The House Committee will hold public hearings Thursday night on TV about the Jan. 6th 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. This is eight days before the 50th anniversary the bungled burglary that gave rise to the most scandalous political scandal of our time, aEUR” Watergate.
This single word is still used in Washington, history and media. It is still meaningful to those who are able to recall those times, and those who appreciate the separation of powers and believe that law applies to all aEUR”, even the president of the United States.
Watergate is remembered for one thing: the Senate created a special committee that investigated the bigger story behind the burglary. Watergate was made possible by the work of that committee.
In the summer and autumn of 1973, 51 sessions were held by the panel. All sessions were open to the public and televised. They were rebroadcast by PBS at night. The witnesses’ often shocking testimony was the main focus, and not personalities or conflicts among the members of the committee.
Millions watched. The minds of millions were transformed. History was changed.
Will the Capitol riot of January 6th 2021 be remembered fifty years later by Americans as the Watergate scandal?
The January 6 investigation committee’s work in the coming weeks will determine a lot of the answers.
Slow-moving scandal and reaction
In June 1972, Watergate was a meaningless word to most people. The term Watergate was used to describe a newly constructed hotel and office complex overlooking Potomac River in Washington, D.C., close to the Kennedy Performing Arts Center (Kathleen Performing Arts Center) and the National Mall. Many locals thought it was quite ugly.
Five burglars were captured in the complex, which was rented by Democratic National Committee on the night of June 17. The burglars were rifling through files and bugging phones when police arrived. The investigation revealed that some of them were connected to President Richard Nixon’s White House and re-election committee.
The Washington Post published stories about it at that time. This suggests that the DNC hack-in was part a larger scheme. The story was picked up by other journalistic organizations throughout the year. The country was unaware of the story for months due to slow-moving legal processes and official cover-ups. Nixon won easily a second term as president in the fall of 1971.
Watergate was only a topic of conversation until the spring following, when Nixon’s inner circle members began to resign. Both the Senate leaders and members of the Republican Party decided that a special committee should investigate it. The members were selected and the co-chairs were named. The staff was hired.
The hearings were scheduled by the committee and three commercial television networks agreed to provide at least partial live coverage. The public television went further and committed to givingl-to-gavel coverage as well as rebroadcasting every day’s proceedings in prime-time. From May to the end, the rebroadcasts lasted up to six hours each session. Follow-up hearings were held in the fall.
[Also, on board gavel-to-givel was a new low-budget operation that allowed listeners to hear the radio while they drove, worked, or sat at home. This was the first time that most people had ever heard of National Public Radio.
The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (now known as the “Watergate Committee”) held its first session in May 1973, 11 months after the break-in.
From the beginning, Chairman Sam Ervin (76), a self-described “country attorney” from rural North Carolina, was the face of proceedings. He was also a Harvard-trained constitutional scholar. “Senator Sam” was first elected as an old-school Southern Democrat in 1954. He could be both genteel or folksy, establishment or populist.
Widely considered a conservative, Ervin was opposed to civil rights legislation. He was also known to have the respect and admiration of many Republicans, including Nixon. Senator Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) stated at the time that “Sam” was the only person we could have chosen on either side and who would be respected by the entire Senate.
Nearly equally prominent from the beginning was Howard Baker, vice chairman of the committee and the top Republican. Baker, a Tennessee senator serving a second term, was widely considered a potential future leader of the Senate party or presidential nominee. Both of his parents were members of Congress, and his father-in law was Everett Dirksen, an Illinois senator.
Baker was initially seen by the White House as a key ally of the committee. Baker also met with Nixon three times before the hearings started. Baker also met with several Nixon men, who would later be called witnesses. Baker’s famous opening question, aEUR,”What did the president know? And when did he learn it?” was also answered by Baker. Initially, aEUR” was meant to protect the president and limit the potential damage from the entire affair.
However, the question would bring out the evidence that directly implicated President Nixon and increase the damage. Some Republicans were disappointed that Baker resigned from Nixon during that summer. However, he would become the GOP leader within the Senate and stay there for eight years. In 1980, he ran for the party’s presidential nomination but was defeated by Ronald Reagan. He would serve as Reagan’s chief of staff in his final years.
The key turning points
John Dean, the former White House counsel began to read his 245-page testimony on June 25. Dean, who was the coordinator of the cover-up, took two days to read his testimony. Mo, his young wife, sat silently behind Dean, listening. The committee’s five other members, Ervin and Baker, listened. The nation listened.
Dean accused John Mitchell, who was the chairman of Nixon’s re-election campaign in the United States of allowing the Watergate break-in and other clandestine actions to disrupt and monitor the Democrats’ presidential nomination bid in 1972.
