with President Richard Nixon's election in 1968 as we discussed he claimed that he represented the silent majority now all of this also meant that he was reversing the trend of reform that had started and and had an increasingly conservative mindset that has actually to the continued to this this point nearly fifty nearly or or over forty years later of course that doesn't mean that he did nothing and and some of the things that he did is president and we're just we talked about his foreign policy which was you know there was some obviously problems with the way he pulled out of Vietnam but the Paris Peace Accords I'm sorry the the date aunt was a resounding success the opening of China was a resounding success and in domestic policy he had a pretty important success as well and that was the creation of the EPA the Environmental Protection Agency he so the fact that he was curtailing rights and reform doesn't mean that he did nothing and and this is a particularly good example in fact he created a highly active regulatory body that is controversial today amongst conservatives which is the EPA is conservative controversial today most conservatives because you know the mantra was be that is that there's too much regulation and the EPA has said such an amazing job that it looks like we don't need it anymore but as soon as you take away the EPA those problems are going to return and start to return so this was created in response to the terrible illusion that the u.s. suffered under the US had suffer under the the last you know close to a little under a hundred years I mean the people had died in New York City because when shifted in the pollution lingered in the city and and look big cities like New York and Chicago rely on the winds to keep the air fresh and between all of those giant buildings we also talked you know we're actually dealing with a problem we talked about back in unit one with the impacts of industrialization with the environment with the pollution we talked about the kiyah River catching on fire well we're finally getting around to actually fixing that with the APA it had caught fire in 1969 and that was the 13th time that it had done that so Nixon created a federal agency dedicated to ensuring that industry was not causing direct and overt harm to the environment of course as with any agency they sometimes go too far but preventing rivers from catching fire is a worthy cause I think we can all agree on that no okay it does go overboard sometimes but the it exists for a reason and it's been amazingly successful that's really the big regulation for Nixon on the domestic policy side he's going to run for re-election in 1972 and the Democratic Party has still not recovered from 1968 they still had not recovered from the Vietnam War and everything that we had talked about and so they get absolutely crushed here as you see the Democrats won the state of Massachusetts and Washington DC and that's it and yet this is still not the most lopsided victory in American history good Massachusetts and DC were still 17 votes we'll get to that that's in the 80s so Nixon even the popular vote was 60% in the popular vote is it does not happen often so Nixon absolutely destroys his Republican challenger here but essentially his entire second term or what he serves of a second term was dominated by the Watergate scandal look for all of the good things that Nixon did hit the Watergate scandal and his own natural corrupt tendencies overshadow all of it and rightfully so if he hadn't been such a corrupt surely a you know person he'd you know be go down as one of the better presidents we've ever had but unfortunately I guess unfortunately that's not the case I guess an unfortunate because we had to go through the Watergate scandal what happened here is that during uh in the late summer of 1972 before the the actual election five men broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC and why would they break into a hotel well that's where the Democratic National Convention was located their headquarters so those five men were under orders from Nixon's official re-election committee to wiretap the the the phones and the democratics the Democratic HQ that re-election committee was called the committee for the re-election of the President which has probably the most fitting acronym of any event of all time Nixon's re-election committee the committee for the re-election of the President was creep you see creep creep creep yeah that was the that was his actual now they called it the CRP but most people call it the creep and called him you know well it's Nixon so they they're ordered by a couple of men who were part of this committee to break into the Watergate Hotel and wiretap the Democratic National Headquarters off office and phones how did this go wrong for them well one of the doors that they had to go in and out of they had to was one that locked automatically and they couldn't unlock it and so what they did was they put duct tape over the latch so that when the door would shut it wouldn't actually lock it would stay unlocked well security guard walks by sees the duct tape on the door and says well that's weird he pulls the tape off shuts the door goes around doesn't it around he comes back and it tapes back so he calls the police and says hey something's going on I think somebody's broken in and it's on the floor where the Democratic National Headquarters is can you send somebody over and so they did and so they sent over the the nearest unit which was actually a couple of plainclothes officers so they showed up in a nondescript car wearing a quote-unquote hippie attire and they go into the building and and unfortunately for the five men they they had a lookout but he was too busy watching TV to notice that they had shown up and so by the time he did realize that they had shown up and that they were officers it was way too late and though the five men will be arrested and they'll be charged with breaking and entering and they got busted because of duct tape and because of television and so obviously they were very bad at this and there was there was all kinds of things that was found on them lockpicks wiretap about 2,300 dollars in cash $23 at that time it'd be probably close to the 30 or 40 grand today if not more so pretty much so those vive men and will be convicted of breaking and entering but as the investigations were going on the investigators kept finding ties back to creep and the judge in particular just looking at the situation and and you know they eventually tied mostly actually through that money or money in general they tied all five men in different ways back to creep and so the judge himself basically went to the investigators and said you know when this is done there's something else here you know it's it's a jury trial so he wasn't you know he didn't influence the case or it wasn't one of those things and so they start looking into creep and and and then from that point starting in late 1972 and the the this is already a scandal that was growing but it's only gonna escalate from that point forward eventually you know under further investigation they're