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Nixon is never caught.

NWO Sentryman

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a counterfactual moment here. Let's assume Richard Nixon's "plumbers" manage to slip past the security at the Watergate Hotel and are thus never caught.

How does that change American politics and the world?

Note to mods: If this isn't appropriate for this subforum, then move it at your discretion.
 
Intriguing question. I think Nixon would have left office in 1972. Agnew resigned for different corruption, and probably still would have. So Ford would have been VP until Nixon was termed out of office. And probably would have won elections as President anyway.

He was still an ineffectual President, but who knows if he may have beaten Carter in the 1976 election without the scandal of his pardoning of Nixon hanging over him? If he did win, there'd have been no Carter malaise to run against in 1980. Carter may have President in 1980, beating VP Bob Dole, and Reagan may have won in 1984. Interesting.
 
Without the Watergate scandal, perhaps Moral Majority and other right wing Christian groups wouldn't have been able to wrestle power of the GOP and have far less influence today.

Perhaps Nixon gets to do more damage to prominent Democrats and wrecks Jimmy Carter's presidential aspirations the way he did Al Gore Sr. Maybe he turns on some Republican honchos that oppose him. The Goldwater Republicans vs Right Wing Christians battle turns out differently.


The problem is, we may never know what circumstances and backroom deals really propelled certain political events.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since so much of the course of events rely on the context provided by past events, are not most counterfactual thought exercises regarding history essentially fantasy and nothing more? I mean, you cannot possibly consider all the ramifications that one event changing would have since it would logically change the context in which future decisions were considered, and then the contexts that those decisions affected were considered, and so on down the line.
 
A Laughing Baby said:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since so much of the course of events rely on the context provided by past events, are not most counterfactual thought exercises regarding history essentially fantasy and nothing more? I mean, you cannot possibly consider all the ramifications that one event changing would have since it would logically change the context in which future decisions were considered, and then the contexts that those decisions affected were considered, and so on down the line.
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Well, yes, and no. Niall Ferguson had a good collection of "counterfactual history" essays and addresses this point in some detail in the forward.

Basically, our past was nevertheless someone else's future and present; we can look to see what people then considered their future to hold. For example, it's not that hard to make a rational assessment of "what would have happened if the Nazi's had launched Unternehmen Seelöwe (the invasion of Great Britain)?," since the Nazi planners were kind enough to have drafted their expectations in detail. They expected (for reasons historians today consider to be valid) that it would be a colossal failure, which is why they kept opposing and delaying it and it never happened. This has been confirmed by Sandhurst wargames.

Similarly, if you want to assume by some miracle that the invasion was successful and want to know what life would have been like in Nazi England, it's not exactly "fantasy" to assume it would be a lot like life in Nazi France or Nazi Poland, esp. since we have writings about who Hitler was planning to put in place to govern his English puppet state and what their administration was like elsewhere (where they were actually assigned).

So "fantasy" is a little strong; you just need to make sure that you use your sources of evidence appropriately.
 
That's definitely a fair assessment, and it makes sense. However, the difference, it seems, is that those counterfactual "parallel histories" or whatever you'd like to call them are based on supporting documentation (i.e. plans in this case) that lay out guidelines which can then be used to make reasonable assumptions. In this case, since--to my knowledge--there really isn't a trove of Republican planning documents outlining future guidelines and policy implementations, it's hard to say that in this parallel history there will not be rampant speculation based on personal perceptions, isn't it?
 
marksman said:
Intriguing question. I think Nixon would have left office in 1972.
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You mean 1976, don't you?

Agnew resigned for different corruption, and probably still would have. So Ford would have been VP until Nixon was termed out of office. And probably would have won elections as President anyway.
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That assumes that VP Ford wins the Republican nomination in 1976. In the real world, Reagan almost won the nomination, and that was against an incumbent President Ford; it's not inconceivable that some Republican primary voters would have been more receptive to Reagan if he was challenging a VP rather than the President for the nomination. On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that President Nixon would have governed differently in a way that kept the conservative wing of the party on the administration's side.

He was still an ineffectual President, but who knows if he may have beaten Carter in the 1976 election without the scandal of his pardoning of Nixon hanging over him?
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It was such a close election that it's certainly plausible.

If he did win, there'd have been no Carter malaise to run against in 1980. Carter may have President in 1980, beating VP Bob Dole, and Reagan may have won in 1984. Interesting.
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Or Ted Kennedy (who, like Reagan in 1976, ran a primary challenge to his party's sitting president) might have won the 1980 election.

ETA: Of course, we're all ignoring the possibility that Nixon signs the Keene Act, gets the Constitution amended, and serves four terms in office
 
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NWO Sentryman said:
a counterfactual moment here. Let's assume Richard Nixon's "plumbers" manage to slip past the security at the Watergate Hotel and are thus never caught.

How does that change American politics and the world?

Note to mods: If this isn't appropriate for this subforum, then move it at your discretion.
Click to expand...

Nixon did claim that, had he remained in office, South Vietnam would never have fallen. He's probably right.
 
Nite Owl has a lot of cool tech stuff, but I kind of felt that he never really... Did much. Okay, he did break Rorschach out.

Meanwhile you have Rorschach breaking the fingers of people and throwing them down elevator shafts.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
Nite Owl has a lot of cool tech stuff, but I kind of felt that he never really... Did much. Okay, he did break Rorschach out.
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He was a crime fighter for years! He saved people from a burning building!

Meanwhile you have Rorschach breaking the fingers of people and throwing them down elevator shafts.
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He was paranoid, stole food, was more than happy to B&E the homes of his friends, and he even smelled funny.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
Dr. Manhattan is just scary with his powers. I prefer Rorschach. At least you kind of know where you have him.
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Meh, I don't know how the book explains it, but from the movies it looked like he simply had access to a secondary, perpendicular timestream, such that he could step back and look at our timestream like a film strip, end-to-end. Hence he could make a change, and immediately see the consequences through the end of (our) time axis, though he could not know the results prior to said action.

Nuthin' Doctor Who or Lazurus Long (towards the end of Heinlein's life) couldn't pull off.
 
Manhattan can also, you know, manipulate matter at the atomic level and stuff. And as the book shows is, he seems to be able to observe all points in time and know all things that will happen, for at least a long time forward. Tachyons messes with his ability to do that, though.
 
It's been years since I read it, but isn't the premise of the book Secret Coup that Watergate was done with the purpose of getting Nixon out of office before the "really bad stuff" was ever discovered?
 
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