988 campaign); instead he looked like a hopeless dweeb. George W Bush’s team doubtless thought a Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier conveyed victorious strength following the invasion of Iraq; instead it came to haunt him as an emblem of hubris and myopia.But other unwanted images from this collection capture not mistaken bits of stage management, but rather tragedy and disaster. George W Bush reading My Pet Goat to a group of Florida schoolkids as he gets word of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 distils the shock of 9/11, even now. The lifeless body of Robert F Kennedy evokes the turbulence and violence of 1968), a time when the US seemed about to tear itself apart.It’s all here: moments of hope – Barack Obama inspiring a young boy as America’s first Black president – and moments of despair – Lyndon Johnson taking the oath following JFK’s assassination while Jackie Kennedy, in blood-stained clothes, looks on. And yet, no matter how sweeping the range of these photographs, there is something missing from this selection. It would be lacking in any assembly of presidential pictures. Yes, there are Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. Yes, there are old presidents and young presidents. But there is no female president. We see Hillary Clinton, who got close. We see Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman to try but never got near. Otherwise, there is an absence. On 5 November, Americans have a chance to fill that space – and to give the world a picture no one has ever seen before.Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Gabrielle SchwarzJimmy Carter collapses, 1979By Phil StewartView image in fullscreen“His face was ashen and his mouth hung open,” is how one reporter described Jimmy Carter in September 1979, when the president dropped out of a six-mile race four miles in. Though he swiftly recovered, this image – two months after his speech blaming US problems on a “crisis of confidence” – was seen as evidence of weakness. He lost to Ronald Reagan the following year. GSRichard Nixon bids goodbye, 1974Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“Once more, there was not a spark of contrition in the man,” commented the Guardian at the time. On 8 August 1974, Richard Nixon earned the dubious honour of being the first (and, to this day, only) president to resign from office.Two years earlier, five men were caught trying to burgle and bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC. The subsequent investigation implicated Nixon, who faced impeachment for his role in covering up the break-in. Yet – as seen in this image of him leaving the White House for the last time – he was never really repentant. As he told David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” One month after he resigned, his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. GSFDR at Yalta, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenFor eight days in February 1945, the “Big Three” – Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – met in the Crimean city of Yalta to discuss allied strategy.“FDR’s position between the other leaders is significant,” Diana Preston, historian and author of Eight Days at Yalta. “It was appropriate for a man who hoped to reconcile conflicting interests and build a future peace.” The conference was at first deemed a success, but the Soviet leader soon broke his promises to allow free elections in eastern Europe, and the cold war began. GSTexts from Hillary Clinton, 2011By Kevin LamarqueView image in fullscreenIt was the photograph that launched a thousand memes before becoming a liability at election time. The image of Hillary Clinton texting in sunglasses aboard a military plane to Libya went viral, inspiring a popular blog called “Texts from Hillary”. CBS reported at the time: “Hillary Clinton brings the LOLZ” and Clinton even name-checked the authors of the blog in her first ever tweet, proudly setting the image as her avatar.By 2015, however, she would distance herself from it, dropping it from her Twitter profile when the FBI announced an investigation into her use of a private email address for government business. As the image became used in articles about the investigation, its meaning began to shift. Many people started to wonder what Clinton might have been writing on that Blackberry. The scandal came to a catastrophic peak just 11 days before the 2016 election, when FBI director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation after having closed it in July. FBTheodore Roosevelt, 1898Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of Roosevelt on a horse encapsulates the rugged masculinity the 26th president – in fact born into an aristocratic family in New York – strove to embody. Once a sickly child, he credited his recovery to exertion and hardship, and argued this approach would lead to triumph for both man and nation. Here he is in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, leading volunteer regiment the Rough Riders. Returning a war hero, he re-entered politics and became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. GSHair Like Mine, 2009By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreenThe symbolic power of the first African American president was cemented in this image of Barack Obama leaning forward so a five-year-old boy could feel his hair. On 8 May 2009, Jacob’s dad, departing national security council staffer Carlton Philadelphia, took his family to the Oval Office for a farewell photo. This snap, by the then chief White House photographer Pete Souza, captures the moment Jacob asked, “Is your hair like mine?” Obama suggested he touch it and see. A framed print of the photo was hung in the White House for the rest of his presidency.“The whole thing happened so fast, I literally have this one picture,” Souza recalls. “My composition was not perfect, but I think it adds to the spontaneity of the moment.”Two years ago, Obama called Jacob to congratulate him on his high-school graduation. “Folks who maybe didn’t feel they belonged,” he said of the image, “they’d look at themselves differently – to see a person who looked like them in the Oval Office.”“That was a highlight of my life,” Jacob said. “If I get to see another Black man at the top, I want to follow that lead.” GSAssassination attempt on Donald Trump, 2024By Evan VucciView image in fullscreenThis photograph will be remembered as a pivotal moment in this year’s election. On 13 July, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler County in Pennsylvania. The former president was only lightly wounded when a bullet grazed his right ear but one crowd member was killed and another two critically injured before the shooter was taken down by a Secret Service sniper. This remarkable image of Trump – his ear and face bloodied, and fist defiantly raised in the air as he is hurried off the stage, an American flag raised behind him – instantly went viral. In an interview soon after, AP photojournalist Evan Vucci recalled his thoughts as he was capturing the scene: “In my head, I just kept saying to myself, slow down, slow down. Compose, compose.” GSAbraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863By Mathew B BradyView image in fullscreenFor almost a century, it was thought that no photographs existed of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on 19 November, the day he delivered his endlessly quoted address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. That is, until archivist Josephine Cobb undertook some detective work in 1952. Cobb, the first woman to be employed by the National Archives, picked through the work of the 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, famous for his portraits of the great and good. She came upon a broken glass negative that showed a vast crowd at Gettysburg – she estimated the time to be about noon, a few hours before Lincoln would speak. After repeatedly enlarging, expanding and reprinting the image, she found his unmistakable face in the crowd (bare-headed, left of centre). FBRonald and Nancy Reagan kissing in Vanity Fair, 1985 By Harry Benson View image in fullscreen“There is in the West,” wrote William F Buckley in 1985, “a tradition against chiefs of state engaging in visible, let alone ostentatious, shows of biological informality.” Ronald and Nancy Reagan, both successful actors before going into politics, bucked tradition by using the White House as a setting for their love story. The media was happy to indulge them, with Buckley writing a fawning ode to the couple in Vanity Fair, to accompany a series of images by Harry Benson of them dancing to Sinatra and locking lips.Reagan, a year into his final term, could risk a little biological informality – the images were probably more consequential for Vanity Fair. Benson later said that the loss-making publication was facing closure until this issue. The editor Tina Brown, he said, convinced the owner to “wait until the June 1985 cover of the Reagans appeared. The magazine sold off the stands and the magazine was saved.” FBRichard Nixon with Elvis Presley, 1970By Oliver F AtkinsView image in fullscreenOne December morning in 1970, Elvis showed up at the White House with a handwritten letter for the president. He wanted to give him a gift (a Colt pistol with silver bullets) and discuss becoming a “federal agent at large”: “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and communist brainwashing and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can do the most good,” he wrote.Nixon gave Presley a federal narcotics badge, but not an official role. The bizarre encounter was captured by White House photographer Oliver F Atkins, but the images weren’t made public until the 1980s, after Nixon’s resignation and Presley’s death. GSJohn F Kennedy: the loneliest job, 1961By George TamesView image in fullscreenA few weeks into his presidency, JFK stood at his desk before meeting the French ambassador, reading an official paper. Photographer George Tames, shadowing him for the New York Times, took this photograph, which became famous for its intimate portrayal of the pressures of holding office.It was later reproduced in the opening title of US political drama The West Wing. FBBill Clinton hugs Monica Lewinsky, 1996By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenIt was a moment captured by chance: a hug between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the crowd at a Democratic fundraiser in Washington in October 1996. But when news of the affair between the president and the former White House intern broke in 1998, photojournalist Dirck Halstead, then senior White House photographer at Time magazine, recognised her face. After searching through his archives, he located this image in a box of transparencies. The photo ran on Time’s cover that August, when Lewinsky agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating Clinton’s denials of the affair.Four months later, Clinton was impeached on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury, but he was eventually acquitted and left office after two terms in 2001 with the highest approval rating of any departing postwar president. Lewinsky, meanwhile, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracised back then”, the anti-bullying campaigner wrote in Vanity Fair in 2018. “There has been at least one significant reference in the press to that unfortunate spell in our history every day for the past 20 years.” GS‘Dewey defeats Truman’, 1948Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWith Harry Truman’s popularity waning, a win for his Republican opponent, Thomas E Dewey, in the 1948 election seemed certain. The Chicago Daily Tribune, forced to go to press early due to a printers’ strike, issued 150,000 copies of this 3 November edition – held up by a gleeful Truman en route to Washington – before it became clear its editors had backed the wrong horse. GSDwight D Eisenhower, 1944Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of General Dwight D Eisenhower addressing paratroopers at Greenham Common airfield on 5 June 1944, the