In an important article in The American Spectator, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich concludes that the conventional version of Watergate is wrong. Instead of being a morality play on the supposed sins of President Richard Nixon, Watergate at its essence was a liberal media-Democratic Party-bureaucratic putsch to remove a popular president from office—and it worked. Gingrich sees similarities in Watergate and more recent attempts to drive President Trump from office and later to prevent Trump from winning a second term. But at a deeper level, Gingrich’s article should remind us that “history” and the “truth” are not always what we have been spoon fed by historians, the media, and our teachers. To borrow from the title of Victor Lasky’s book, “it didn’t start with Watergate.”
Donald Trump’s greatest “sin” has been to expose our cultural elites for who they really are.
Gingrich is not the first to question the conventional wisdom about Watergate—Paul Johnson, Jim Hougan, Len Colodny, and Robert Gettlin, and more recently Geoff Shepard—have pierced the veil of the accepted narrative. Watergate has been sold to us as a shining example of the proposition that no person—not even the president—is above the law. It is nothing of the sort. It was instead a vehicle used to remove a popular Republican president who was hated by many elite Democrats and our nation’s intelligentsia and cultural elite—and some of that hatred stemmed from Nixon’s role in unmasking Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who had clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and served in high positions in FDR’s administration during the New Deal and World War II. But there are other accepted narratives that also deserve piercing. Here are just a few examples.
The accepted narrative on McCarthy is that in the 1950s he falsely accused American citizens of being communists or sympathizing with communism, creating a climate of fear—a “Red Scare”—that terrorized innocent Americans. McCarthy has been implicated, for example, in the “abuse” of the so-called “Hollywood Ten” (all of whom were communists or communist sympathizers) even though it was the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), not Senator McCarthy, that leveled those charges in 1947. Liberals frequently conflate HUAC’s work with McCarthy’s (who as a Senator was not a member of that committee), but for their narrative details don’t matter—it was all “McCarthyism.”
Democrats … mostly and successfully opposed every proposed piece of civil rights legislation until the mid-1960s.
“McCarthyism” was, as James Burnham wrote at the time, an invention of the communists to wield as a rhetorical sword against anyone who provided information about communist infiltration of the government and other institutions. National Review’s William Rusher, who served as associate counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1956-57, noted that in the 1930s and 1940s, “Communists were represented abundantly (but almost always silently and invisibly) in the U.S. government,” just as McCarthy said. M. Stanton Evans’ meticulously researched book Blacklisted by History set the record straight about the truth behind most, if not all, of McCarthy’s accusations. Diana West in American Betrayal likewise shows that communist infiltration of our government was even greater than McCarthy alleged. Even Nicholas von Hoffman—no right-winger—had to admit after the Venona intercepts revealed significant communist infiltration of the FDR and Truman administrations that “Joe McCarthy … was … closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.”
Americans have been educated to believe that President Franklin Roosevelt was a “great” war leader who led the world’s democracies to victory over fascism. Often forgotten in this narrative is that Roosevelt left the country woefully unprepared for war throughout the 1930s, despite the repeated urging of then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur and others. Also left out of the narrative is FDR’s likely unconstitutional actions in moving the United States to belligerent status prior to Congress’ declaration of war after the attack at Pearl Harbor—actions that set precedents for future presidents to commit this nation to war by unconstitutional means. Finally, FDR’s end-of-the-war diplomacy set the stage for the Cold War in what Robert Nisbet characterized as Roosevelt’s “failed courtship” of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
The accepted narrative here is that President Harry Truman prevented World War III from breaking out by firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was insubordinate and threatened civilian control of the military during the Korean War. But as Arthur Herman noted in his recent biography of the general, MacArthur never disobeyed a direct order, though he did complain to others about the tactical restraints imposed upon U.S. and UN military forces after Chinese forces massively entered the war in October-November 1950. And while MacArthur privately recommended the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea, Truman publicly threatened their use—which action posed a greater threat of World War III? The Truman administration authorized U.S. forces to cross the 38th parallel, and Defense Secretary George Marshall told MacArthur to feel “unhampered strategically and tactically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.” After Inchon, Truman basked in MacArthur’s success, but when MacArthur rightly advised Truman that China’s intervention had produced an entirely new war Truman balked at measures MacArthur recommended to win that war. When Truman fired MacArthur, the general did not attempt to remain in his position. Instead, the “old soldier” dutifully accepted Truman’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and retired from the army. MacArthur never questioned Truman’s right to fire him.
It is nothing short of remarkable that the Democratic Party is known as the party of civil rights for black Americans. Not only were Democrats the party of slavery and the party of Jim Crow laws, but they mostly and successfully opposed every proposed piece of civil rights legislation until the mid-1960s when President Lyndon Johnson persuaded some of his fellow Democrats in Congress to support the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Neither law would have been passed without Republican support, and Johnson himself spent most of his legislative career opposing civil rights (including anti-lynching legislation) for black Americans. The Democrats’ history here is brilliantly told by author Robert Caro in his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.
When you control the narrative of history and are positioned to “cancel” or ridicule those who challenge the narrative, you are able to effectively subvert history, to use Diana West’s term. The left infiltrated and took control of our country’s institutions—the elite media, the schools, the entertainment industry—some time ago. They have used it for their own purposes, including political purposes.
Donald Trump’s greatest “sin” has been to expose our cultural elites for who they really are and open the eyes and ears of a substantial portion of the American public that formerly held those elites and their institutions in high regard. The Iowa Caucus results proves this. Our elites may still prevent Trump’s election as president in 2024, but they will never again have the trust of a large segment of the American populace. That is what happens when you subvert history.
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