How to Kill a Presidential Scandal (Depressing look back at Iran Contra)

A mysterious intrusion at the Democratic National Committee, an obstructive and besieged president, fears of an incipient constitutional crisis. It’s been easy to draw parallels between Watergate and the Trump-Russia scandal.

This isn’t entirely surprising. For decades, Watergate has been the touchstone whenever a scandal wafts through Washington. There’s been Chinagate and Plamegate, Bridgegate and Emailgate, and many others besides. But these comparisons have become particularly fervid lately. Historians of the Richard Nixon era and former Watergate prosecutors and protagonists are again cable news mainstays. Discussions about potential impeachment proceedings, should the Democrats retake the House in November, inevitably glance backward to the dark final days of the Nixon administration.

But the lessons of Watergate, through real, are overstated. And its persistence in our collective imagination reveals a particularly American tendency: our bedrock optimism, and—even in this era of cynicism—trust in the equalizing force of our political institutions. In Watergate, “the American system worked,” as Carl Bernstein said. Americans stared down an unprecedented modern threat to their democracy and won.

But this is an overly optimistic scenario. In truth, the other great political scandal of the last half-century—the complex set of crimes known as Iran-Contra—parallels President Donald Trump’s alleged coordination with Russia to skew the 2016 presidential election much more closely and offers us greater insight into how the scandal will likely unfold in the future. And if Iran-Contra’s lessons have been oddly forgotten, we might want to consider why. Because there, the perpetrators succeeded.