day before they would parachute into France, became one of the most widely circulated of the war, durably linking him with D-day’s success and the eventual American victory. Despite the general’s authoritative pose, the soldier closest to him, Lieutenant Wallace Strobel, recalled a lighter conversation. “He asked my name and which state I was from … He then said, ‘Oh yes, Michigan, great fishing there. Been there several times and like it.’”After the war “Ike”, as he was popularly known, regularly topped polls as America’s most admired man. After years of claiming that it would be inappropriate for a military leader to run for president, he finally went for it in 1952, winning 55% of the popular vote for the Republicans. FBHarry S Truman and Lauren Bacall on the piano, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWhile playing piano for photographers during a wartime variety show in 1945, vice-president Truman was joined by 20-year-old Lauren Bacall, with the famous actor perched awkwardly above him. “I was just a kid,” shrugged Bacall years later. “My press agent made me do it.”Truman had only been vice-president for a few weeks, plucked from relative obscurity by Franklin D Roosevelt. This photograph, considered risque at the time, made headlines all around the world and helped to establish his public image – even if they irritated his inner circle, including his wife, Bess. “I don’t think you should play piano in public again,” she said, according to Truman’s grandson. The New York Times recently dubbed it a viral image before its time – it inspired so many other women to climb up on the piano that it eventually broke. FBShirley Chisholm’s presidential bid, 1972By Don Hogan CharlesView image in fullscreenThis is Shirley Chisholm – who four years earlier had become the first Black woman elected to Congress – announcing her presidential bid at the Concord Baptist Church, Brooklyn. She knew that, with its “Unbought and Unbossed” slogan, the campaign was a long shot – she was also the first woman of colour from either major party to run for president. So it was a feat that, despite racism and sexism from her own party as well as the opposition, she made it to the Democratic national convention with the support of 152 delegates – and came fourth. When Kamala Harris launched her first presidential bid in 2020, she paid tribute with campaign colours based on the red and yellow pins Chisholm’s supporters wore. GSGeorge W Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment, 2003By Stephen JaffeView image in fullscreenDan Bartlett, George Bush’s communications director at the time, would later call this photo op “one of the big regrets of my life”. “It did seem premature,” remembers Stephen Jaffe, the press corp photographer covering Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier that day. “The administration tried to stage everything perfectly – unfortunately it’s not a perfect world.”As the eight-year occupation of Iraq spiralled and weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the image of Bush in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, just six weeks into an invasion that would kill more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians, became a symbol of hubris.While Bartlett says the banner referred to the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, returning from its tour in the Gulf – the ship’s crew requested it, and he “didn’t think twice”– Jaffe is sceptical and thinks the intended meaning was plain to all on the day. “There was a lot of spin afterwards,” he says. “If the mission had been accomplished, they would have taken credit for it.” FBGeorge W Bush learns of 9/11, 2001By Win McNameeView image in fullscreenThis captures the moment on the morning of 11 September 2001 when George Bush, taking part in a reading session at a primary school in Florida, learned that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. (He’d been informed of the first plane, at the time thought to be an accident, before he entered the classroom.) When his chief of staff, Andy Card, whispered in his ear, “America is under attack,” he decided not to interrupt the reading, instead waiting around seven minutes before leaving.It would become one of the most scrutinised events of his presidency. In his scathing 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore said, “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr Bush just sat there.” But several people there that day have since spoken out in his defence. “It was nice he understood we were young kids and would probably have gone crazy if he had told us what had happened,” former student La’Damien Smith told an interviewer in 2011. GSSituation Room, 2011By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreen“It’s not a picture I have hanging on my wall,” Pete Souza says. “It’s not artistic – the lighting in that room sucked.” On 1 May 2011, the chief White House photographer was called to the situation room, a network of rooms below the White House. The atmosphere immediately felt unusual. “I had been there many, many times before to cover discussions about sensitive policy decisions,” Souza says. On this day, however, the decision had already been made: Souza was there to document Barack Obama and his senior team as they watched the operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden play out in real time.As everyone packed into a side room to watch a live feed from a drone, Souza squeezed himself in the corner. (Seated, from left to right, is then vice-president Biden, Obama, joint operations command Marshall B Webb, deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense Robert Gates.) While the raid unfolded in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Souza took about 100 images. “It was as tense and anxious a situation as I had ever seen that whole team in,” he recalls. “You could see it on their faces.” He tried to focus on his composition, getting everyone in frame, and on timing his shutter clicks so as not to distract them. Later it was announced that Navy Seals had killed Bin Laden, along with his son, a courier and two of the courier’s relatives.Of nine pictures released that day, it was this one that went viral, exhaustively analysed and relentlessly memed. Souza, looking back today, believes this was because it occupied some part of the national psyche: “We had this guy that attacked our country, and it took us 10 years to find him, but we found him. It closed the chapter.” FBJohn Quincy Adams, 1843By Philip HaasView image in fullscreenThough Adams was not the first president to be photographed (an 1841 picture of William Henry Harrison is now lost), this is the oldest surviving portrait of a US president. Adams had a familiarly vexed relationship with the medium. “All hideous,” he wrote in his diary, after posing for daguerreotypes in the early 1840s. “Too true to the original.” This image of Adams – who served as president in the 1820s – surfaced in 2017, found by the great-great-grandson of a congressman who had received it as a gift from Adams. FBMichael Dukakis and the tank, 1988By Michael E SamojedenView image in fullscreenMeant to project strength, this unfortunate photo-call crystallised, for critics and voters, something mediocre and uncertain about the Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The Republicans used it relentlessly in attack ads.Politicians are drawn to tanks: Churchill, Putin, Blair, Hugo Chavez, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage have all been snapped on or in one. Dukakis’s efforts came only a couple of years after Thatcher’s influential contribution to the genre; while she loomed out of the turret with uncanny poise, dressed in her own clothes, he seemed shrunken and overwhelmed, in a helmet that didn’t belong to him.Widely recognised as one of the most disastrous campaign photos in history, the image would haunt future presidencies. “I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a ‘Dukakis in the tank moment,’” recalled former Clinton aide John King to Politico. In 2013, after being handed a naval football helmet, Obama declined to try it on. “You do not put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he joked. FBJFK in the motorcade, 1963Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“It was a watershed moment that changed America,” says Fredrik Logevall, historian and biographer of John F Kennedy. “I think there’s something to the notion that America lost its innocence after 22 November 1963.”More than other images from Kennedy’s assassination – grainy TV coverage of the immediate aftermath, or Lyndon B Johnson being sworn in – this long lens shot of Kennedy smiling just moments before his assassination has come to signify what was lost that day. “In this photograph he’s for ever frozen in our minds,” Logevall says, “the picture of youthful vitality and glamour.”For Logevall, it captures an era not only less haunted by political violence – open-top motorcades, beloved by Kennedy because he could get “closer to the people”, are a thing of the past – but also less riven by polarisation. “This was a conservative city,” he notes, and yet “hundreds of thousands of people turned up to cheer him on”.Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech on political extremism, with lines Logevall believes to be prescient. “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” FBLBJ being sworn in, 1963By Cecil W StoughtonView image in fullscreenOn 22 November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F Kennedy, vice-president Lyndon B Johnson took the oath to become the 36th president of the US, inside a cramped compartment aboard Air Force One, on the runway of Dallas airport. Kennedy’s body had been loaded on to the plane 15 minutes before, and as the compartment filled with people, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton stood on top of a sofa, crammed himself against the curved ceiling and asked everyone to step back.When Jackie Kennedy arrived, still in her blood- stained suit, she was positioned to LBJ’s left – her haunting, dazed expression lends the image its emotional force. In less than a minute, as Stoughton snapped eight pictures, the ceremony was over. As Air Force One continued on to Washington, Stoughton left the plane to ensure his film was swiftly developed and transmitted to the world’s press, to authenticate the transfer of power to a new president. FBDonald Trump mugshot, 2023By Fulton County Sheriff’s OfficeView image in fullscreenEven before Trump arrived at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia, last August, people were anticipating the release of his mugshot, with fakes spreading around the internet. It was his fourth arrest that year, but the first time he had had a picture taken.Mugshots are often used to shame public figures who have run-ins with the law. But for Trump, ever the self-publicist, the image became a golden opportunity, adorning mugs, T-shirts and stickers, with the mottos “Never Surrender” or “Not Guilty”. Trump, not long reinstated on X by Elon Musk, tweeted the image himself, raising more than $7m in just a few days. FBJimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978By Karl SchumacherView image in fullscreenIn September 1978, Jimmy Carter convened a secret 12-day summit with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David. The main focus was a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel after 30 years of intermittent war. The resulting accords led to Israel agreeing to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for its first official recognition by an Arab state and an end to the state of war. A plan was also laid out for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, but it was never implemented.Here Begin and Sadat are shown smiling and shaking hands at the presidential retreat in Maryland, as Carter looks on. “The picture makes it look as if the three leaders all got along very well at the summit. That was not at all the case,” recalls William B Quandt, a former national security council staffer who was involved in the negotiations. “The adversaries were very hostile, and on the third day Carter decided not to have any more three-way meetings. We were not at all sure we would get an agreement until the last day.”Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace prize that year, while Carter was awarded it in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. While the Camp David accords are recognised as his greatest presidential achievement, they left crucial issues unresolved and, some argue, helped prevent Palestianian statehood. GSGeorge HW Bush in bed, 1987By David ValdezView image in fullscreenThis photograph, taken in 1987 for Life ­magazine, captured the then vice- president with his ­family on holiday in Maine. David Valdez – personal photographer to Bush at the time – was invited by Barbara Bush to come by the house at 6am. “I poked my head in the bedroom door and there were George and Barbara Bush in bed,” he later told NPR. “Then the ­grandchildren started coming in and I took that snap, and that wound up running two full pages, and it’s taken on a life of its own.” The Washington Post credited the image with launching Bush’s successful campaign for the presidency; Valdez became his official White House ­photographer. FBLyndon B Johnson watches war protests, 1968By Yoichi OkamotoView image in fullscreenThis strikingly intimate shot shows LBJ and his family at his ranch in Texas, watching TV coverage of Vietnam war protests outside the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. This level of access was remarkable: Yoichi Okamoto was the first civilian to be appointed chief photographer for the White House.Here we can also see a turning point in LBJ’s presidency. Since taking over in 1963, he had sent more than 500,000 troops to what the public increasingly saw as an unjustifiable, unwinnable war. “I know we oughtn’t to be there,” Johnson admitted to a colleague in 1966, “but I can’t get out.” He withdrew from the 1968 election, and Nixon won. GSCalvin Coolidge as a cowboy, 1927Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenDuring his tenure in the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge held the greatest number of press conferences of any president (521 over six years), delivered the first State of the Union address on the radio and was the first to appear in a sound film. The media-savvy president appeared in photos dressed up in workers’ overalls, pitching hay and – as here – wearing a cowboy’s chaps and hat, on a trip to South Dakota. This image caused a stir: while the New York Times claimed “Coolidge as Cowboy Wins West’s Heart”, others called him “a pitiful puppet of publicity”, the first president to make himself a laughing stock. He would not be the last. FBBill Clinton on Arsenio Hall, 1992By Reed SaxonView image in fullscreenThis may well be what clinched the 1992 election for Bill Clinton. In June, weeks before accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talkshow and played Heartbreak Hotel on the saxophone. It was a bold move at the time and the image of a cool, confident Clinton on stage with his sax and dark shades is credited with helping him secure the youth vote especially. “It’s nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election,” Hall quipped on the show. The success of the appearance, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “changed presidential politics – turning pop culture’s hippest TV shows into the contemporary equivalent of campaign whistle-stops”. GSLyndon B Johnson with Martin Luther King Jr, 1965Photographer unknown View image in fullscreen“I want to tell you how grateful I am,” Johnson told King on the phone, after becoming president in 1963, “and how worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” The cautious collaboration between the two reached its peak on 6 August 1965, with the signing of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Johnson is pictured that day, reaching out to pass a smiling King the pen used to sign the act, as Rosa Parks looks on.How strong this much mythologised moment of unity really was has remained the subject of fierce debate. Mutual distrust haunted their interactions and King faced relentless pressure from J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, with Johnson’s knowledge. King split with the government over Vietnam, and today, voting rights have been rolled back. FBRonald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, 1987By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenOn 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered probably the most famous sentence of his presidency: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He was standing in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, 24 years after JFK gave his famous speech in the city. It was a risky move: the previous day, thousands had gathered to protest against his visit. Even his own advisers had been unsure whether the public address to the Soviet leader was too provocative. But the fall of the Wall two years later, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to vindicate the decision – though there is debate over whether its importance has been overplayed. Over time, Gorbachev and Reagan, both keen to end the cold war, formed a productive alliance. GSJoe Biden at the debate, 2024By Justin SullivanView image in fullscreen“I’ve done 31 debates since I’ve been at Getty,” says photographer Justin Sullivan, “and I’ve never seen anything like that.” The Biden-Trump debate of June 2024 had felt unusual even before it started: press were allowed in only moments before it began and the room was eerily empty. As a “pale and very unstable” Biden gave “incoherent” answers, Sullivan focused on the “strange facial expressions” that damned him as much as his nonsensical responses did. Within weeks, he’d dropped out of the race.“It was a sad ending to a strong presidency that history will look upon more favourably,” says David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief. “He inherited four major crises – the pandemic, the economy, racial justice and climate – and made significant progress on all of them.” FBRobert F Kennedy’s assassination, 1968By Bill EppridgeView image in fullscreenOn 5 June 1968, Robert F Kennedy was in the ballroom of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles, giving a victory speech after winning the Democratic California presidential primary – he was shaping up to be the nominee to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. As he exited through the hotel kitchen after midnight, shaking hands with staff, shots rang out. In this photograph by Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge, Kennedy lies on the floor while a busboy, Juan Romero, crouches down to comfort him. Kennedy died the next day. The gunman was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man who said he felt betrayed by Kennedy’s support for Israel in the six-day war.Letters addressed to “the busboy” soon arrived at the hotel. “One even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t stopped to shake my hand, the senator would be alive, so I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish,” Romero told NPR in 2018. “It’s been a long 50 years.” He visited Kennedy’s grave in 2010, buying his first suit for the occasion.Alternative accounts of the assassination have since emerged. His son, Robert F Kennedy Jr – a conspiracy theorist who recently suspended his own presidential campaign – is among those who believe there was a second gunman. GS More

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    Fifty years after Nixon resigned, a key player is still angry about his pardon

    A sombre US president addresses the nation from the Oval Office. Despite all he has achieved, he will relinquish power and pass the torch to his vice-president. It is clear that he is bowing to pressure from his own party and leaving against his will.This was Joe Biden in 2024. It was also Richard Nixon in very different circumstances 50 years ago on Thursday. Disgraced by the Watergate break-in and cover-up, Nixon would claim an unwanted place in history as the first – and still only – person to resign the American presidency.For Elizabeth Holtzman, who at the time was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, it was a day of hope – an affirmation of America’s system of checks and balances holding Nixon to account for his role in the Watergate scandal. But her optimism did not last long. A month later, Nixon was granted a full pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford.“The pardon was unpardonable,” Holtzman, who turns 83 this week, says by phone from her home in Brooklyn, New York. “The pardon created a double standard of justice: one for the high and mighty in this country and another for everybody else.”Half a century later, she still suspects that Ford’s motives were less noble than are often portrayed and worries that he set a dangerous precedent for the likes of Donald Trump. But as she reflects on a long career as a trailblazer, Holtzman is optimistic about the potential for America to elect its first female president in November.She was a 31-year-old Harvard Law School graduate when, in 1972, she beat a five-decade incumbent, Emanuel Celler, to win a Brooklyn, New York, seat in the House of Representatives. Foreshadowing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Holtzman took to the streets and out-campaigned her better-known opponent, making her case to voters at every subway station in her district and queues outside cinemas showing The Godfather.The summer of 1972 had also seen the arrest of five men in a bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington – a dirty tricks scheme aimed at scuppering would-be challengers to Nixon in that year’s presidential election.Nixon and his aides attempted to cover up the White House’s involvement in the break-in and obstructed the investigation by law enforcement agencies. Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post played a key role in uncovering the story with the help of a secret informant known as “Deep Throat” (later revealed to be the FBI associate director Mark Felt).View image in fullscreenThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Senate Watergate committee and a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, also investigated the scandal. It emerged that Nixon had a secret taping system in the Oval Office that recorded conversations. In 1974, after a long legal battle, the US supreme court ordered Nixon to release the tapes that contained evidence he had been involved in the cover-up from the beginning.Holtzman was one of the House judiciary committee members who recommended articles of impeachment against the president. She recalls: “The evidence was overwhelming. At some point I remember feeling as though I was in quicksand with no bottom, that we just kept hearing one fact of criminality, misconduct, abuse of power after another, and we just kept sinking further and further into that muck.”The gravity of the moment was profound. This would be only the second impeachment of a president in American history, following that of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Holtzman, who five years ago published the book The Case for Impeaching Trump, reflects: “Nobody was happy on the Democratic side or Republican side in voting for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.“It’s well known that the chair of the committee, Peter Rodino, a very liberal Democrat, went back to his office and cried after that first vote for impeachment. Nobody wanted to see it and I felt also very uncomfortable. It was a very difficult vote to cast.