Nixon Staffer: The Similarities Between Watergate and Mueller

“Normally you have separation of powers, and you have supervision, but with special prosecutors you don’t have very much supervision. That’s the great danger.”

On March 22, author and former Nixon attorney Geoff Shepard joined Merion West’s Erich Prince to discuss what it’s like to serve in an administration under fire. Mr. Shepard has written two books about the aftermath of President Richard Nixon’s resignation and how the case was mishandled by the prosecution. He works on organizing forums of former Nixon staffers. Mr. Shepard spoke with Merion West to break down the similarities between the Watergate scandal and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation involving President Donald Trump.

Mr. Shepard, thank you for joining us this afternoon. To begin, could you talk a bit about having attended Whittier College, the alma mater of then-former Vice President Nixon, receiving the scholarship that bore his name, and how that would later lead to your position in the Nixon White House a decade later?

I went to Whittier after high school in 1962 and graduated in 1966, so Nixon at that point had been vice president under Dwight Eisenhower and then had lost the 1960 [presidential] campaign to Jack Kennedy and then the 1962 gubernatorial campaign to Jerry Brown’s father, Edmond Brown. He’d left politics. He had that famous press conference where he says, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

He leaves, and he goes to New York to practice law. He was nonetheless Whittier’s most famous alumnus, but he’d only been vice president [at the time I was a student]. But he was very proud to have come from Whittier; it’s a small Quaker school. It’s the equivalent of having been born and raised in a log cabin, and he was very loyal to the school.