More than half a century ago, the Watergate scandal ended the White House tenure of one of the most popular presidents in American history in such catastrophic fashion that the suffix “gate” entered the Western lexicon as an indication of scandal. Now, the former president whose name has been almost synonymous with scandal for decades is being reclaimed by young conservatives as an icon of resilience and patriotism. According to The Wall Street Journal, the “kids are ‘Nixonmaxxing,’” casting President Richard Nixon as an “America First” champion.

Nixon was, of course, a flawed figure, as have been so many American heroes, but, as conservative intellectual, activist, and author Christopher F. Rufo pointed out, “The Right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies — some good, some bad — but about the aesthetic, the attitude, and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the Silent Majority, and was taken down in a Deep State coup.”

Born in Yorba Linda, California, in 1913 and named after King Richard the Lionheart, Nixon grew up helping his father tend to the family’s store, often rising at 4 a.m. to pick up vegetables in the family truck, wash them, and set them up for sale in the family’s store before going to school. Nixon turned down a tuition grant to attend Harvard University to stay and help his father run the family’s store while his mother tended to his brother Harold, who was suffering from tuberculosis.

Throughout his career, Nixon projected the image of the self-made man. This was more than mere self-flattery or public relations. Despite having turned down an offer to attend Harvard, Nixon graduated summa cum laude from the local Whittier College, where he founded a literary society and earned a reputation as a champion debater, all while still helping out at the family’s store. He later attended the newly-founded Duke University School of Law, where he was awarded highly competitive scholarships, was elected president of the Duke Bar Association, and was inducted into the prestigious Order of the Coif. Within two years, he was made full partner in a local law firm, where he specialized in commercial litigation and wills. His Quaker morality and sense of social propriety kept him from handling divorce cases, as he disliked hearing women discuss sex. A year later, Nixon married a local high school teacher, Thelma “Pat” Ryan, and the couple eventually had two daughters, one of whom, Julie, married David Eisenhower, grandson of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

When the Second World War broke out, Nixon, then working in the Office of Price Administration, sought a position in the U.S. Navy, despite the fact that he could have claimed exemption from military service as a Quaker or a deferral from the draft as a government employee. Not content with his posting at a Naval Air Station in Iowa, Nixon requested sea duty and was assigned as an officer aboard a Marine transport group and the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command (SCAT), where he aided in the logistics of U.S. operations in the South Pacific theater. There, he was promoted to a lieutenant and was awarded a Navy Letter of Commendation and a Navy Commendation Ribbon from his commanding officer, who cited Nixon for “meritorious and efficient performance of duty as Officer in Charge of the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command.” After the war ended, Nixon was one of the officers tasked with terminating war-time contracts, earning a promotion to lieutenant commander, and later to commander, and a citation from the Secretary of the Navy for “meritorious service, tireless effort, and devotion to duty.”

Nixon financed his first congressional campaign partly with his earnings from playing five-card stud poker during his time in the Navy. In one amusing story, Nixon turned down an invitation to dine with the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh because he was hosting a poker game. The successful young attorney and Navy veteran was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946, running on an anti-communism campaign. Once in Congress, Nixon continued to work against communism, serving on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and co-sponsoring the Mundt-Nixon Bill, an effort to identify communist agents in the U.S., and ushered the legislation through the House, although it later failed in the Senate.

It was under Nixon’s firm hand that State Department and United Nations official Alger Hiss was exposed as a Soviet agent. Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist and later one of the founding editors of National Review magazine, was given a platform by Nixon to prove, via documentary evidence and microfilms, that Hiss had been working for the Soviet Union and betraying U.S. state secrets. Although the statute of limitations for treason had expired, Hiss was convicted of perjury for lying under oath about his activities. Nixon moved to the Senate in 1950, where he continued his crusade against communism in the U.S. While nominally an ally of fellow Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), Nixon made sure to distance himself from the other senator’s broad, heavy-handed allegations, while still supporting the movement to identify communist agents and prevent the ideology from contaminating the American public and American institutions.

While campaigning as vice presidential candidate alongside Eisenhower, Nixon gained the admiration of the nation in a televised speech (delivered to some 60 million viewers, the largest ever audience for a television speech at that time) refuting claims of impropriety relating to a political campaign fund. Nicknamed the “Checkers speech,” after a dog given to his family as a gift, the address has gone on to be used today in “Nixon edits,” compilations of speeches, voice-overs, and images of the Republican president often set to hypnotic electronic music or rap songs and overlaid with heavy filters and interspersed with dynamic transition effects. Upon being elected vice president, serving Eisenhower, Nixon was given more responsibilities than any previous vice president ever had been, including attending and even chairing Cabinet and National Security Council meetings, managing key aspects of both foreign and domestic policy, and serving on diplomatic missions abroad.

When Nixon ran for president in 1960, he faced then-Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who eventually won the election. There were substantial allegations of voter fraud in Texas and Illinois, both states which were won by Kennedy, but Nixon chose not to press them for fear of making the U.S. appear weak on the world stage. Famously, Nixon was embarrassed during the debates against Kennedy when he began sweating and appeared pale under the stage lights, in contrast to the suave, eminently photogenic Irish Catholic. When Nixon later failed to win the governorship in California, he faulted biased newspapers and television news presenters for favoring Democrats.