Even more remarkable was Dean’s calm testimony that Nixon orchestrated the cover up and directed the FBI to not investigate. Dean stated that he had spoken to Nixon about such issues not just once, but 35 times.
All of this was denied by Nixon. It was Nixon’s word against Dean’s. The second turning point came after that. Baker’s colleague Tennessean Fred Thompson learned from a White House document, that Nixon’s conversations at the Oval Office were being recorded by a taping system since early 1971. Secret Service kept the tapes under lock and keys.
The Watergate scandal would soon become a battle over the tapes. The tapes were requested by Elliot Richardson’s special prosecutor. Nixon refused to give the tapes, and Archibald Cox, the prosecutor, issued a subpoena. Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox but he refused and resigned. So did his deputy. The “Saturday Night Massacre”, also known as the “Saturday Night Massacre”, was over soon after the third-ranking Justice official Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in and fired Cox.
Bork also recommended Leon Jaworksi, a Democrats for-Nixon Texas attorney, as a replacement for Cox. Although he was thought to be a safe choice he proved to be extremely persistent in the case and brought indictments aEUR”, as well as naming Nixon unindicted coconspirator.
Disgraceful impeachment
The House Judiciary Committee took in all the proceedings and opened an impeachment investigation that would revisit much of the ground covered by Senate panel last summer. Articles of impeachment were issued after the House hearings. In July 1974, the Supreme Court heard the case and unanimously ruled that the tapes should be released. Nixon’s involvement in the cover-up was made painfully obvious by the “Smoking Gun”, tape. He resigned in August 8 after his Republican support for Congress fell.
Nixon’s Gallup Poll approval rating had risen to 68% since his second term began in January 1973. His standing had been eroded by the Watergate news trickle, and his Gallup was at 48% before the hearings started. This measure fell throughout the summer, reaching 31% in August 1973. He left office one year later and it topped out at 24%.
Evidently, the hearings played a part. Gallup received a remarkable 71% of respondents who said they had seen some of the hearings live. Only 31% believed Watergate was serious and not just politics before they started. A further 19% believed Nixon should be expelled from office because of it.
After the hearings, 53% believed it was serious and nearly twice as many people said Nixon should be fired. Further, 71% of respondents saw Nixon as guilty at least partially.
Nixon was not prosecuted as his successor, Gerald Ford, granted a blanket pardon during his second month in office. Nixon’s resignation is still the only voluntary exit from office.
Different crime at different times
The Jan. 6 committee’s current goals (sometimes called the J-1-6 committee or the 1-6 committee) are clearly very different. The committee is not as balanced between the parties as well as the regions as the Watergate panel, in large part because it was not set up in a spirit for cooperation among the parties.
Strong public support and bipartisan support for the idea of an independent investigation body, like the one that was established to investigate the 2001 terrorist attacks had led to strong bipartisan support in Congress. It was stopped by the Senate Republican filibuster. The GOP’s Senate leader Mitch McConnell called this a “purely political exercise”, which would neither learn anything new or promote healing aEUR. He added: “Frankly I don’t believe it is even intended to.”
The House created a separate committee that was initially to be led by Kevin McCarthy, the GOP House leader. McCarthy named potential members, who were expected to be investigated for their role in the Jan.6 events.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposed them and instead appointed two Republican members who voted for President Trump’s second impeachment. These are Reps. Liz Cheney from Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger from Illinois.
Another important difference is the refusal to testify by many witnesses, even when subpoenaed. The Justice Department indicted two of the people who refused to testify, Steven Bannon, a former Trump advisor (who left the White House in 2017), and Peter Navarro, a Trump trade economist, for contempt of Congress. Bannon will be tried in July.
The Justice Department announced on Saturday that two Trump men who refused to comply with subpoenas from a House committee have been exonerated. The two men are Mark Meadows, former Chief of Staff, and Dan Scavino, his former deputy. They were hoping that these two would provide some of the firsthand information about Oval Office conversations that Dean and later the tapes provided to the Watergate committee.
In the end, the charge of the House committee is different than its predecessor in that the president at the centre of the controversy has resigned. These proceedings should not be confused about the ultimate target. There are many people involved in the events that led up to the attack on Jan. 6, 2017. It all had to do keeping Trump in power.
Many Trump supporters believe that the Jan.6 committee was created to keep Trump from running for office. Navarro said that the investigation’s clear mission was to stop Donald John Trump running for presidency in 2024 and being elected President.
In May, The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll that found 52% believed Trump should face criminal charges for his involvement in the January 6th events. 42% disagreed. The Democrats supported charges at 88%, 56% and 11% respectively.