“Not that I had any questions about Nixon’s guilt or whether he should be impeached. It was obvious that the impeachment clause was written almost with Nixon in mind by the framers of the constitution. But that wasn’t the point. The point is that he was my president and I didn’t want to see any US president involved in this kind of misconduct, this degree and level and horror of abuse of power and criminality.”She adds: “I didn’t want to see it and it was awful to see and it was a very sobering moment. Nobody took any pleasure. This was not a gotcha! moment for Democrats. That’s the difference between then and now. People took impeachment seriously.”At first many Republicans had remained loyal to Nixon, denying that he was personally involved despite mounting evidence. But the “smoking gun tape” confirmed the allegation of the White House counsel, John Dean, that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary.Holtzman adds: “That was a key part of the cover-up. The Republicans could no longer argue that there was no evidence that Nixon was oblivious to what was going on. Nixon was ordering the cover-up almost from day one.“At that point, all the what I call the ‘holdout Republicans’ said that they would support impeachment if it came to the House floor. In the end, the Republicans themselves were governed by the facts, although up to that point they would not accept anything less than a tape recording.”Three Republican leaders went to the White House to warn Nixon that there were no longer enough Republican votes to spare him impeachment. The following night, as crowds outside the White House gates chanted “jail to the chief”, Nixon announced his resignation in a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office that focused on the accomplishments of his presidency and contained no admission of guilt.On the morning of 9 August, a sweaty Nixon delivered an extemporaneous, grievance-filled speech to White House staff, some of whom broke down in tears. He said: “Always remember, others may hate you – but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” The remark has been described by Woodward as “one of the most interesting and important moments in presidential history”.But Holtzman was unmoved. “This was not a Shakespearean tragedy for me. This was a man who seriously abused his power, fought his political enemies. For a man to say treat your enemies well, he’d stick the IRS on his political enemies to try to get them to have harassing audits. This is a man who wiretapped journalists he thought were leaking information.“This is a man who went after Daniel Ellsberg [the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers] by approving a break-in into his psychiatrist’s office. He never acknowledged his guilt. He never showed remorse. Saying you shouldn’t do something, that’s very nice to preach to others, but what about practising what you preach? That we didn’t see and we never had any acknowledgment of his flaws ever.”View image in fullscreenNixon gave a final victory sign on the White House South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away. On taking the oath of office as the 38th president, Ford remarked that America’s “long national nightmare is over”. Weeks later, he granted a full and unconditional pardon to Nixon. Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: “You’re not gonna believe it. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!”Holtzman was incensed. At a hearing of the House judiciary committee, she questioned Ford about the pardon directly. The president insisted that a criminal indictment, trial and conviction would have diverted the attention of the White House, Congress and American people from the urgent problems they needed to solve at home and abroad.Fifty years later, Holtzman is still convinced that Ford got it wrong. “We did something at the House judiciary committee to hold the president accountable and set forth the basis for his accountability on a bipartisan basis and in a process that the public would understand.“Here you had a president who had said, ‘I’m not going to do anything right away’ but basically he acted within a month of the resignation, and where was the transparency? What were the grounds for this? Why would you do this? Let the system work.”The criminal justice system should not have been tampered with, she continues. “The special prosecutor should have been allowed to examine all the evidence to determine whether on a criminal basis it was justified to bring charges to the grand jury, to let the grand jury make its determination to bring the prosecution, to bring a trial if that was warranted, to see whether there would be a conviction.“To short-circuit the process was a gross political act and an abuse of power and raised the question which to this day has never been solved as to whether the pardon was part of a deal to get Nixon out of office to help the Republicans in the midterm elections. Do I know that was Ford’s motive? It could have been. It was obviously a potential motive for him.”Trump, facing federal criminal charges over his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, has floated the idea of pardoning himself as well as his supporters who attacked police and stormed the US Capitol. Holtzman says: “The blatant use of the pardon power in a political way is wrong.“It’s an abuse of power and shouldn’t happen, and a lot of thought has to be given to reforming how the pardon power is being used, because for Donald Trump to say that he’s going to pardon the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6 is beyond reprehensible.”She also rejects that notion that a Democratic president should consider pardoning Trump. “Pardons don’t create national unity. There was no serious division among the American people about the Nixon impeachment. It was overwhelmingly approved by the American people.“The idea that the country had to be brought together because Nixon was being removed from office is nonsense. The American people came together because they realised that more important than any president, whether Republican or Democrat, was preserving our constitution and the rule of law. We came together on that principle, not on the principle of a particular person.”View image in fullscreenFord went on to lose the 1976 election to the Democrat Jimmy Carter. “Ford was kicked out of office. He was not re-elected because of the pardon so how did that unify anybody? The pardon appeared to have been used to my mind as a blatant political means to get Nixon out of office.”Holtzman spent eight years in Congress, leading efforts to bring Nazi war criminals living in America to justice, and went on to serve as Brooklyn district attorney. But she has suffered her share of setbacks, coming within a percentage point of being New York’s first female senator in 1980, losing a Senate primary election in 1992 and being defeated after one term as New York City comptroller in a banking-related scandal.Her record as the youngest woman elected to Congress eventually fell in 2014 to a then 30-year-old Republican named Elise Stefanik. Two years ago Holtzman made an unsuccessful bid to return to the House in a newly drawn congressional district spanning parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan.But Biden’s withdrawal from this year’s White House race in favor of Kamala Harris raises the prospect that she may see a woman occupy the Oval Office in her lifetime. She muses: “More and more women are holding more and more important offices in this country, and slowly but surely the American people are recognizing that women can do a great job and some women can do a terrible job, just the way men can do a great job and some men can do a terrible job.“To exclude women from the presidency because they’re women is wrong, it’s bias, it’s depriving us of great talent. I feel very optimistic about Vice-President Harris’s campaign and about her possibility of success and it would be a great thing for this country. It’s another way that we could be a beacon in this world.” More

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    If cover-up is the real crime, Trump’s hush-money charges have a Nixonian ring | Sidney Blumenthal

    Of all of Donald Trump’s charged crimes, spelled out in 88 felony counts – from plotting to overthrow the government of the United States to stealing national security secrets, and obstruction of justice along the way – there is one case that most closely parallels the greatest political crime in American history: his trial in New York, scheduled to begin 15 April, for falsifying business records.Yet against the enormity of the former president’s transgressions, that case’s gravitas has been diminished by some legal pundits as the “runt of the litter” and “probably the least serious of the crimes he’s been charged with”. This case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney, however, reveals Trump as having essentially the same purpose as Richard Nixon in Watergate, hiding the truth through fraud and bribery in order to manipulate the outcome of a presidential election.From the beginning, Nixon tried to persuade the public that Watergate was much ado about nothing. On 17 June 1972, five men of the White House “plumbers” unit were arrested in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The next day, the White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, trotted out to minimize the incident as a “third-rate burglary attempt”. He was following Nixon’s directive to downplay the affair as meaningless. “It’s going to be forgotten,” Nixon said on 20 June. The next day, in one of the first meetings in which he orchestrated the cover-up, he said: “I think the country doesn’t give much of a shit about it … And the answer, of course, is that most people around the country probably think this is routine, that everybody’s bugging everybody else, it’s politics.”But Nixon’s attempt to bury the break-in spread into an elaborate effort to contain and conceal the scandal in order to protect his campaign for re-election. His White House counsel, John Dean, told him there was “a cancer on the presidency”. But Nixon’s cover-up grew: from obstructing the FBI investigation, to misleading the public, to discrediting the investigative reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, who were virtually alone in pursuing the story for months, to paying hush money to the burglars.“Goddamn hush money”, Nixon called it. “We could get that,” he told Dean. “On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”On 1 March 1974, the Department of Justice Watergate special prosecution force’s Watergate road map, officially titled the Grand Jury Report and Recommendation Concerning Transmission of Evidence to the House of Representatives, was delivered under seal to chief judge John Sirica of the US district court in the District of Columbia. He then provided it to the House judiciary committee, which launched its impeachment inquiry. This document was not publicly released by the National Archives until 2018 – about one month before Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison for arranging hush-money payments on his client’s behalf.Nixon’s and Trump’s motives run starkly parallel. “The President was well aware, as tapes and transcripts demonstrate,” the Watergate road map stated, “that the primary purpose of the conspiracy prior to the election (the ‘containment theory’) was to protect the President’s own political future.”The road map also laid out the potential consequences for Nixon if his cover-up had been exposed after his re-election: “If the cover-up and obstruction of justice that had already occurred came to light in the spring of 1973, not only would all the President’s close advisors be subject to criminal liability but the President himself would have had to shoulder ultimate responsibility (moral, if not legal) for their actions. The President could well expect that the failure of the conspiracy at that stage (at least at its center) would jeopardize his ability to continue successfully in office and to remain an effective political force in the country and Republican Party.”Echoing Nixon, Trump in his 2016 campaign conspired to exchange hush money for silence about certain of his actions that he believed would cost him the election if the public knew about them. As in Watergate, his crimes involved bribery, illegal campaign contributions and tax fraud. Trump directed his cover-up when he was a candidate, when he was the president-elect, and, in