Watergate Doesn't Bother Me; Does your Conscience Bother You?

Lynyrd Skynyrd expressed the mood of much of the country when it questioned the relevance of Watergate and the feigned outrage surrounding a third‑rate burglary that captured the nation's attention.

More than half a century later- 54 years after the break‑in and 52 years after the release of Sweet Home Alabama - Watergate has become civic shorthand for presidential corruption. The burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the subsequent cover‑up are treated as the original sin of modern American politics. Richard Nixon remains the only president to resign, and his legacy has been cabined into this single episode.

But history is rarely that tidy.

Measured not by symbolism but by consequence and moral weight, Nixon's misconduct pales beside the actions of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. It is not that Nixon was innocent or his actions justified, but that the American political memory is selective. Moral outrage is often relative. Far more consequential abuses of power have been normalized, excused, or even celebrated when carried out by presidents who were more charismatic or more popular.

If Watergate did not trouble disc jockeys in 1974, perhaps their collective conscience was simply focused elsewhere.

No war started or was prolonged because of Watergate. No ethnic group was imprisoned en masse. No constitutional order was permanently altered. Millions of lives were not placed at risk. Its victims - the integrity of an election, the rule of law, and public trust - were real and serious, but abstract when compared with the human costs of decisions made by other presidents who remain lionized.

Nixon's greatest sin was secrecy paired with an inflated sense of presidential prerogative. His downfall came not because he was uniquely immoral, but because he was uniquely caught, and largely for actions other presidents had undertaken routinely, but more discreetly.

Franklin D. Roosevelt guided the nation through the Great Depression and World War II, expanded the federal government, and permanently reshaped the relationship between citizen and state.

He also presided over one of the most sweeping violations of civil liberties in American history.

Roosevelt authorized the forced relocation and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans (two‑thirds of whom were U.S. citizens), without charges, trials, or evidence of disloyalty. Families lost homes, businesses, and dignity. No comparable act of collective punishment occurred under Nixon.

Following a series of adverse rulings, Roosevelt attempted to pack the Supreme Court by appointing justices who shared his ideological bent, an overt assault on judicial independence that would have permanently altered constitutional checks and balances.

These actions were deliberate, public, and widely defended at the time. History remembers Roosevelt kindly not because his actions were morally cleaner than Nixon's, but because his outcomes were popular and his narrative victorious.

John F. Kennedy inherited the Cold War and came perilously close to ending the world, yet his presidency has been embalmed in romance and defined by words like Camelot, youth, and idealism. Beneath the glow, however, lay a recklessness that makes Nixon appear almost restrained.

The Bay of Pigs invasion was an ill‑conceived covert operation that humiliated the United States and strengthened Fidel Castro. The Cuban Missile Crisis was precipitated in part by earlier American provocations, including secret missile deployments in Turkey, belligerent military leadership, and repeated assassination attempts authorized by the Kennedy administration.

And Vietnam?

Kennedy expanded U.S. involvement there, laying the groundwork for the war that would consume Johnson's presidency. His assassination spared him the accountability toward which his policies were careening.

On a personal level, Kennedy's serial infidelities posed genuine national security risks. That Nixon's taped profanity is considered more troubling than a president seducing staffers inside the White House reveals a peculiar moral calculus. Kennedy's greatest protection was not innocence, but charm. History forgives what it finds attractive.

If Nixon resigned over a burglary, Lyndon Johnson presided over a deception whose consequences still haunt the nation.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which Johnson used to secure congressional authorization for massive escalation in Vietnam, was at best exaggerated and, at worst, fabricated. Johnson and his advisers knew the evidence was questionable. They proceeded anyway.

The result was a war that claimed more than 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians. The public was systematically misled about the war's progress, purpose, and prospects. Internal documents later revealed that Johnson privately doubted the war could be won even as he publicly insisted on escalation.

This was not a cover‑up to defeat political enemies. It was a cover‑up to sustain a war and satisfy a president's ego.

Why does one crime dominate our moral imagination while the other is treated as tragic but understandable?

Nixon's true offense was violating elite norms without elite permission. He distrusted institutions, despised the press, and treated politics as a blood sport. When he broke the rules, he did so clumsily and visibly, without a sympathetic national press to shield him.

Roosevelt broke norms and rewrote institutions with confidence and congressional backing. Kennedy broke rules privately while projecting virtue publicly. Johnson, who had his own internal taping system, bulldozed norms with political muscle.

Watergate is comforting because it reassures us that the system works: a bad man is exposed, accountability follows, and democracy is cleansed. The broader abuses of American power, such as wars of choice, mass surveillance, racialized policy, and executive malfeasance, are harder to confront because they implicate not just one man, but an entire political culture.

Watergate was a scandal about process, not suffering. About power games, not mass harm. About lies told to protect a presidency, not lies told to justify death on an industrial scale.

Internment camps, body counts, rape, and wars sold under false pretenses should trouble us more. The issue is not Nixon; it is what we are taught to notice.

For Presidents Day, we deserve an honest reckoning with the presidents we excuse and what our selective conscience reveals about our values and moral judgment of our leaders.

Will Sellers is a graduate of Hillsdale College and is an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of Alabama. He is best reached at jws@willsellers.com.