A funny thing happened on the way to ranking the four big presidential scandals of our time: Former Nixon staffers in O.C. said Watergate wasn’t Nixon’s scandal after all, and he was actually the first victim of “lawfare,” and that our understanding of history is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Oh, we got quite an inbox-earful from Ken Khachigian, longtime aide to Nixon, and Bob Bostock, who did the original (booster-y?) Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Museum, before it was part of the presidential library system. “The conventional wisdom about Watergate has, over the past 50 years, increasingly been proven to be wrong in virtually every particular,” Khachigian told me.

Nixon had nothing to do with the break-in and knew nothing about it. The cover-up is in dispute. And the “smoking gun tape” — where it sure sounds like Nixon ordered the FBI to abandon its investigation of the Watergate break-in, which led directly to his resignation — was misread and is not what everyone thinks, they said.

The men cite Geoff Shepard’s book, “The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President,” and assert that Nixon was the first victim of “lawfare” in the United States. The real Watergate conspiracy, in their view, was a corrupt “Deep State-big media alliance” wherein Democrats wrongly brought down a Republican president.

Shepard was an attorney on Nixon’s Watergate defense team and based his book on four caches of internal prosecutorial documents that surfaced fairly recently. Those documents include descriptions of prosecutors’ meetings with Watergate judges and what Shepard calls their “suppression of exculpatory evidence.”

There were also harsh words for the author of the current (critical?) Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Museum, Timothy Naftali, who Khachigian asserted “had a true axe to grind when it came to Nixon.”

Nixon loyalists were angry that they couldn’t keep their “shrine” to the late president, critics have charged.

Not a ‘gotcha’ exhibit

Naftali, the exhibit’s author, is a Canadian American presidential scholar with rather solid credentials: degrees from Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins. Historical consultant to the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Government Records Interagency Working Group. Consultant to the 9/11 Commission. Public policy professor at New York University and Columbia University.

He was appointed director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in 2007, after control was transferred from the cheerleading Richard Nixon Foundation and to the nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration. Naftali’s most formidable task: Present a more objective and unbiased picture of the Watergate scandal.

“The original display argued that Watergate was an effort by the Democrats to overturn the electoral results in 1972,” Naftali told the Register in 2011.

The Nixon Foundation was not pleased. “When libraries first open they strongly reflect the point of view and perspective of the president whom they honor and whose supporters and friends have financed the creation of the facility,” the Foundation said in a 158-page memo to the National Archives about the new draft exhibit. “That was certainly true of the Nixon Library and its treatment of Watergate when it opened. It is also true of the Clinton Library, which still treats President Clinton’s impeachment as driven by raw politics and does not, in any meaningful way, acknowledge President Clinton’s own failings that led to his impeachment….

“We believe that the overall impression the exhibit leaves is that President Nixon and members of his White House staff committed a broad series of unprecedented acts in violation of the law, people’s civil rights, and the Constitution, and that they acted without any possible justification, precedent, or reason – save their own deep seated and unwarranted paranoia about imagined enemies and conspiracies against them. By failing to include any information about acts of a similar nature undertaken by previous presidents and their administrations; by neglecting to put into historical context the times in which Watergate unfolded; by not including any of the explanations offered by the President for various actions; and, by using ‘snippets’ of oral histories to support its interpretive point of view, the draft exhibit fails to give visitors the information they need to reach their own conclusions.”

Naftali remembers it all too well. It’s not a “gotcha” exhibit, he said.

“Yes, I wrote it, but it wasn’t one person’s version of history. It went through an independent panel at the National Archives in D.C. After that, it was shared with the Nixon Foundation, and they wrote a 100-plus-page rebuttal, and I responded to that. When we were at the proof stage of the exhibit, my boss showed it to Geoff Shepard (the ‘Conspiracy’ book’s author), and I had to defend every sentence again. And I did.

“The National Archives had an obligation, because of the records that it keeps for the American people, not to have anything up on the wall that was contradicted by evidence. It’s full of data. If anything, it’s sort of text-heavy. I take responsibility for that — the data had to be there. You can listen to the president say these things. And we put the evidence online — please tell your readers that.” (Memos, video, etc. are at www.nixonlibrary.gov/watergate-exhibit-evidence).

The new Watergate exhibit debuted in 2011 and attracted nationwide attention (though none of the Nixon Foundation’s board members attended the opening). The New York Times called it a “searing and often unforgiving account of one of the most painful chapters of the nation’s history,” drawing on some of the 2,700 hours of secret tapes Nixon recorded in the Oval Office.

“With the push of a button, in a technology that Mr. Naftali likened to an iPad, a visitor can hear Nixon in incriminating conversations with associates in the Oval Office. His words scrawl along in text to help listeners decipher the often scratchy recordings,” the Times wrote.

The exhibit also used 131 oral interviews with critical figures in the Nixon presidency. In one, erstwhile Nixon chief of staff Alexander Haig said that Nixon asked him to burn the tapes — and that Haig refused. In another, George P. Shultz, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, said Nixon asked him to help gather information on his political enemies — and that Shultz refused.

‘Abuse of power’

“The point of the exhibit was to present our visitors — in person and to some extent online — with evidence about abuse of power and efforts to cover that up and the way in which the system responded,” Naftali said. “I know Geoff Shepard has real criticisms about how the system responded. I don’t dismiss the arguments about ‘lawfare.’ It’s significant for those who study legal history. But it doesn’t resolve the issue of the president’s actions.”

The tragedy of the Nixon presidency, Naftali has told us, is that a man capable of opening the door to China, of embracing fairer treatment for Native Americans, of working with Congress to create our nation’s strongest environmental laws, also carried within him a darkness that made him a danger to the U.S. presidency.

“Nixon did something that is inexcusable — he used the power of the presidency to hurt American citizens,” he told us in 2022. “He allowed thugs to break legs of anti-war demonstrators, wanted people arrested on trumped-up charges, had lists of people to be audited by the IRS because they opposed him politically. When presidents do that, they are a threat to the U.S. Constitution and shouldn’t be in office,” Naftali said.

Did Nixon personally know about the Watergate break-in before it happened? Perhaps not. But his re-election folks did.

Did he try to cover their tracks and use the powers of government against his perceived enemies? That’s rather well-documented.

Was there prosecutorial misconduct attendant to Nixon after investigations began? That may well be the case.

But does any of that absolve Nixon of the judgment of history and make him the true victim of Watergate?

No, it does not. “That evidence is as startling and dramatic and fresh as it’s ever been,” Naftali said. “The American people have a right to know about it.”