On August 8, 1974, I lined up with friends to get free tickets for a Shakespeare play in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. Sitting in the open air and watching the first act of “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” we were all aware that something much more meaningful was happening in America that night. One of my friends held a transistor radio to his ear.
“I have never been a quitter,” the voice on the radio crackled. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
“Therefore,” said President Richard M. Nixon said, “I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”
The drip, drip, drip of the Watergate scandal had sunk Nixon’s presidency. It is uncanny that, 50 years later, Donald Trump, a former President of the United States, is in a close election against Vice President Kamala Harris despite having been impeached twice, convicted of 34 felonies and potentially facing trials on other charges.
But 2024 is not 1974.
Nixon’s resignation affirmed a bedrock democratic principle: that no one, not even a president, is above the law.
He concluded that he had to quit two weeks after the US Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the White House would have to turn over incriminating tapes of the president’s conversations to a special prosecutor. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Nixon himself, rejected the president’s claim that his White House comments were shielded by absolute privilege.
“The impediment that an absolute, unqualified privilege would place in the way of the primary constitutional duty of the Judicial Branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under Art. III,” wrote Burger. “In designing the structure of our Government and dividing and allocating the sovereign power among three co-equal branches, the Framers of the Constitution sought to provide a comprehensive system, but the separate powers were not intended to operate with absolute independence.”
Immune, immune, immune
Yet on July 1 this year Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a bitterly divided Supreme Court that as a former president Trump enjoys a substantial amount of immunity from prosecution. The court’s decision jeopardized special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election, a case the former president has said is a politically motivated witch hunt. (Smith has refashioned his election-conspiracy indictment and Trump pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to the new version. Federal judge Tanya Chutkan said Thursday that the upcoming election is “not relevant” to the schedule for Trump’s case, but looming in the background is the possibility that if Trump wins in November, he could fire Smith and scuttle the prosecution.)
In the July ruling backed by the six-person conservative majority of the Supreme Court, Roberts stated, “We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity.” Presidents don’t get immunity for any unofficial acts, Roberts wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s devastating dissent argued that the court’s ruling “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”
“The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”
Had the 1974 court split along ideological lines as the Roberts court just did, there likely would have been no Nixon resignation speech on August 8 — and perhaps no President Gerald Ford. Many of the post-Watergate reforms to American politics might have been stillborn.
But however Nixon’s political career ended, the profound changes Watergate brought to journalism likely would have endured.
Investigative reporting’s heyday
I had been fascinated by news and media since grade school but was unsure about pursuing it as a career. Watergate was a tipping point for me and many other young people inspired to join the profession by the reporting of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
On September 4, 1974, a few weeks after Nixon resigned, I started work as a reporter for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, where the craft of investigative reporting was honed by Robert W. Greene and practiced by, among many others, Robert Caro, a former Newsday reporter whose masterpiece “The Power Broker” had just been excerpted in the New Yorker. (It was published later in September.)
Newsday and its sister paper New York Newsday trained and attracted a generation of reporting talent. I started as a reporter, eventually moving into editing roles including managing editor of Newsday and New York Newsday.
In 1984, I got the chance to direct the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of a team of reporters, including Kathleen Kerr and B.D. Colen, who documented how the Reagan administration was intervening in the most personal of health care dilemmas to support a conservative agenda. In 1991, I worked as metro editor with Jim Dwyer and the team that covered and investigated the 1991 New York fatal subway crash.
Journalists on other desks at the paper also won Pulitzers. Just a few examples:
Roy Gutman, “for his courageous and persistent reporting that disclosed atrocities and other human rights violations in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Laurie Garrett “for her courageous reporting from Zaire on the Ebola virus outbreak there.”
Brian Donovan and Stephanie Saul, “for their stories that revealed disability pension abuses by local police.”
Patrick Sloyan, “For his reporting on the Persian Gulf War, conducted after the war was over, which revealed new details of American battlefield tactics and ‘friendly fire’ incidents.”
Dele Olojede, “for his fresh, haunting look at Rwanda a decade after rape and genocidal slaughter had ravaged the Tutsi tribe.”
Editors David Laventhol, Tony Insolia, Tony Marro, Howard Schneider, Don Forst, Les Payne and Charlotte Hall were, like me, convinced that it was crucial to provide the resources and the leadership to make this ambitious level of work possible.
For all its achievements, though, Newsday was just one among many news organizations demonstrating the power of a free press to serve as a watchdog. The economic model that supported outstanding journalism at metro newspapers was a lucrative one in the days before search and social platforms started taking away billions in advertising revenue. Yet, for all the challenges, investigative reporting still thrives today, often where it is backed by readers’ subscriptions or philanthropy.
There is no exaggerating the extent to which a culture of investigative reporting changed journalism. The good faith of government leaders would no longer be assumed. The freedom of information acts passed in the 1960s and 70s around the nation would become a tool used by enterprising reporters to tell a fuller version of the American story.
That there were excesses too in the era of big newspaper journalism can’t be denied. Every purported scandal had to become a “-gate” whether or not it really measured up. Did an overreliance on investigations help reduce Americans’ faith in government, other institutions and ultimately the media? Or were the investigations too timid, failing to get at the roots of the conditions that ail American society? These aren’t easy questions to resolve.
And yet, after having practiced journalism on both the news and opinion sides for a long time, I still believe in some basic things about the media: that we as citizens are better off knowing more rather than less about the way our government and other big institutions work and that without independent-minded journalists, we would know far too little.
Quick takes:
In an urgent new book, “Our Nation at Risk,” 17 scholars examine “the danger posed by election denialism” in light of the effort to subvert the election of Joe Biden in 2020. The book’s editors, Karen J. Greenberg and Julian E. Zelizer, write, “The constitutional system on which we rely to determine who will be our president has multiple points of vulnerability that can be manipulated, exploited, and weaponized, despite long-standing efforts to implement safeguards.” Trump might still be in office, they note, had Vice President Mike Pence yielded to pressure on January 6 or if state officials had sent an alternate slate of delegates to the Electoral College.
A shooting in a Winder, Georgia high school Wednesday took the lives of four people and injured nine others. We tend to think of gun violence as a uniquely American plague, but it has become a worldwide one. The medical journal The Lancet announced this week that it is forming a commission on “Global Gun Violence and Health,” with experts including Jennifer Tucker, Founding Director, Wesleyan University's Center for the Study of Guns and Society and Robert Muggah, Research Director & Program Coordinator for Violence Reduction at the Igarapé Institute, Brazil. “Civilian gun violence claims an estimated 600 lives every day around the world, with countless more suffering debilitating injuries that greatly reduce their quality of life,” The Lancet noted. “Just six countries — Brazil, Colombia, India, Mexico, the USA, and Venezuela — account for two-thirds of global gun deaths.”
If you like your suspense served with a generous helping of humor, you now have two suitable destinations on Apple TV+: The fourth season of “Slow Horses,” based on Mick Herron’s devilishly clever “Slough House” spy thrillers, is streaming, along with “Bad Monkey,” the series adapted from Carl Hiassen’s 2013 satirical excoriation of Southern Florida. The casts are outstanding, with Gary Oldman starring in “Slow Horses” and Vince Vaughn in “Bad Monkey” — and the dialogue consistently hits the mark.