Well, that headline was easy to write. That's former President Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign slogan with a slight addition. Hillary Rodham (Clinton) once door-knocked for 37, but now, an entirely new generation of Nixon fans is springing up and giving the man his due. I'm not shocked.
But it is about time.
It's Nixon. pic.twitter.com/3RPg1GmBPo
— Richard Nixon Foundation (@nixonfoundation) July 9, 2026
Richard Nixon is best known for opening China for trade to the rest of the world. He personally negotiated arms treaties with the Soviets. His geopolitical game was to play these two giants off each other and keep America ascendant.
Domestically, Nixon was more liberal. was He the guy who signed or pushed for legislation that stopped the military draft and, after Milton Friedman convinced him, went to an all-volunteer military. He got America out of Vietnam, called it Peace With Honor, only to see the Democrat Congress renege on its promise to fund the anti-communists. The country fell. The Killing Fields commenced. The term "Boat People" became a part of the lexicon. Nixon brought back the POWs.
Nixon dropped the voting age to 18. He blessed Title IX.
Perhaps his worst moves were economic. He took the country off the gold standard to a floating currency, and said that his experiment with wage and price controls for 90 days to stop the uptick of inflation was something he regretted.
But of course, aside from his triumphs, Nixon was Watergate. And this is where we are beginning to see, not a crack, but a big fissure from whence the truth about this scandal is coming out.
Nixon will be vindicated, been saying it for years https://t.co/o7wTAPHa9x
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@christopherrufo) July 9, 2026
I became a sentient person during the Watergate era. As a young school kid, I watched the Watergate hearings as summertime entertainment. Understand, I was abnormal in this regard. Yours truly also pretended to be a TV Meet the Press host, an educational station "teacher" using my parents' college textbooks (think Bob Ross as a kid but with a book instead of a paint bush), and I was a cooking guru. I was a weird kid. If my parents were still above the sod, they'd tell you so, bless 'em.
But I knew one thing. Nixon was a big MEANIE, I reckoned with my child-sized unformed frontal cortex. He had a five o'clock shadow in those flickering Kennedy-Nixon 1960 TV recorded debates. Shifty eyes. They called him Tricky Dick, after all. He was a bad man, obviously.
By the time I was a senior in high school, years later, however, I told a local reporter (don't ask why I was talking to a local reporter as a senior know-nothing) something that seems smart in retrospect, "Heck, I don't even know what I think about Watergate yet."
It's a good thing I hadn't made up my mind yet, because later on, I'd learn perhaps more than I ever wanted to know about this stuff. In fact, I'd become a volunteer at his presidential library, because it sounded fun, and I had some free time. I learned more.
It was at a lecture there that I heard Geoff Shepard. He was a young Nixon White House lawyer whose later job was to transcribe Nixon's secret tapes. He was the one who thought he heard smoking gun evidence of Nixon's guilt on the tapes, only to put the pieces together years later and realize he was wrong. In his book The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, he painstakingly details the flawed and outrageous legal gamesmanship that the Watergate committees played, and Judge John Sirica's illegal antics. Lore says Sirica pushed for the truth to get to the public. Sirica was pushing narratives.
It's believed that the current and former CIA spooks working in the Nixon universe were doing so to give their illegal operations the imprimatur of the White House, so they could claim it was a national security issue if they were ever caught. This would make their domestic spying legally palatable.
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And there was that CIA mole in Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP). James McCord was the guy who bought the bugs to allegedly plant at the DNC and a nearby building. He bought the bugs that were capable of being uploaded to satellites on a hush-hush frequency that the Pentagon used for Vietnam communications. Those bugs weren't for Nixon; they were for a CIA op looking into the sexual habits and other insights into whomever was using a nearby bordello. Democrats often made reservations through the DNC, either from the office or through the secretary.
This was the same CIA that ran the drug tests on unknowing people in MK Ultra, and ran a brothel in San Francisco; the spooks watched in an effort to learn human behavior and when the best time was to get information out of someone.
