Abstract
Did the great dismantling really begin with Richard M. Nixon and Watergate? Is it fair to put all or even most of the burden on one man and one scandal? Is it even possible for one man to define and embody his age, impose his personality on an era, infect the body politic? Could one man’s hatreds, resentments, and insecurities, strengths and weaknesses, strategic brilliance and petty retributions, really be, or become, those of a nation? The man is Richard Nixon, a “brilliant and tormented man struggling to force a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s.”1 Did he create or did he merely represent the fracturing of America? Were we—are we—Nixonland?
The past is not dead. It is not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
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Notes
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Schribner, 2008), xii.
David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (New York: Norton, 2003).
Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 52, 58.
Robert Sam Anson, Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984)
James C. Clark, Faded Glory: Presidents Out of Power (New York: Praeger, 1985), Chapter 28.
See: Bruce E. Altschuler, Acting Presidents: 100 Years of Plays about the Presidency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Daniel Frick, Reinventing Richard Nixon: The Cultural History of an American Obsession, Lawrence, (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 17.
Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
Michael A. Genovese, The Watergate Crisis (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).
Paul J. Quirk, “Coping with the Politics of Scandal,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 28 (Fall 1998): 898–902.
Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter, Politics by Other Means (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).
John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000)
Larry J. Sabato, Mark Stencel, and S. Robert Lutcher, Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield, 2001).
Suzanne Garment, Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics (New York; Anchor, 1992), 3.
Michael A. Genovese and Victoria Farrar-Myers, Corruption in American Politics (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2010).
James P. Pfiffner, Power Play: The Bush Presidency and the Constitution (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008)
Michael A. Genovese, Presidential Prerogative: Imperial Power in an Age of Terrorism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
John Dean, “The Nixon Shadow that Hovers Over the Bush White House,” History News Network, January 6, 2003
Bruce P. Montgomery, “Nixon’s Ghost Haunts the Presidential Records Act: The Reagan and George W. Bush Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 32 (Fall 2002): 789–809.
Richard P. Nathan, The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975)
Nathan, The Administrative Presidency (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983).
Charlie Savage, Takeover (Boston: Book Bay Books, 2008).
C. Vann Woodward, Responses of the President to Charges of Misconduct (New York: Dell, 1974), xxvi.
Henry Steel Commanger, “Watergate and the Schools,” in David C. Saffell, ed., American Government: Reform in the Post-Watergate Era (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1976), 6.
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© 2012 Michael A. Genovese and Iwan W. Morgan
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Genovese, M.A. (2012). The Long Legacy of Watergate. In: Genovese, M.A., Morgan, I.W. (eds) Watergate Remembered. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011985_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011985_10
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