one instance, when he was president.Every one of the 34 felony counts in Trump’s indictment begins with a citation of the same New York State criminal statute, §175.10, on falsifying business records in the first degree, which requires a mens rea – a state of mind – that “includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof”. Essentially, Trump has been indicted on what the Watergate prosecutors in the road map called the “concealment theory” that was at the heart of Nixon’s cover-up. In short, both Trump and Nixon committed business crimes to further their political crimes.The New York indictment alleges that Trump falsified his business records, committing tax fraud and violating campaign finance law, to prevent the voters from learning that he had paid bribes. “From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects,” reads the statement of facts connected to the indictment.Like Nixon, Trump conspired with others to achieve his ends. Several of his co-conspirators have already “admitted to committing illegal conduct in connection with the scheme”, according to the statement of facts. In 2018, Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, named as “Lawyer A” in the indictment, was prosecuted by the US attorney of the southern district of New York and found guilty of two crimes of illegal campaign contributions. He has since served a three-year prison term.David Pecker, the chairman and CEO of American Media, Inc, which owned the National Enquirer and other tabloids, entered into a plea agreement for non-prosecution with the southern district in exchange for his confession that he engaged in a “catch and kill scheme” to discover and pay sources so they “did not publicize damaging allegations” about Trump “before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election”. Pecker had known Trump since 1998, when as a publisher he produced a quarterly magazine called Trump Style for Trump to distribute at his golf clubs, casinos and hotels.Per the indictment, the conspiracy began at a meeting in August 2015 at Trump Tower of Trump, Cohen and Pecker. Trump had announced his candidacy two months earlier. Pecker pledged to be his “eyes and ears”, on the lookout “for negative stories about the Defendant and alerting Lawyer A [Cohen] before the stories were published”.The first payment went to a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin, who had bruited about the rumor that Trump had an illegitimate child with a housekeeper. He said he was repeating a story he had heard from Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari. Although Sajudin passed a lie-detector test administered by a private detective hired by the National Enquirer, the Enquirer’s reporters could find no evidence to back up his the claim, nor could Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker when he investigated. Nonetheless, the Enquirer paid the loose-lipped doorman $30,000 to zip it.Pecker “directed that the deal take place because of his agreement with the Defendant and Lawyer A [Cohen]”, and “falsely characterized this payment in AMI’s books and records, including in its general ledger”, according to the statement of facts. After determining that the story was false, Pecker wanted to release Sajudin from his non-disclosure agreement, but Cohen told him to wait “until after the presidential election”.The next payment went to “Woman 1”, Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playmate of the Year, whom Trump had met at a pool party at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006, three months after his wife Melania had given birth to their son. Trump and McDougal had an affair that lasted for 10 months. Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker reported her note on that initial encounter: “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was ‘ON’! We got naked + had sex. He offered me money. I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks–I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you–NOT for money’–He told me ‘you are special.’”Trump, Cohen and Pecker held “a series of discussions about who should pay off Woman 1 to secure her silence”, according to the statement of facts. Pecker agreed to cover the payment if he were reimbursed. “So what do we got to pay for this? One fifty?” Trump asked Cohen in an audio recording. Trump suggested an untraceable cash payment. Cohen created a shell company, Resolution Consultants, LLC, to pay McDougal by check, but, in the end, Pecker made the whole payment himself.On 7 October 2016, the 2005 Access Hollywood tape of Trump’s lascivious boasting broke: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Three days later, in full damage-control mode, Pecker’s AMI editor connected Cohen with the lawyer of a new danger, “Woman 2”, “to secure Woman 2’s silence and prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election”.The recipient of the third payment, Woman 2, was the adult film actor Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels. Trump and Daniels had a sexual encounter in July 2006, at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe to which Trump had also brought McDougal (“Woman 1”). (He and McDougal had begun their affair just a month earlier.) That same weekend, Ronan Farrow has reported, Trump invited four other adult film actors to his hotel room for sex, offering one of them $10,000, but that they rejected him.Cohen and Pecker’s lawyer struck a deal to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 to “prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election”, per the indictment. But Trump resisted paying, calculating that “if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”. In the end, Cohen paid himself through the shell company after Trump agreed he would pay him back personally.On 14 February 2017, Valentine’s Day, Cohen submitted fraudulent invoices for a fraudulent retainer for fraudulent services rendered that then president Trump paid with two checks from his trust, fraudulently recording them as retainers and stapled to the fraudulent invoices.During the presidential transition, Trump invited Pecker to Trump Tower to thank him “for handling the stories of the Doorman and Woman 1 [McDougal]”, and invited him to the inauguration and to a White House dinner. He was grateful to Pecker for more than the “catch and kill” operation. Throughout the campaign, Pecker had also conducted the systematic smearing of Trump’s opponents from both parties as part of the deal. While the hush money was secret, wild stories about his rivals were blazoned on Pecker’s tabloids displayed at every supermarket counter.The Enquirer and AMI’s even more down-market Globe headlined stories of his Republican rivals: Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John F Kennedy; Cruz was covering up his numerous extramarital affairs; Carly Fiorina was “a homewrecker”; John Kasich was a closeted homosexual. On Hillary Clinton, the papers screamed “Six Months To Live!” She was a money launderer who “will face prison”. She was gay. Bill Clinton was a cocaine addict who was not Chelsea Clinton’s father.“You can’t knock the National Enquirer,” Trump said, defending the tabloid libels, while falsely disclaiming any responsibility of his own for them. “I’m just referring to an article that appeared. It has nothing to do with me.”Many if not most of the fabricated stories originated with Roger Stone, a former Nixon Committee To Re-Elect operative and a link between the “ratfucking” dirty tricks of the Nixon underworld and Trump’s. Trump reviewed the smears before they appeared, and Cohen gave them a final stamp of approval.In 2018, federal prosecutors granted Pecker immunity for his testimony on the “catch and kill” scheme in the Michael Cohen case that led to his conviction. In 2019, Pecker sold AMI to an equity firm, and a year later he was removed as CEO.Now, with Trump’s chief media co-conspirator taking the non-prosecution deal, Trump has substituted his Truth Social site for the National Enquirer. He cannot rely on Pecker and the Enquirer to do his smearing for him. His previous “containment strategy” having failed, he has been forced to run a campaign of obfuscation, obstruction and intimidation openly by himself. His tweets attacking the judges presiding over his cases, their relatives and court clerks have filled the vacuum left by the Enquirer.“It is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings. The threat is very real,” stated Judge Juan Merchan of the New York court in his second gag order. Trump’s “recent attacks”, he said, constitute “a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself”.Trump’s targeted assaults on the justice system are intended to instill fear while at the same time he depicts himself as the victim. They are also an extension of his cover-up. It is fundamental to both his defense and political strategy. If he could, he would engage in a “Saturday Night Massacre” like Nixon, who ordered the attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which they refused to do and instead resigned. Nixon finally got the solicitor general, Robert Bork, to do his dirty work.But Nixon’s desperate act could not stop the wheels of justice from grinding. A new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, sought the release of Nixon’s White House tapes. In his January 6 coup, as if imitating Nixon, Trump demanded the resignation of his previously compliant attorney general, William Barr, when he declined to become involved in the patently illegal fake elector scheme, and tried to replace him with lackeys.Trump’s last-minute attempt to short-circuit his New York trial by invoking presidential immunity was denied on 3 April. In the case over whether Nixon was required to turn over his White House tapes, United States v Nixon, Nixon’s attempt to secure immunity was denied. The US supreme court decided unanimously that his limited privilege in military and diplomatic affairs did not cover and must yield to “the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of justice”. That decision against Nixon stands as an obstacle to Trump’s claim of total immunity now.The salaciousness of Trump’s crimes in the New York case may distract from the basic reality that the means of his cover-up strongly resemble those employed by Nixon for the same end of influencing a presidential election. For that very reason, Trump’s hush-money case is on a continuum with his other high crimes of subversion.The revelation that Trump conspired to eliminate his Democratic opponent Joe Biden by withholding defensive weapons from Ukraine in exchange for bogus political dirt – which, we now know from the recent congressional testimony of one of the key co-conspirators, Lev Parnas, was fabricated by Russian intelligence – led to Trump’s first impeachment. His conspiracy to stage a coup to prevent the Congress from ratifying the electoral college vote in the 2020 election led to his second.But if Trump is convicted of any of the felony counts in his New York trial his fate will diverge from Nixon’s. When the “smoking gun” tape exposing Nixon’s role in the cover-up was released, Nixon resigned. He was never impeached. He was never officially charged with his crimes. He never faced trial. President Gerald Ford pardoned him. Nixon accepted the pardon, an implicit acceptance of his guilt.If Trump seeks a pardon, he must throw himself on the mercy of the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul. On 1 April, he tweeted on his Truth Social account that she was “asked to leave” the wake of a slain New York City police officer, which she rebutted as a falsehood.Trump’s New York case is, at last, the first time a cover-up to steal the presidency through bribery is on trial. Only superficially is it about Trump’s tawdry and pathetic sex life. The true subject of abuse at the center of the trial is the constitution, his ultimate victim.
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

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    A House Republican wants to prove Biden is compromised – but where’s the evidence?