gonna find more and more links now where does Nixon come in well Nixon himself did not know anything about the break-in as far as every bit of evidence we've been ever able to find Nixon did not know about the breakout break-in ahead of time he found out as they were busted and immediately Nixon starts working on covering it up so he didn't order the break-in he didn't commit the crime itself his problem what got him busted was trying to cover it up and that's what he's going to do he's going to basically hold a couple of meetings with the two men from creep who were also some of his most trusted advisors he's gonna hold meetings with them and discuss what to do about this and he's gonna start working on covering it up and that would be a crime into itself obstruction of justice at one point and very early on when he had found out he made a comment obviously privately but he he welcome back to the recording in a second basically saying that he didn't have enough control over the FBI to stop the investigation so one of those advisors suggested that they call in the head of the CIA to convince or coerce the FBI to stop their investigations and the head of the CIA's response was I can't really do that but I'll just do my job which is basically to make sure the investigation didn't have any threats to national security but don't you think the CIA probably held on to that information of course they did that's what they do their intelligence gathering or I guess in this case the lack of intelligence gathering and that right there is obstruction of justice [Music] now how do we know that he said these things well he had his own office bugged and wiretapped was set for recording that wasn't something he had necessarily done before but when he won his election and moved into the White House the outgoing President Lyndon Johnson convinced Nixon that that was the right thing to do to have his office constantly recording so that he could go back and listen to conversations or perhaps use those conversations against people when it came time to push legislation hey we talked about Johnson he wasn't exactly the most savory of characters so all of this is being recorded and and Nixon initially denied that there was anything and some of the early some of the early reports of and some of his early responses when asked about it very again very clearly indicate he had no idea about it one of the tapes when he was informed of the of the break-in and that the men had been caught and he'd been apprised of the situation his initial response was and I quote what ordered that so his first question was who the hell ordered this obviously never thinking that the tapes are going to be made public so he tries to distance himself but he also went out and made statements about how investigations are being committed by individuals and his White House staff or his advisors when those weren't being done he was straight up lying to the American people so they technically could have gotten him if he considered the President to always be under oath they could technically could have gotten him for perjury and this is only going to continue to escalate and there's going to be a lot of invent a journalist who were going to investigate this as well it was particularly to reporters from the Washington Post the last names are Bernstein and Woodward and Bob Woodward in particular I mean both him did amazing work but Woodward was been in the news again in 2018 because he wrote the book fear on the trouble administration Woodward is one of those individuals that if he reports on something it happened that's not there's not the question there's no question of sources another question of credibility if Bob Woodward is confident enough and has the sources to say something happened it happened that's just who he is and that's his reputation and that is his history going all the way back to Watergate so you know these reporters are going in and investigating more and finding more and they have sources than the government I mentioned the FBI will get to the point where they will appoint a special counsel to do a to investigate the Watergate situation and this will escalate to the point where in October of 1973 we have something called the Saturday night massacre basically Nixon will order the Attorney General who was the head of the FBI to fire that independent special prosecutor and his attorney general refused so Nick and when Nixon tried to pressure him on it the the AG the Attorney General resigned so Nixon went to the second-in-command the the Deputy Attorney General in ordered him to fire the Special Counsel and in the investigation and the Deputy Attorney General resigned same night then he gets to the third in command the Justice Department's Solicitor General a man named Robert Bork bo RK and orders him to fire the special prosecutor and port considered resigning but he went ahead and followed through with the order anyway and then I believe he resigned as well after that but he did at least at the very least he dismissed the Special Counsel so in one night the Attorney General the Deputy Attorney General and the SPECIAL were resigned and then the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal was fired in one evening so that's why it's called the Saturday night massacre it's also why in the the Muller investigation why there's such a close watch and such a interest in whether or not President Trump has ordered his Attorney General first sessions and and I don't remember who he put in after that to to fire Muller because that's exactly what Nixon did and when Nixon did this he lost a ton of public support because that makes you look guilty as hell if you're firing the people who are doing the special investigation into you and to your administration because you want the we wanted to go away I mean the only people who want an investigation to go away are people who are guilty if you're innocent you want that investigation that happened so you can clear your name but someone who's guilty is like no no just just it doesn't even need to happen just get rid of it well no if you're innocent you want that investigation to show that you're that you're innocent but you know Nixon of course thought he was above the law and so it caused a pretty big uproar and this is only going to keep escalating to the point where the FBI and Congress will discover that Nixon has his office wiretapped and so they're gonna demand that those tapes be released to them so they can listen to them and see what he said in conversations with with the different officials and Nixon at first is going to refuse and say that it's executive privilege the Congress can order him to do this there's actually a Supreme Court case over this and Nixon is is ordered to turn over the tapes and and what they did was they edited them now what they edited out for the most part was the use of language because Nixon was not in the use of his language and his tone was nowhere near diplomatic you know we we all know somebody who curses excessively Nixon was very much that the people around him were very much that and if you listen to the tapes it almost