Quotes & Sayings About Nixon Watergate

I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.' — Stephen Colbert

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate. — Robert Dallek

When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate, he actually pardoned Alexander Haig for the JFK assassination. — Tegan Mathis

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal. — Conrad Black

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes. — Bob Woodward

In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon's arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency. — Jeff Greenfield

The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal. — Bob Woodward

Nixon clearly broke the law in the cover up of Watergate and hush money payments. That was all criminal activity. With these guys, we're not talking about the kind of common crimes that Nixon committed. I can't tell you whether they are technically breaking the law, but basically, the American government has been hijacked by neoconservatives. They are taking an awful lot of national security operations into the White House. — Seymour Hersh

Well, let me make something perfectly clear (as Richard Nixon says on those old news clips about the Watergate scandal, right before he's about to fill the room with fog)I am not immortal. I've spent more than ten hours in the psych ward with Sarah Byrnes
really and truly the toughest person in our solar system
and I'll tell you what, if life can shoot Sarah Byrnes ot of the sky, it can nail me blindfolded. — Chris Crutcher

Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president. — Ronald Kessler

Nixon sent some no-account underling to tell us that he had done more for the American Indian than any predecessor and that he saw no reason for our coming to Washington, that he had more important things to do than to talk with us - presumably surreptitiously taping his visitors and planning Watergate. We wondered what all these good things were that he had done for us. — Mary Crow Dog

I can see clearly now ... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate. — Richard M. Nixon

Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions. — Stephen Ambrose

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job. — Richard M. Nixon

The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress. — Nigel Hamilton

Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling. — Tom Brokaw

It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality. — Richard M. Nixon

Back at the office, Woodward went to the rear of the newsroom to call Deep Throat. Bernstein wished he had a source like that. The only source he knew who had such comprehensive knowledge in any field was Mike Schwering, who owned Georgetown Cycle Sport Shop. There was nothing about bikes - and, more important, bike thieves - that Schwering didn't know. Bernstein knew something about bike thieves: the night of the Watergate indictments, somebody had stolen his 10-speed Raleigh from a parking garage. That was the difference between him and Woodward. Woodward went into a garage to find a source who could tell him what Nixon's men were up to. Bernstein walked into a garage to find an eight-pound chain cut neatly in two and his bike gone.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story? — Robert Redford

The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero. — Thomas Frank

In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H.R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman's words, "There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events...Just as Eisenhower linked up the nation's cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communication so you wouldn't have to go there." One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects. Fortunately the Watergate scandal intervened, and Nixon was forced to resign before "the Wired Nation" could be hooked up. — David Wallechinsky

Nixon had been to China. He had been to Russia doing arms negotiation. And so, he was on his way toward what happened in November, which was an electoral win with 49 states. And the sheer unnecessariness of the Watergate break-in is something that must have tormented him and his allies in all of the years that followed. — Thomas Mallon

Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency. — John Dean

Mr. Ford's decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency. — Scott Shane

I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power. — Henry A. Kissinger

Why does The Smartest Woman in the World [Hillary Clinton], who could carve her own career, who was on the Watergate committee - and got thrown off of it, by the way, for wanting to deny Richard Nixon his constitutional rights.How does a woman who has become a fixture in northeastern liberal politics find herself in the backwoods of Arkansas? — Rush Limbaugh

What was Watergate? A little bugging! — Richard M. Nixon

Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect. — Bob Woodward

In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. — Leonard Downie Jr.

I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it. I appreciate anybody who wants to tape me openly and notoriously, and those who feel like they want to sneakily, and wear taping devices, I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate. — Rod Blagojevich

HST: Wasn't there a Harris Poll that showed that only 3 percent of the electorate considered the Watergate thing important?
McGovern: Yeah. That's right. Mistakes that we made seemed to be much more costly. I don't know why, but they were. I felt it at the time, that we were being hurt by every mistake we made, whereas the most horrendous kind of things on the other side somehow seemed to--because, I suppose, of the great prestige of the White House, the President's shrewdness in not showing himself to the press or the public--they were able to get away with things that we got pounded for. — Hunter S. Thompson

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up. — Helen Thomas

Today we reject the notion of equality between a regime that belongs to the democratic world - even if it is conservative and disagreeable - and a totalitarian dictatorship, whether its colors are black, red, or green. This is why we will never again say that Chamberlain is no better than Hitler, Roosevelt no better than Stalin, and Nixon no better than Mao Zedong, even if we do condemn Roosevelt for Yalta, Chamberlain for Munich, and Nixon for Watergate. — Adam Michnik

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness ... towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment ... Ah ... Nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. — Hunter S. Thompson

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972. — Rick Perlstein

Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it. — Richard M. Nixon

No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency - a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect. — Richard M. Nixon

I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself. — Bob Woodward

Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it. — John Dean

I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America. — Tony Campolo

You have a good judicial system in the U.S., as you have learned from the Nixon-Watergate period. — Sean MacBride

He never really voice pure, raw outrage to me about Watergate or what it represented. The crimes and abuses were background music. Nixon was trying to subvert not only the law but the Bureau. So Watergate became Felt's instrument to reassert the Bureau's independence and thus its supremacy. In the end, the Bureau was damaged, seriously but not permanently, while Nixon lost much more, maybe everything - the presidency, power, and whatever moral authority he might have had. He was disgraced. But surviving and enduring his hidden life, in contrast and in his own way, Mark Felt won. — Bob Woodward

After the 1970s, when President Nixon's illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from. — Eric Schneiderman

When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell. — Richard Ben-Veniste

I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate. — M. Stanton Evans

Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater's apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II
and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation's sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions. — David Frum

Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses ... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon. — Archibald Cox

Talbott understood that Nixon's private hospitality and his public obsession with U.S.-Russian relations were part of an elaborate rehabilitation scheme, designed to blur lingering memories of Watergate while serving as a reminder of his own, widely praised foreign policy accomplishments when he was president. — Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

I'm just made differently. Man, I just love being an American, I love my country. But it happened to me during the Nixon time, especially pre-Watergate, that as I watched Nixon for the first time in my life I felt shame. I had to analyze myself. What is this emotion? I realized that my government was separate from my country. It was the first time I ever felt ashamed of the government, not the country. — John Fogerty

You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72. — Hunter S. Thompson

The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate. — Dexter Scott King