    “This is a very serious investigation,” James Comer, chairman of the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee, told the rightwing channel Newsmax recently. “The allegations and the things that we’re investigating make Watergate look like jaywalking.”The Watergate scandal needed a whistleblower, John Dean, to bring down President Richard Nixon half a century ago. Republican Comer claims that he, too, has a “highly credible” whistleblower who will provide evidence that Joe Biden has been compromised by a foreign power.Such a monumental allegation from such a senior politician would once have been front page news. Even if Republicans were assumed to have partisan motivations, many observers would have begun with the premise that there is no smoke without fire.However, Republicans’ embrace of former president Donald Trump and his bogus conspiracy theories has turned the default response in Washington to one of skepticism. With the identity of the whistleblower still shrouded in mystery, the burden of proof falls on Comer – and he is yet to deliver.Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, said: “We should always take the whistleblowers seriously but this committee, at least so far, is cheapening the use of whistleblowers because they keep saying that they have found all this evidence for a whistleblower, and I think they even mentioned they might have more, but where is it?”Comer has previously been rebuked by Democratic colleagues for exaggerating the number of whistleblowers that his investigation has. He took his latest claim to national television earlier this month.Appearing on Hannity on the rightwing Fox News network, he said a whistleblower had provided Congress information raising concerns that, during Biden’s vice- presidency under Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017, he was allegedly engaged in a bribery scheme with a foreign national.He said: “Senator [Chuck] Grassley and I have reviewed this whistleblower disclosure. We find it very credible. We have a lot of questions about whether the FBI even looked into this.”In a fundraising email to supporters, the House oversight committee chairman added: “It is with a heavy heart that I fear our Commander-in-Chief may be compromised by foreign actors, and I’m going to do everything in my power to deliver the whole truth to the American people.”In a letter that used the word “alleged” three times in the opening paragraph, Comer issued a subpoena to FBI director Christopher Wray for a document that, according to the whistleblower, “describes an alleged criminal scheme” involving Biden and a foreign national “relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions” when Biden was vice-president and includes “a precise description” about it.But the FBI this week declined to provide the document. Christopher Dunham, acting assistant director for the FBI’s office of congressional affairs, wrote in a letter to Comer: “The mere existence of such a document would establish little beyond the fact that a confidential human source provided information and the FBI recorded it.“Indeed, the FBI regularly receives information from sources with significant potential biases, motivations, and knowledge, including drug traffickers, members of organized crime, or even terrorists.”Comer has also said he obtained thousands of pages of financial records showing that at least nine members of the Biden family – including the president’s son, Hunter, and brother, James – allegedly exploited the Biden name in their business dealings by accepting money from foreign nationals in China and Romania.The oversight committee chairman followed up with an eagerly hyped press conference this week, stating in an interim report that some Biden family members, associates and their companies received more than $10m from foreign entities between 2015 and 2017.Hunter, a lawyer, received more than $1m from a company controlled by Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu, who was the subject of a criminal investigation and prosecution for corruption in Romania.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the financial records showed no evidence that Biden himself acted improperly or took any official action because of his family’s business affairs. Nor, despite the claims of “influence peddling”, did they demonstrate actual wrongdoing by the Biden family. The press conference was widely ignored or panned.David Brock, president of Facts First USA, a non-profit watchdog, said afterwards: “The reality is we don’t even have a scandal here, much less Watergate.”Humiliatingly, Comer was even given a rough ride on Fox News. Host Steve Doocy told the Kentucky congressman: “You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence. And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is that – there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”Republicans are under pressure to deliver after winning the House majority last year and promising to use their subpoena power to investigate foreign entities that did business with the Biden family, with a specific focus on Hunter.The effort coincides with an imminent decision by federal prosecutors over whether to charge Hunter with tax crimes and lying about his drug use when he bought a handgun.Although Hunter never held a position in the White House, his membership on the board of a Ukrainian energy company and his efforts to strike deals in China have raised questions about whether he traded on his father’s public service, including reported references in his emails to the “big guy”. There are no indications that the federal investigation involves the president in any way.The White House has dismissed his investigation as “yet another political stunt”. Spokesperson Ian Sams said: “Congressman Comer has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts and spreading baseless innuendo while refusing to conduct his so-called ‘investigations’ with legitimacy.”Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, a watchdog monitoring the Republican investigations, suggests that Comer is abusing the term whistleblower.“If they have a whistleblower that’s what he the public would be interested in but, other than them talking about it, I haven’t seen anything materialise from that,” he said.Comer’s office did not respond to a request for comment or further details. More

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    What does ‘Watergate’ teach us 50 years on?: Politics Weekly America

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    50 years ago, police in Washington DC arrested five men for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. What followed was the unravelling of a web of scandals that ultimately ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. What can today’s January 6 hearings learn from Watergate? And had it happened in today’s political climate, would it have played out the way it did? Jonathan Freedland speaks with Garrett M. Graff, journalist and author of Watergate: A New History

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    Archive: All the President’s Men – Warner Bros, The Nixon White House Tapes – Richard Nixon Presidential Library Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to theguardian.com/supportpodcasts More

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    Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond even Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo say

    Trump’s bid to cling to power ‘beyond Nixon’s imagination’, Watergate duo sayBob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in new book foreword that bid to overturn election made Trump ‘our first seditious president’ Donald Trump was the first seditious president in US history, surpassing in his efforts to hang on to power beyond even the criminal imagination of Richard Nixon, according to the two political reporters who were instrumental in securing Nixon’s downfall.In a new foreword to their celebrated 1974 book on the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein accuse Trump of pursuing his “diabolical instincts” by zeroing in on the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory by Congress on January 6 last year. In the authors’ assessment, Trump’s unleashing of the mob that day, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol, amounted to “a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination”.Capitol attack panel to unveil new evidence against Trump at public hearingsRead moreThey write in their foreword, published by the Washington Post, they write: “By legal definition this is clearly sedition … thus Trump became the first seditious president in our history.”Woodward and Bernstein’s comparison of Trump and Nixon carries singular weight, given that as young Washington Post reporters they helped to uncover Nixon’s campaign of political spying and cover-up that led in 1974 to the only resignation of a president in American history. In separate capacities, the two journalists have also reported extensively on the Trump presidency, with Woodward doing so in a series of three books: Fear, Rage and Peril.The timing of their analysis is also potent. It comes just days before the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection stages the first of at least six televised hearings in which they will attempt to show the American people that Trump acted corruptly in his efforts to stop Biden’s certification.Woodward and Bernstein suggest that the two presidents had much in common, despite the almost half a century that stands between them. Nixon’s belief that it was for the greater good that he stayed in power whatever the means was “embraced by Trump”, they write.“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon told himself in 1969. That informed Trump’s campaign to hold on to power through falsehoods even in the face of defeat.Misinformation also unites the diabolical pair. “Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the US constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were ‘enemies,’ and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents,” Woodward and Bernstein say in their new foreword.The reporters also explore the differences between the two men, notably that Trump attempted his electoral subversion in public. Pulling no punches, they call the January 6 insurrection “a Trump operation” and predict that the House committee has an abundance of evidence to prove that point in the upcoming hearings.Though Nixon’s criminal misdeeds tend to be remembered through the lens of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on 17 June 1972, and the cover-up that followed, the authors remind their readers that his core purpose was to subvert that year’s presidential election. They rehearse some of the extreme measures that Nixon’s team of operatives took to derail the presidential campaign of his main Democratic rival, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.Those measures included writing fake letters on Muskie stationery alleging sexual misconduct by other Democratic candidates and stealing Muskie’s shoes from outside his hotel room where he had left them for polishing in order to spook him out. Muskie ultimately lost the Democratic nomination to the liberal senator George McGovern of South Dakota.Trump, the reporters argue, pursued equally ruthless tactics designed to undermine credibility in the 2020 presidential election. They reached a pitch on January 6 with the violent mob breaking into the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence” against Trump’s vice-president who was proceeding with certification of the election results.In the last analysis, Woodward and Bernstein ask themselves why two such powerful men would embark on parallel efforts to destroy democracy. They have one overriding answer.“Fear of losing and being considered a loser was a common thread for Nixon and Trump,” they write.TopicsDonald TrumpBob WoodwardCarl BernsteinUS Capitol attackUS politicsRichard NixonWatergatenewsReuse this content More

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    ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on