In 1964, Nixon pledged not to run in the Republican presidential primary, instead endorsing Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who won the GOP nomination but was roundly defeated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor. Nixon earned a reputation as a kingmaker in the 1966 midterm elections, successfully campaigning for Republican candidates across the country, and fairly easily secured the Republican presidential nomination for the 1968 election, defeating Michigan Governor George Romney, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and California Governor Ronald Reagan. In a bid to win the support of conservative southerners disenchanted and disgruntled with the increasingly-progressive Democratic Party, Nixon named Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Campaigning on a platform of “law and order” amidst the often-violent anti-Vietnam War protests of the left-wing hippie counterculture, Nixon was elected by what he called the “silent majority” of socially conservative Americans who were quietly appalled by the leftward trend of the nation under the Democrats. Although he defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey by only about 500,000 votes, Nixon won the electoral college and landed in the White House.

Nixon focused much of his energy on foreign policy, particularly the threat of communism from both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. It was perhaps due to his emphasis on foreign affairs that Nixon came to resent the power and influence wielded by the secret intelligence community, chiefly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its domestic counterpart, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Both the CIA and FBI were placed, according to law, under the command of the president, but the agencies tended to function somewhat autonomously, as Nixon’s late rival, Kennedy, had so presciently observed. The CIA in particular usually mandated foreign policy, skirting international law and openly violating longstanding ethical rules in its zeal.

While the mainstream historical consensus for decades has been that Nixon ordered the cover-up of the break-in at the Watergate building, home at the time of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters, numerous insiders and scholars have suggested in the intervening years that the Watergate scandal was a coup orchestrated by the “Deep State” to keep Nixon from reining in the power-drunk CIA and its affiliate agencies. Geoff Shepard, a member of Nixon’s legal defense team; John D. O’Connor, who represented FBI official Mark Felt, nicknamed “Deep Throat;” and Senate Watergate Committee insider David M. Dorsen have been responsible for much of the research behind the claim, arguing that Nixon was set up to take a fall after winning a landslide reelection in 1972, winning 49 states.

On the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, actor Bill Murray lambasted the reporting of The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, who was responsible for breaking much of the Watergate scandal alongside his colleague Carl Bernstein. After reading Woodward’s biography of actor and comedian John Belushi, which Murray, who was close friends with Belushi, contends was largely bogus, Murray exclaimed, “They framed Nixon.” Murray continued, “If this is what [Woodward] writes about my friend that I’ve known for half my adult life, which is completely inaccurate, talking to the people of the outer, outer circle getting the story, what the hell could they have done to Nixon?” He added, “If he did this to Belushi, what he did to Nixon is probably soiled…”

In fact, Woodward’s and Bernstein’s primary source was Felt, a career FBI bureaucrat who was passed over by Nixon for FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, and therefore arguably had a bone to pick. Even so, Felt afterwards argued that the two Washington Post reporters took many of his comments out of context. Woodward and Bernstein, in fact, could find no one to corroborate Felt’s claims that the president was behind the Watergate break-in, instead connecting the break-in only to a Nixon reelection campaign slush fund, with further circumstantial ties to the intelligence community more broadly. In the end, Felt himself has to be their source for claiming that Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, orchestrated the break-in, although even senior Washington Post editors questioned why the president would order a break-in at DNC headquarters when he was almost certain to defeat his opponent, Democrat George McGovern, which Nixon did almost effortlessly.

Nixon was not a conservative in the same manner as the aristocratic, intellectual Russell Kirk, the refined, patrician William F. Buckley, Jr., or the oft-lionized Ronald Reagan. He was a self-made man, a brash brawler, a pragmatic populist. Bellicose, resolute, and boisterous, Nixon had far more in common with President Donald Trump than with Kirk, Buckley, Reagan, or the other figures who dominated conservative politics for succeeding decades.

Like Nixon, Trump was wildly popular, spoke his mind with a disarming (and sometimes rankling) frankness, and was willing to confront the most pressing threats of his day — in Nixon’s case, communism and “Deep State” overreach, and in Trump’s mass immigration and also “Deep State” overreach. Both men were derided and incessantly attacked by the mainstream media — according to a recording of a 1972 conversation between Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the then-president warned, “Never forget that the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” — and both faced Deep State coup attempts throughout their presidencies. In Nixon’s case, the coup was successful, and he was pressured to resign in 1974. In his resignation speech, Nixon cited his White House predecessor Theodore Roosevelt:

“Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, ‘whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’”

Nixon explained that he resigned for the good of the country, to once again avoid the appearance of weakening the U.S. on the world stage and to ensure a smooth transition to his successor and vice president, Gerald Ford. However, the problem of the Deep State did not disappear, but only worsened over the years, unchallenged, bloated, and always hungry for more power and control. It was this same Deep State which, 42 years after Nixon’s resignation, would turn its ire against Nixon’s spiritual successor, Trump.

Unlike Nixon, Trump did not back down. It may be said that Nixon was an optimist, a man who believed in the better angels of America, despite the evidence he found of a shadowy war for the nation’s soul; the 37th president trusted in the American people to uncover and root out the power-hungry evil threatening to choke out the country. With the benefit of four more decades, Trump was able to see that the American people had not uncovered and rooted out the Deep State, but that the hidden puppet masters had instead only grown in power and cunning, manipulating the American public and even American elections.

The renaissance of Nixon’s aesthetic, his attitude and spirit, his rhetoric and tragic downfall — and, perhaps most crucially, Trump’s historic 2024 reelection, against seemingly insurmountable odds, following a concentrated, concerted lawfare campaign, multiple attempted coups and assassination attempts, and a decade-long propaganda campaign painting him as Adolf Hitler reincarnate — have served to vindicate Nixon, a patriot, a president, and a victim of the machinations of the Deep State.

For further reading on Nixon and the Watergate scandal:

“Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth about the President, Watergate, and the Pardon” by Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro

“The Mysteries of Watergate” and “Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism” by John D. O’Connor

“The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down” by Geoff Shepard

“Reopening Watergate: An Insider’s Account of Why Nixon Lost” by David M. Dorsen