Hugh Hewitt: The Real Story Of ‘The Most Famous Political Scandal’ In U.S. History

In the latest 5-minute video for PragerU, radio host and columnist Hugh Hewitt breaks down the real and little-known history of Watergate, the most famous political scandal in U.S. history. 

Even though many people know Watergate involved an illegal break-in, says Hewitt, if you were to ask most any person to try and explain the scandal, they’d likely draw a blank. But what most people don’t know, he argues, is that Watergate was “first and foremost” part of a political war between a Republican president and the mainstream media. 

Hewitt offers three reasons for why the media had it out for President Richard Nixon: The elites despised him, and the Washington, D.C., press corps were members of the elite; Nixon was a staunch anti-communist at a time media types believed the communism threat was “overblown”; and Nixon refused to abandon South Vietnam in the war against communism at a time when media types were anti-war. 

So why did the Watergate scandal blow up the way that it did? Hewitt argues that had Nixon’s people simply owned up to its role in the scandal, the whole ordeal may have just blown over. But because Nixon failed to mount an effective response, the scandal grew from minor to major. 

“Three men made sure of that,” argues Hewitt. “A publicity-seeking judge” named John Sirica, a “vengeful” FBI official named Mark Felt, and “a partisan special prosecutor” named Archibald Cox. 

“Suspecting a vast conspiracy, Sirica threatened the burglars with lifetime prison sentences if they didn’t rat out the people who authorized the crime,” says Hewitt. 

Meanwhile, the FBI official “thought that he deserved to become head of the FBI” and started leaking tips to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward after Nixon overlooked him for the position. “Meeting secretly, he told them where to look and what questions to ask. Without him, the duo would have gotten nowhere,” Hewitt says. 

“With Sirica applying pressure from the bench and Felt from inside the FBI, the White House defenses began to weaken, then crack, and then shatter,” says Hewitt. Then once Cox appointed Democratic lawyers to investigate the Nixon administration, the president effectively found himself in political quicksand from which he could not escape. 

“When it emerged that many of Nixon’s private conversations were recorded, his fate was sealed. Citing executive privilege, he tried to keep the tapes from Sirica and Congress. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled against the president,” he says. 

Less than a month later, Nixon resigned — the only U.S. president to ever do so.

“The media had its victory, and a newfound sense of power. The country has not been the same since,” says Hewitt. 

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