    ‘I’m living in the bubble’: the man who helped bring Nixon down, 50 years on John Dean speaks on the 1972 Watergate break-in and why he has never been more concerned about US democracy than now“I’ve never escaped Watergate,” says John Dean, as once again he allows the years to melt away, the old faces to crowd in and the secret tapes to whirr in his mind. “There’s just no choice. I’m living in the bubble. It’s become a fact of life.”America has never escaped Watergate either. The biggest political scandal of the 20th century, and the only one to cause a presidential resignation, has become a byword for lost innocence and lost faith in institutions. Along with the Vietnam war, it marked the end of an era in which a president’s words were met with automatic trust rather than default scepticism.Republican primaries offer look into future of Trumpism without TrumpRead moreSuch is the notoriety that the “-gate” suffix has been applied to dozens of controversies, from Sharpiegate (Donald Trump showing a map altered using a black marker pen) to Deflategate (allegations that Tom Brady’s New England Patriots used deflated footballs) to Partygate (British prime minister Boris Johnson’s social gatherings that flouted Covid-19 restrictions).Today the luxury Watergate hotel’s phone number ends in 1972 – the year of the burglary – and callers are greeted by a message that begins: “There’s no need to break in,” as well as recordings of President Richard Nixon. This month’s 50th anniversary of the break-in is being marked by books, exhibitions, TV dramas and a four-part CNN documentary series, Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal, narrated by Dean himself.In it the man who helped bring Nixon down draws a direct line from the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972 to the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, taking stock of a half century that has seen the media fragment, the Republican party embrace authoritarian tendencies and presidents become less accountable. Dean has never been more concerned about American democracy than he is now.“I was never worried about the country and the government during Watergate but from the day Trump was nominated, I had a knot in my stomach and, until he left, I never got rid of it,” Dean, 83, tells the Guardian via Zoom from a Washington hotel. “He just discovered late in his presidency the enormous powers he does have as president. He wants them now. He knows he can hurt his enemies and help his friends.”He adds: “Nixon, who was very bright and understood how the government operated and what the levers of power really are was somebody who also could experience shame and accepted the rule of law. When the supreme court ruled against him, that was it. I can’t imagine, in a similar situation, Trump complying with a court order from the supreme court saying turn over your tapes.”Dean was working for the justice department when he was recruited to the Nixon White House. But he soon discovered that John Ehrlichman would remain the president’s top legal adviser. “As White House counsel, I got the title – I didn’t get the job,” Dean says wryly. “It was frankly too good a title at 31 years of age to pass up, although I knew I would be doing the grunt work.”It also did not take Dean long to discover that the Nixon administration was doing things differently. It kept an enemies list. It had approved a September 1971 burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defence analyst who leaked the secret history of the Vietnam war known as the Pentagon Papers.Dean himself had to intervene to squash an outlandish plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution, a thinktank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored. “I did not know that the president had authorised the Brookings operation but I thought it was insane, whoever had authorised it,” he says.Dean was out of the country on the day of the Watergate break-in but instantly guessed who was behind it. Five men had been arrested in the bungled operation to bug and steal documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex – a dirty tricks operation aimed at sinking would-be challengers to Nixon in that year’s presidential election.At first the incident seemed comically inept and inconsequential but, when it emerged in court that the lead burglar, James McCord, had worked for the CIA, journalists such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post sprang into action. Gradually they and others would trace a complex web that connected operatives known as “the plumbers” to the Committee to Re-elect the President (Creep) to senior White House officials and, finally, to Nixon himself.But it was not until after the president won re-election in November 1972 that Dean felt himself sucked into the cover-up, arranging hush money for the Watergate burglars. He recalls: “[White House aide Chuck] Colson brings a recording he’s made of Howard Hunt, who was one of the managers of the burglars, and Hunt wants to be paid and if he doesn’t get paid, people are going to start talking.“I knew enough of the criminal law to know this is either extortion or bribery. Now, my reaction is kind of interesting. I had just gotten married and I said, ‘Holy cow, we’re in trouble!’ So I decided then I’ve got to make the cover-up work and that’s when I dove in with both feet. It was foolish.”He adds: “It’s only later [in March 1973] when Hunt starts extorting me personally for money that I said the same thing’s going to happen to everybody – it’s going to follow us the rest of our lives. There’ll be no end to it and Nixon has got to get out in front of it and we all have got to stand up and account for the mistakes we’ve made.”Dean went to see Nixon in an effort to convince him that the cover-up would destroy his presidency. In later testimony to Congress, Dean explained: “I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.”Dean has since been able to listen back to the conversation thanks to Nixon’s secret recording system at the White House. “The quality of the tapes in general is just awful but I’m sitting right over one of the little microphones that had been bored into the desk, so my voice is crystal clear. I can actually hear myself sigh at times, exasperated with the reaction I’m getting.“I took him through every problem he had and, to my amazement, he had an answer for everything I thought was a problem. I can hear my frustration with this man and I’m waiting for his fist to come down on the desk.“Finally, at the end, when it’s clear he is going to do nothing, I say, ‘Well, Mr President, people are going to go to jail for this.’ He says, ‘Like who?’ To bring it home, I say, ‘Like me!’ So he knows his White House counsel thinks he’s on his way to jail. I hope that will turn him but all it does is turn him against me because now I’m radioactive.”What were Dean’s impressions of Nixon the man? “He wasn’t who I thought he was. He clearly wanted to engage in criminal behaviour and he would blame everybody but himself. What surprised me most is he spent a lot of time conspicuously trying to impress me.”On one occasion, Dean recounts, Nixon told him that he was reading a book about President John’s F Kennedy’s ruthless streak. “I’ve often thought he did that to impress upon me that all presidents are ruthless to a degree because I’m the one who had blown up the the plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution. He knew that and he was worried, maybe, I thought presidents shouldn’t do things like that. He was trying to do a little tutorial on me.”Wary that he would be turned into a scapegoat, Dean began cooperating with Senate investigators. At the end of April 1973, with the walls closing in, Nixon aides HR Haldeman and Ehrlichman resigned and Dean himself was forced out.He then publicly turned against Nixon by testifying to the Senate Watergate committee – becoming the first White House official to accuse the president of being directly involved in the cover-up. The blockbuster hearing in June was watched by millions on television. But first Dean got a haircut.“It was a barber I had never been to and it was last-minute. I had done an interview with Walter Cronkite and my hair was curling over my shoulders. I said that is just not a good look; I’d better get that neck cleaned up or my mother will be all over me. In the barbershop, he just put a bowl on my head and cut it so it was much shorter than people were used to: ‘Oh, he’s changing his image!’“The same thing with the glasses. I had actually scratched my cornea. I had worn contacts during the Cronkite interview and noticed I was just blinking madly. I have never really worn contacts since I had that experience.”Dean read from a mammoth prepared statement that took almost the entire first day. “If I had been told in advance I was going to have to read it all, it would not have been 60,000 words. It may have been 6,000 at max. But it’s much easier to write a long statement than it is a short one so I just let it flow. It took eight hours to read it.”Later that year Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, was disbarred and served four months; he was in the witness protection programme so never went to prison. Meanwhile Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s deputy chief of staff, had testified that there was a recording system in the White House.The supreme court ordered the release of a “smoking gun tape” confirming Dean’s claim that Nixon told aides to order the CIA to shut down the FBI investigation into the burglary. Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. The president gave a final victory sign on the South Lawn before a helicopter spirited him away.Dean, who happened to have his molars removed that day, cannot recall any particular emotion. “I didn’t feel vindication or anything of that nature. We’d been at battle. It’s very lucky that the system worked as it was designed.”He continues: “It’s very hard to look at Watergate without looking through the lens of Trump where it didn’t work, or hasn’t yet. It’s not over. If Trump gets through with zero accountability, then the system is deeply flawed and a lot of that is probably traceable to the Ford pardon.”When President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a full pardon in September 1974, Bernstein exclaimed to Woodward: “You’re not gonna believe it. The son of a bitch pardoned the son of a bitch!” (Woodward has more recently praised Ford’s act as one of courage.) Dean’s initial reaction was different.“At the time I thought it was right and it was understandable because I knew he couldn’t govern with Watergate hanging over him. Every day would be a new decision as to what he does and doesn’t turn over from the Nixon archive.“It would have consumed his presidency but so I understood it, but in the long run it codified the memo that was prepared then re-prepared during the Clinton presidency, that a sitting president can’t be indicted. Well, a post-president can’t be indicted when he’s pardoned.”Dean went into business for a while and tried to leave Watergate behind but a 1991 book that alleged he and his wife, Maureen, masterminded the cover-up prompted him to take legal action. This led to years of research, immersing himself in the tapes and making peace with the subject. He has written several books, including two about Watergate, and teaches a Watergate-related course for lawyers.He has also been called upon by the media and Congress to provide expert analysis during scandals in the Clinton and Trump administrations. Now a grandfather living in Beverly Hills, California, he quips: “My speciality, I guess, is presidents in deep trouble.”But if something like Watergate happened in the 2020s, he does not believe it would necessarily bring down a president again. “It would be very different today, primarily because of Fox News, which would be mounting a fulsome defence of him. We are far more polarised today than we were. We were polarised during Watergate but not to the degree we are today.”Dean will be watching this week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill intently but reckons that Republicans, at least, face less accountability than they once did. “Trump is a poster boy for authoritarianism and the authoritarian followers just fell in line. They just absolutely did what authoritarian followers do: click their heels, salute, ‘Yes sir!’”That leaves him fearing for the future of American democracy. “Not so much Trump but now the whole Republican party has shifted into this authoritarian stance. Not all the Republicans I know are that way but too many of them now think authoritarianism is just dandy because it works, it’s efficient. Well, Mussolini ran the trains on time, didn’t he – but at some expense.”TopicsWatergateRichard NixonUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Dwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’

