Dear President Nixon: Re-examining public correspondence during the Watergate scandal

The Watergate scandal remains a tumultuous and troubling time in American presidential history. Leading to the first and to date, only presidential resignation from office, the events of this period exemplify the political and societal consequences of corruption and misuse of power. This article provides a renewed look into the lasting legacy of Watergate by examining letters addressed to President Richard Nixon by members of the public during the spring of 1973. Following Nixon’s landslide 1972 re-election, this period would prove memorable with the then White House Counsel John Dean characterizing the scandal’s ‘cancerous’ nature on the presidency. Within this exploratory analysis, we wish to develop a better understanding of (1) which members of the public wrote to Nixon, (2) the general public perceptions of Nixon’s role in the scandal, as well as (3) citizens’ thoughts on related political concepts, including the president’s invocation of executive privilege to withhold information from special prosecutors. The text corpus includes over 300 individual letters written to Richard Nixon. Each is coded by key political considerations, namely the writer’s support for Watergate-related events, as well as support for an independent investigation into the scandal itself. Other identifiers, including gender, partisan affiliation and geographic location, are also included in the data. We do find substantive and meaningful differences among letter writers. By scrutinizing Watergate-era presidential communication, we are able to more fully appreciate the dimensions of public sentiment, concerns and expectations during a critical juncture in political time.