I went to the American Presidency Project and did a keyword search to see when Reagan did actually mention Richard Nixon. This search turned up a couple of things that are worth mentioning. First, Goldberg’s core claim is correct: Reagan did not make reckoning with the legacy of Watergate, or with Nixon’s ideological project (more on that later) a central purpose of his rhetoric. It’s true that not much time had elapsed between the two administrations, but Carter provided a hell of a buffer.
But Reagan did mention Nixon about 100 times. And those instances are instructive. Least important to the overall point here – but still kind of interesting – were Reagan acknowledging that the whole relationship between current and former presidents is kind of strange and awkward. A handful of the mentions make reference to Nixon’s foreign policy knowledge, something that continued to be valued in GOP circles even after Nixon resigned. If Nixon had anything resembling a public redemption, that was it.
The third and largest category complicates the claim that Nixon and Reagan were pursuing different political projects, or that the Reagan administration represented a clean break from the problems that plagued Nixon. These are mentions of personnel appointed by Reagan who had also served under Nixon in some capacity. These include at least one Cabinet Secretary, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who left the Nixon administration in response to the requests of the Saturday Night Massacre), and a number of political and communications figures. These figures include Pat Buchanan, widely believed to be an important forerunner to Trumpist politics. We could argue about how important these appointments were, individually or collectively. These kinds of appointments provide a lot of continuity across administrations that embrace very different aesthetics or respond rhetorically to very different moments (see also, the Clinton people in the Obama administration). But the appointment of various Nixon-connected personnel, combined with minimal public reckoning with the legacy of Watergate, paints a very different picture of the Reagan model of moving on.
I’m not just pointing this out because I love to be right (though this is in fact the case). Rather, it seems plausible to me that this could happen again, especially with a term or two of a Democratic president in between: a post-Trump leader distances themselves through silence, never quite contends publicly with what has happened since 2025, and appoints a bunch of people from Trump world to obscure White House roles that only nerds pay attention to.