Most of the Watergate burglars, including McCord, had ties to the CIA and the Bay of Pigs operation; one was still on the payroll of the spy agency.
On page 371 of Legacy of Ashes, a highly regarded book about the history of the CIA, Director Richard Helms picks up the phone when he's told the Watergate burglars who had ties to his outfit have been busted. Helms dials L. Patrick Gray, the acting head of the FBI after the death of J. Edgar Hoover.
Helms told Gray very carefully that the Watergate burglars had been hired by the White House and the CIA had nothing to do with it. Got that? Okay, good night then.
Later, Nixon would admit that he'd planned to "gut" the CIA and get rid of Helms, and that the top spy knew it. Nixon did fire Helms, but made him ambassador to Iran. Still, one phone call from Helms admitting it was their op would have gotten Nixon off the hook. He had a motive to get Nixon and let him hang. He let Nixon hang.
Before he left, however, Helms shredded reams of documents and tapes, including the MK Ultra experiments. CIA employees' eyes were streaming with tears when he crossed the seal as director for the last time.
That's just a taste of the skullduggery going on at the CIA, but the Nixon White House also had to contend with the spying Joint Chiefs of Staff. The chairman tasked a Navy yeoman to spy with impunity on Nixon's National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's burn bag and diplomatic pouches.
This explains Henry Kissinger's secret diplomacy with the Vietnamese.
The CIA and the Pentagon were engaging in so much spycraft in the Nixon universe that it was a full-on goat rodeo.
It reminds me of Donald Trump 45's administration, with all the spies and deep staters who tried to set him up — including Russian spies from the local liberal think tank. Eric Ciaramella, anyone?
But I digress.
Or do I?
This is the kind of thing Chuck Schumer meant when he said, “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
I explain what Chuck Schumer meant by this in an upcoming story on @PJMedia_com pic.twitter.com/7Tn8vnbsGw
— Victoria Taft, The Adult in the Room, FITF Squad (@VictoriaTaft) July 11, 2026
And then there was the press coverage that would change the craft of journalism for worse.
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Bob Woodward, a former Navy intelligence officer who was friends with the FBI's Mark Felt, the man we learn was the secret source they dubbed Deep Throat, and Carl Bernstein were directed in their smear campaign to divert attention away from the CIA angle of the story, and toward the White House. This compendium of award-winning stories comprised received wisdom from a disgruntled FBI seventh floor exec, and off-the-record intel from another three-letter agency that ran a "PR agency." The Washington Post shared the same counsel with the Democratic National Committee. Somebody was covering for someone, and that someone was not Richard Nixon.
In all of "Woodstein's" Watergate reportage, there would be only one mention of the CIA, and that was at the beginning, when Bob Woodward was in the courtroom and learned that the Watergate burglars had CIA ties, according to John O'Connor, the author of Postgate: How the Washington Post betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Secrets of Watergate: What Really Happened.
The story of Watergate, therefore, was only partially told. Nixon wasn't a saint, but most presidents aren't. Other newspapers told some of the CIA story, but the white light of the Washington Post eclipsed their coverage.
Ah, but what does that former federal prosecutor know? He was only Deep Throat's attorney. O'Connor watched Woodward's effort to clean up their reportorial messes and to keep Deep Throat quiet led to a phony book deal that was a catch-and-kill caper, so that Woodward could continue lying about Watergate, in his opinion. He contends that Woodward, the former intel officer, "breach[ed] all of his protective promises to [Deep Throat] [and] knew where many of the bodies were buried about the Post's suppression of the story involving the CIA ..."
The former federal prosecutor writes in his Final Argument section of Postgate how the Post blew the coverage and worse: "The facts presented here also support the continuation by the Post of this cover-up through the present, with consciousness of guilt shown by all involved." He continues, "The Post was as highly motivated to take down the hated Nixon as it was to protect its beloved ideological brother, the DNC."
It's time we revisit this entire issue as a nation.
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