‘History will treat me fairly, historians probably won’t’: Notes on the historiography of Watergate and suchlike political disasters

Abstract

The Watergate scandal looms over perceptions of all modern political disasters, contributing to conspiracy having become seen as typical political behaviour. It has also had an evolving impact on the United States, including its use in ongoing culture wars and place in fundamental changes in the culture of the Republican Party. Although academic historians have tended to minimise the personal and contingent causes of this scandal in favour of supposedly deeper historical origins, much of the best of Watergate’s rich historiography is to be found in biographical studies of Richard Nixon. This historiography also helps suggest the potential for using Watergate as a reference point for delineating the common characteristics of political disasters by constructing a tentative typology of their origins. Show more