We need not take Bob Woodward’s word for it: The murky Trump-Russia suspicions are still far, far from the constitutional crisis that was Watergate, the scandal that took down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency and sent some 20 of his associates to jail.

Saturday Night Massacre

Even so, exaggerated claims have flourished in the days since President Donald Trump sacked the preening FBI director, James Comey.

Firing Comey was reminiscent — vaguely — of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when the top two Justice Department officials resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to dismiss Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor.

A persuasive case can be made that Comey, unlike Cox, merited dismissal. But Trump’s conduct was puzzling nonetheless: What better way to encourage Trump-Russia suspicions than to fire the head of an agency investigating those suspicions?

Still, the Trump-Russia matter differs from Nixon-Watergate in significant respects, not all of which are well-recognized.

For starters, Watergate originated with a crime — a thwarted burglary in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Arrested in the break-in were five men linked to Nixon’s reelection campaign, including the security coordinator.

The  Trump-Russia matter, however, is a mess of suspicion, of feverish speculation that Trump may have benefited from, encouraged, or somehow participated in Russia’s suspected meddling in the stunning 2016 presidential election.

But the centerpiece crime in Trump-Russia? No one can say. As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, said the other night: “No one has yet to explain to me what the core crime that would be investigated with regards to Russian influence.”

More than six months after the election, it remains unclear what Trump’s campaign did — if anything — to collude with Russian operatives.

And it’s unlikely that Russian interference would have been decisive in tipping the election to Trump. The inept, highly centralized campaign run by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton effectively accomplished that. Trump was the beneficiary of Clinton’s flawed candidacy.

It’s also important to recognize that although Watergate’s outcome may seem now to have been inevitable, bringing about Nixon’s resignation was rather a close call.

Although journalists may love the interpretation, Nixon quit the presidency in 1974 not because of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting for the Washington Post.

Nixon resigned after the Supreme Court compelled him to surrender telltale audio tapes that he had secretly made of many of his conversations at the White House. (Woodward, himself, said last week: “The Supreme Court forced Nixon to turn those [tapes] over and that ended the reign.”)

As I point out in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong (an expanded second edition of which is out now), absent the audiotapes “Nixon likely would have served out his term.” The tapes were key. They were compelling evidence that captured him, in his own words, approving a scheme to sidetrack the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate burglary.

It is, moreover, important to keep in mind the sui generis character of Watergate. The scandal was sweeping; it went to the heart of America’s political and constitutional system, as Stanley I. Kutler, Watergate’s leading historian, noted. Its reach and implications were exceptional, and they will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to duplicate.

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

• Why Trump-Nixon is hardly Watergate-Nixon
• Who, or what, brought down Nixon?
• ‘You might bring down a government’: Sure, that happens
• Inflating the exploits of WaPo’s Watergate reporters
• Pumping up Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth
• The ‘newsroom where two reporters took down a president’? Sure it was
• Mythmaking in Moscow: Biden says WaPo brought down Nixon
• Of media myths and false lessons abroad: Biden’s Moscow gaffe
• Obama, journalism history, and ‘folks like Hearst’
• Jimmy Carter fumbles Watergate history
• ‘Follow the money’: A made-up Watergate line
• Both left, right embrace media myth about WaPo and Watergate
• ‘A debunker’s work is never done’
• ‘Getting It Wrong’ receives major shout-out in ‘New Yorker’