Historians are, by design, better at interpreting the past than predicting the future. They read sources, not tea leaves. But in the fall of 1973, in the middle of Watergate's Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. decided to try a bit of both. In The Atlantic's November 1973 cover story, "The Runaway Presidency," Schlesinger diagnosed President Richard Nixon's abuses as the predictable result of long-standing historical trends that had swollen the executive branch, and then offered a prognosis so sunny it could have come with a SPF warning. "Watergate," he wrote, "is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken."
Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, ending the scandal but providing no such catharsis and certainly no stop to the runaway presidency. To underscore how poorly Schlesinger's optimism aged, J. D. Vance mused in June that "if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy." As my colleague David A. Graham noted at the time, that's a startling admission from a member of an administration that has taken liberties with the Constitution and the laws. It's also entirely plausible: Scandals that once would have brought the nation to a standstill now barely register for more than a few days, partly because there are simply so many of them under Donald Trump. To understand how Schlesinger got it so wrong, first you have to understand what he got right.
In 1973, Schlesinger published a brick of a book titled *The Imperial Presidency*. He'd started it as a pamphlet that March, but the project quickly ballooned to 200,000 words as the Watergate spectacle unfolded. The book tracked the aggregation of executive power from the founding onward, accelerating during World War II and the Cold War. By the early '70s, the office had grown so far beyond its constitutional bounds, Schlesinger wrote, that it posed "a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself."
Schlesinger's Atlantic essay was preaching from his own text. In that account, Nixon's abuses were symptoms of a larger sickness. The expansion of the presidency, especially in war and foreign policy, was clear enough, but Nixon showed the dangers and "intoxications" that came with such power at home. Previous presidents may have possessed such authority but, Schlesinger argued, they had the character and restraint not to use it. Nixon was different, demonstrating what happens when a person "not open and modest," but "from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law," reaches the nation's highest office.
The president's place at the center of the American political story exacerbated the problem. Congress should restrain the executive, Schlesinger argued (he'd advocated for Nixon's impeachment as a starting point), but the American people also had a role: They must form "a new attitude" toward their presidents, becoming more skeptical and less reverent. That would administer fewer "intoxications" to the office's occupant. But his prescriptions struck critics as rich, to say the least. As he admitted in *The Imperial Presidency*, "historians and political scientists, this writer among them, contributed to the rise of the presidential mystique." Contributed, indeed. Over his career, Schlesinger had endowed Democratic presidents with just the stature he now feared. In 1965, he'd memorialized John F. Kennedy (to whom he served as special assistant) in a book so reverential that Christopher Hitchens later called it "the founding breviary of the cult of JFK."
Schlesinger may have only got religion because of the sins of the Republican Nixon administration, but he wasn't exactly wrong. Many hoped Nixon's transgressions would spark a democratic revival. And reforms did come: A slew of legislation from 1973 to 1978 attempted to address Watergate abuses and restrain presidential power on war, impoundment, elections, secrecy, and surveillance.
What Schlesinger failed to see was that while Watergate pierced the mystique of the presidency, it also heightened the American fascination with it. Many lost their reverence for the office, but they didn't turn their attention away. Perversely, the spectacle of the presidency was enhanced rather than diminished by subsequent scandals. Watergate supplied more than the inevitable suffix for all presidential crises to come - it established the script: the crime and cover-up; the drip of revelations; the question of what the president knew, and when; the obscure Washington characters thrust into the spotlight; the marathon hearings; the stern nightly news reports.
But presidential scandals, which once dominated the media cycle for weeks and months, now come and go at the speed of an attention economy demanding constant novelty. Meanwhile, the institutions that might have checked presidential power now enable it. Congress's inaction and the Supreme Court's expansive doctrine of executive authority have brought us closer to Nixon's later assertion that "when the president does it, that means it is not illegal." Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today, as Vance suggests, because there's nothing to stop a new one from happening tomorrow. In an era of revelation without reckoning, we're more transfixed than ever by the imperial presidency, whether we like it or not.
At the end of his 1973 essay, Schlesinger suggested that corruption comes to the White House in 50-year cycles, like monstrous cicadas. There's perhaps something to it. Start with Nixon in the early '70s, go back half a century to Warren Harding in the early 1920s, and another half-century to Ulysses S. Grant's scandals in the 1870s. Keep rewinding another 50 years - ignore John Quincy Adams's reputation for probity - and you'd land on the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824. The cycle could be projected forward, too: Schlesinger closed with one more prediction, this one more right than wrong. "Around the year 2023," he wrote, "the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight." We can't say we weren't warned.