    InterviewDwight Chapin on his former boss: ‘Richard Nixon was not a crook’David Smith in WashingtonThe former secretary to the disgraced president talks about his new memoir and what it was like to go to prison for Nixon He was at the side of the American president on one of the most important diplomatic trips in history, enjoying sumptuous banquets as a guest of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.Three and a half years later he was in prison after becoming first person to go on trial in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, despite protesting his innocence.Carl Bernstein: ‘Our democracy, before Trump, had ceased to be working well’Read moreBut half a century on, Dwight Chapin is not bitter and does not blame Richard Nixon for his fall from grace. On the contrary, he believes that the jowly-faced 37th president – who resigned in shame in 1974 – was a brilliant man and is still misunderstood.“Richard Nixon was not a crook,” says Chapin via Zoom from his home in Riverside, Connecticut. “Sometimes the term ‘evil’ is used: that’s not what the man was about. In his heart, he was not only a patriot but an incredible public servant. He was in the arena serving the public for half a century.”Challenging baked-in perceptions of Nixon was the main motivation for Chapin, now 81, to write a memoir, The President’s Man, which delves into the thousands of hours they spent together, from small hotels in New Hampshire to the Forbidden City in Beijing.They first met in 1962 when Chapin was a 21-year-old student and Nixon – narrowly defeated for the presidency by John F Kennedy two years earlier – was running for governor of California.Chapin recalls: “Mr Nixon had been a congressman, a senator, vice-president for eight years and then had all that notoriety running against Kennedy, so he was a commanding figure. When he was in a room, you knew it. His presence was very strong.”He worked as a field organiser on the 1962 campaign then as Nixon’s personal aide during his successful run for president in 1968. At the White House he was appointments secretary, with a door that opened into the Oval Office, and deputy assistant to the president, responsible for the planning and logistics of his public appearances.But he does not claim to have been Nixon’s friend. “I knew him so well; but as I have continued to discover through the decades, in many ways I barely knew him at all,” Chapin writes wistfully.Despite his relative youth he served as acting chief of protocol when, 50 years ago this week, Nixon became the first US president to visit China. It was a leap into the cold war unknown: China was closed to the west and the US refused to recognise its communist government.The Washington Post newspaper wrote in an editorial at the time: “If Mr Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more. It is very nearly mind blowing.”Such was the cultural impact that it inspired an opera by John Adams. Chapin reflects: “History should remember the trip as the single most significant and dramatic foreign journey by any American president ever. The world stood still while Nixon went to China.”He writes that Nixon relished the meeting of adversaries as a unique opportunity to demonstrate diplomatic and strategic expertise. “He loved planning this trip. Loved it … Here was Richard Nixon, the leader of the free world, marching off to the darkest, and most mysterious, part of the Communist empire.”Nixon was accompanied by three Americans, including national security adviser Henry Kissinger, during his meetings with Chairman Mao, while Chapin and the rest of the delegation remained at a guest house. “When he got back, the president reported to us that it had gone well,” he recalls. “I would use the word elated.”Not that Chapin had time to be bored. He writes: “The banquets kept coming. At each banquet there were toasts and more toasts and toasts of the toasts. Between banquets there were meetings and tours. Six months earlier I had known nothing about the Forbidden City. At this point, if it had been necessary, I could have conducted a tour myself.”At a banquet in Shanghai, Nixon offered a toast that he had scribbled on one of his yellow legal-sized notepad in his suite, declaring: “This trip was the week that changed the world.”Chapin writes: “In retrospect, yes, it was ‘the week that changed the world’, but as Chairman Mao had proclaimed, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. What a prairie fire of aggressiveness, influence, and trade, reaching around the world, was ignited by that week fifty years ago.“Looking back I have a special appreciation for Nixon’s prophetic prediction that ‘Within fifty years, the United States and China will be adversaries, and we need to be able to talk with one another.’”But today the wisdom of Nixon’s outreach is questioned. China’s rise as a global power has become a defining principle of Joe Biden’s presidency as he warns of a struggle for the 21st century between autocracy and democracy, rival systems competing to show which can better deliver for its people.The communication channel with President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, remains open but relations are strained. China is flexing military muscles and threatening Taiwan. The US staged a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights abuses.Chapin reflects: “Any official American involvement there is missing and you have the the Russians and the Chinese together. I think Nixon would have been handling that differently. Nixon would be thinking of this in a very strategic sense. He would be wanting to do anything besides having a war or conflict and he would be looking for diplomatic answers.”But just four months after the historic China trip, the seeds of Nixon’s – and Chapin’s – downfall were sown.A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, which involved wiretapping phones and stealing documents, was traced to officials at Nixon’s re-election campaign committee. Although the president comfortably won re-election later that year, White House attempts to conceal the scandal began to unravel.A key whistleblower was Mark Felt, a senior FBI official who secretly fed information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Felt was immortalised as “Deep Throat” by their book All the President’s Men, which became a Hollywood film. But five decades later, he is no hero to Chapin.“It’s disgraceful that the number two man at the FBI is leaking material regarding an investigation,” he says, evidently still rankled. “I met with the FBI and I told them the truth and I told them everything and two days later it’s on the front page of the Washington Post because Mark Felt got the report and leaked it.“I have nothing but disdain for somebody that took an oath to the constitution to follow the rules of the land. This leaking by FBI is so outrageous and goes way back into the J Edgar Hoover days. Part of the culture of the old FBI was leaking stuff and I happen to feel that’s wrong. Mark Felt is a real sleazebag and a disgrace to the FBI.”Chapin acknowledges that Nixon “made mistakes” and the White House did not “come clean” early. But he argues this was because the president had not been told exactly what happened or why. “He was treating it like a public relations problem.”As the walls closed in, Chapin was among several staff who, in December 1972, learned that they would be fired. “My eyes welled with tears,” he writes of a decision he found profoundly unfair. “Everyone was expendable. But me? Processing what I had been told was very painful.”Announcing the shake-up two months later, Nixon declared: “There can be no whitewash at the White House.” But despite further purges, there was no escape. A drip-drip of damaging headlines led to high-profile congressional hearings and bombshell testimonies.The courts forced Nixon to surrender tape recordings that confirmed he had tried to use the CIA to divert the FBI investigation – an abuse of presidential power and an obstruction of justice. The “law and order” president had behaved as if he was above the law.Nixon lost the confidence of fellow Republicans and in August 1974, facing almost certain impeachment, became the first and still only US president to resign.Chapin maintains his own innocence, insisting that he had nothing to do with the break-in or cover-up. But his earlier decision to hire an old university friend, Don Segretti, a political dirty trickster who would eventually serve four months in prison, was his undoing.Chapin was indicted on four counts of making false statements to a grand jury, charges that he still adamantly denies. He was found guilty on two counts and spent nine months in a low security federal prison in California.“I was fortunate that I could go to a minimal security place so there were no cells, no doors that slammed,” he recalls. “There was more of an army barracks type situation. Now, I’m not saying it was pleasant because you’re losing your freedom and I was being punished. I always viewed this as a political thing, not that I was a criminal.”Two or three weeks in, Chapin got hassled by two younger inmates. He went to see an older inmate, “Big Mike”, who happened to be keenly interested in politics and used his influence to ensure that Chapin never got bullied again. “When he put out the word, nothing was going to happen to me.”Chapin believes incarceration changed him and proved one of the most valuable learning experiences of his life. “When I was going off to prison, a friend said, ‘Dwight, it can get the best of you, or you can make the most of it.’ That was a wonderful piece of advice. I kept myself very busy. I read constantly.“I was probably in better physical shape than ever in my life. I started a programme for other prisoners that were getting ready to go back out into society. I had a desk and a little office and I helped them write letters and find jobs they could go to. I tried to make myself productive there and that helped make the time go faster.”But did he not feel abandoned and betrayed by Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and escaped criminal prosecution?“He couldn’t help me out,” Chapin says. “Richard Nixon was president of the United States. He had to resign so he went through his own hell, different than mine, but equally traumatic, maybe even more traumatic than what I went through, particularly for such a proud man, such a good man.“What he made it possible for me to witness and be a part of so outweighs any of the negatives of Watergate. I’m very proud of what we accomplished and I think he did a great job. There’s no question I was heartbroken, there’s no question I went through hell, but so did he.”Some readers may find Chapin’s praise of Nixon hard to swallow and draw comparisons with the blind loyalty of former aides to another Republican president, Donald Trump. But Bernstein is among those who have observed that while Nixon was a crook, liar and media hater, Trump is infinitely worse: an authoritarian who staged an attempted coup.Chapin, an admirer of Ronald Reagan who seems reluctant to talk about Trump, found his footing when he regained his freedom. He was a magazine publisher, held a senior position at a public relations company and managed his own consulting firm. He has put his prison time behind him and, at 81, written his first book so his children and grandchildren can understand his version of history.“Things happen to people all the time and it’s important that individuals realise that their life is not over,” Chapin reflects. “Time is a great healer, and I try to make the point in my book that I was able to recoup from this.“I was happy it happened to me as a young man and not like with some of the older guys where it was the capstone of their career. For me, it was at the start of my working life and I’ve been able to do many other interesting things with my life since then.”
    The President’s Man is out now
    TopicsBooksRichard NixonWatergateUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More