sounds like he hates the United States some of the quotes about people who have listened to the tapes or read the transcripts more potato specifically when people are reading the transcripts you know his true character comes out because it's just him and his advisers he's not putting on the show for the cameras anymore and and some of so a lot of it even if they put an expletive deleted it was still pretty clear what was being said his tone still came through and at one point they released some of the tapes and a transcript of which there was a 18 minute section missing and when asked about it they said that it had been erased that his secretary accidentally erasing which he picked up the phone the the the you had a recording machine and there was some it was actually like foot pedals to change stuff over and she claimed that as part of that she accidentally erased the tapes instead of recording the phone call but later like testing of her setup showed that there was literally no you know it's almost impossible for that to happen and that the the tape itself was actually deleted or erased in five different segments over a period of time and that but that investigation wasn't done until 2003 so the transcripts come out and then eventually the tapes themselves come out and amongst these tapes are discussions pretty early on in this whole process where Nixon does the whole bit about ordering the CIA to get involved and they also talk about the the advisers he's talking to were the ones from creep they talk about the the money trail and how the men are being the the men who broke in were being leaked or I'm sorry linked to creep via money and then one particular tape came out and in August of 1974 that very early August 1974 that was it was called The Smoking Gun and basically it's where he's very Nixon very specifically that were that bit with the CIA and the FBI was there were there were members of Congress who didn't want to bring forth impeachment charges if there wasn't a actual specific crime that's obstruction of justice and so basically when that smoking gun tape came out he lost all support in Congress he lost a lot of public support though even when he resigned he still had a 40 percent approval rating amongst Republicans the dudes up there committing crimes and covering up government break-ins and still had a 40 percent of approval rating amongst his own party we love our political tribalism in this country so with all of this going on Nixon is facing impeachment now impeachment is not removal from office it's it's part of a process to remove somebody from office if Congress believes the president has committed a crime they do investigations and then if they decide to bring charges against the president is what is impeachment if the House of Representatives in particular the House of Representatives charges the president with a crime officially charged them with a crime those are called articles of impeachment then once you have been charged with a crime you get a trial and that trial would would be done by the Senate and if the Senate convicts you of those charges and crimes or crimes then you are removed from office we have had two presidents who were impeached Andrew Johnson in the 1860s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s why not Nixon because he resigned first a few days after the release of The Smoking Gun tapes Nixon August 1974 well resigned and he claimed and he followed through on this till the day he died that he had done nothing wrong he had done nothing illegal so now that he's gone the next person up should be his vice president but the man who got elected with him in 68 and re-elected with him in 72 was not his vice president anymore now the the man who I was just referencing was Spiro Agnew or if you're like me and you're a fan of Futurama the headless body of Spiro Agnew but Agnew had resigned a couple years before I'm sorry the year before in 73 four completely different corruption charges in this case I believe it was tax evasion or some kind of tax fraud so in the midst of the Watergate scandal Nixon appoints a new vice president and that was Gerald Ford he had been the house Minority Leader so he is appointed vice president in 1973 so when Nixon resigns in 74 it is Gerald Ford who becomes president and Ford is to this day the only person the only man the only person to become president without having been elected as or vice president because he was elected to Congress and then Nixon appointed him you've had presidents die in office and be replaced but the vice presidents who replaced them had been elected to that position so Ford is the only person to serve as president who was elected as neither president nor vice president will talk about Ford here shortly but the the ultimate tragedy of all of this is that why why was all of this done why was the break-in done it was done to wiretap those phones and offices well why would the Nixon administration why would rather creep want to do this well they wanted to do this so they could figure out what the Democrats were gonna do in the election so they could listen in and hear their strategies but we talked about the 1972 election that was the result there was literally no need for any of this this is the results of the of the 1972 election now before Nixon was implicitly implicated but the scandal was going on this is what it looked like when the Watergate scandal had already started to break there's literally no reason for them to do this but Nixon's own fostering of corruption of hubris of lack of ethics morality bred these situations where they believed they needed to do this no matter what and look elections are funny things but there was no way they were gonna lose this and polling had shown that McGovern was no nowhere close to Nixon in the polls so that's perhaps the first tragedy of the Watergate scandal the second tragedy is that now every other scandal has gate at the end Watergate deflategate Spygate gamergate I can't wait until we have a problem with gates and fences so we can call it gate gate and then we can have a scandal about the scandal about fences that we can call gate gate gate and so on and so forth I'm so tired of scandals being called gate there's something different please but ultimately this whole Watergate scandal is such a great picture by the way really really reduced and damaged the public's trust in government and their belief in good government you know what what franklin roosevelt had built up as part of the New Deal and recovered from the Great Depression the Vietnam scandal and the Tet Offensive had started to erode and I wrote it quite a bit the Watergate scandal demolishes it completely and we have not returned to the same level of trust and that we have in our government as Americans that we had before Watergate and we will likely never get there again and I say that even from some of the best times that highest levels of support after Watergate were nowhere near what it was before so that's Nixon's administration that is the Watergate scandal what we will pick up next is to finish off domestic policy with presidents Ford Carter and Reagan