Nixon's Undoing Came Long Before Watergate | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Every American president has experienced periods of tense relations with reporters, and wrathful surveillance campaigns aren’t, unfortunately, particularly novel. But any exploration of presidential spying and media hostility would be incomplete without a look at a president whose career was defined by secrecy and press antagonism: Richard Nixon. While many think of Watergate as the 37th president's undoing, a new podcast, Nixon At War, traces his fall back to an act of treason he committed before his presidency — meddling in peace talks for the Vietnam War. Kurt Andersen, host of Nixon at War, says that secret escalated Nixon’s paranoia upon the release of the Pentagon Papers—leaked by Daniel Ellsberg—and drove Nixon all the way to his ill-fated decision to bug Democrats at Watergate.