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One tends to overlook the essential role that sticky tape played in the downfall of a president.

It was after midnight on June 17, 1972 — precisely 50 years ago — that Watergate Complex security guard Frank Wills discovered tape covering the latches on doors leading from the parking garage to the office building. That wasn’t so strange — maintenance folks often taped latches so doors closed but didn’t lock as they worked — so Wills just peeled off the tape and continued on his rounds.

When he circled back a bit later and found the locks taped again, he called police.

As I headed to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda with my two daughters in tow to mark the half-century since the arrests of the Watergate burglars, which culminated with Nixon’s resignation, the January 6th committee hearings were in full swing on the radio. I reflected on my 11-year-old’s fascination with tape — I find it on clothes, the underside of tables and counters, even mirrors — as the voice of Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., played at a volume they found annoying.

“The former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again,” Thompson said. “When Mike Pence made it clear that he wouldn’t give in to Donald Trump’s scheme, Donald Trump turned the mob on him, a mob that was chanting ‘hang Mike Pence,’ a mob that had built a hangman’s gallows just outside the Capitol.”

The juxtaposition of these two scandals was striking. Both have such strong Orange County ties: Nixon, born and buried here; Trump’s “Coups for Dummies” architect John Eastman, once dean of Chapman University’s law school.

But Watergate’s sticky tape and bumbling burglars and phone bugs — meant to give the incumbent president a leg up in his battle for reelection — seemed almost quaint on the backdrop of Jan. 6, where an incumbent president aimed to win his battle for re-election even though he had lost.

“There are important parallels,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Law and founding dean of UC Irvine’s. “Both involved a president who acted in violation of the law. In each instance, the president put staying in office ahead of the Constitution. In both instances, the guardrails of democracy held.

“There are differences: What Trump tried to do was much worse in that it was an attempted coup and led to an insurrection. For Nixon, by the end, even most of his party turned against him. Trump, though, still has support of much of the Republican party.”

There are no banners fluttering from the edifice of the stately Nixon museum noting the 50th anniversary of the break-in. The 11-year-old was intrigued by the giant fountain out front, which resembles her exploding volcano project in science class.

I covered Nixon’s funeral here in 1994 — and got a hug from Henry Kissinger — long before it became part of the federal government’s official presidential library system. The Watergate exhibit is much changed since then. On the backdrop of great civil unrest, with continuing civil rights struggles and a highly unpopular war, its timeline begins with the leak of the highly classified Pentagon Papers documenting America’s disastrous course in Vietnam. Such leaks fed Nixon’s paranoia and he sought to plug leaks with “The Plumbers.” He wanted action against perceived political opponents inside and outside the government.

“The Plumbers” were assembled to fix such leaks, and some of them were eventually tasked with gathering information to help Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972.

And so it came to pass that, on May 28 of that year, a team of anti-communist Cuban nationals (with connections to the CIA) broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building. They bugged phones and photographed documents. But the haul wasn’t satisfactory.

So, on the morning of June 17, 1972, they went back for more. With the aforementioned sticky tape.

The burglars were nailed. One had an address book with the White House phone number of former  CIA operative Howard Hunt in it. And so the cover-ups, and hush money payments, and unraveling, began.

“President Nixon and his senior aides were concerned that an uncontrolled investigation of the Watergate operation would reveal much more than a simple plot to break into Democratic headquarters,” says the exhibit, authored by Timothy Naftali, founding director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who is now director of NYU’s undergraduate public policy major.

“The President’s re-election committee…paid for this break-in. Because (the) team included former White House Plumbers, an uncontrolled investigation could also lead back to the unethical and illegal domestic operations of 1971. …The actions by President Nixon and his chief lieutenants to keep those secrets away from criminal investigators would doom his presidency.”

The tragedy of the Nixon presidency, said Naftali, the NYU professor and exhibit author, is that a man capable of opening the door to China, of embracing fairer treatment for Native Americans, of working with Congress to create our nation’s strongest environmental laws, also carried within him a darkness that made him a danger to the U.S. presidency.

“Nixon did something that is inexcusable — he used the power of the presidency to hurt American citizens,” Naftali said. “He allowed thugs to break legs of anti-war demonstrators, wanted people arrested on trumped-up charges, had lists of people to be audited by the IRS because they opposed him politically. When presidents do that, they are a threat to the U.S. Constitution and shouldn’t be in office.”

But Nixon was enough of an institutionalist that, when he lost the fight to cover up his crimes, he resigned. On his last day in office, he met with former colleagues in Congress, and wept. He apologized for letting them down.

“Richard Nixon was capable of feeling shame,” Naftali said. “Donald Trump hasn’t proven himself capable of showing shame. To this day, he continues to deny the reality of January 6.”

Nixon was very unhappy when he lost a very close election to John F. Kennedy in 1960. There’s decent evidence that there may have even been cheating. But Nixon didn’t conspire with Dwight Eisenhower to block the transition of power, or try to undermine the legitimacy of the fledgling Kennedy administration, or incite his followers to storm the Capitol in protest.

“I think Nixon would find Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulse disgusting,” Naftali said.

Today’s constitutional crisis sheds a harsh light on how far we’re drifted from a strong, shared moral base and ethical core, said Michele Bratcher Goodwin, a Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine.

“What we saw 50 years ago with Watergate was a shared belief that our government must have integrity and there must be accountability that stands above party and partisanship and ideology, because that’s the only way our institutions and the rule of law can truly function,” Goodwin said. “It was a time in which there was a principled under-core.”

That has eroded over the decades, along with our democracy, hitting the brick wall of “no” with the Obama administration. “It was decided that, if a president does not reflect our beliefs, there will be no cooperation, no compromise. There will simply be ‘no,’” she said, which is an abdication of elected officials’ responsibility to actually govern.

Politicians play on “fear of erasure,” give White supremacy oxygen to thrive and treat the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol as if it was another day of tourism, Goodwin said. “In another country,  if people say they want to kill the vice president, it would be called attempted assassination,” she said. “Those people assembled for a coup, for sedition. We need to be able to say that. They can’t be treated with kid gloves.”

What will it take, she wondered, for Americans to trust that they’re seeing the same thing? To be able to galvanize around clear principles and values? To dissolve a fear that’s been implanted within the consciousness of a broad cohort of Americans that somehow our nation is failing?

The Jan. 6 hearings might help. Matt Beckmann, an associate professor of political science at UCI, points out that the U.S. system is designed for stability more than speed; it took about two years for Watergate to culminate in Nixon’s resignation, and then pardon. Trump has has a lot of exposure on many different dimensions, but we are still far from the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, he said.

“Things really got perilous for Nixon when people – starting with the Watergate burglars – got into the criminal system and their own liability became very clear,” he said by email. “It is unclear what the Department of Justice is going to do, but inasmuch as people in Trump’s inner-circle start going to trial, the risks to Trump himself will quickly and dramatically escalate.”

My girls weighed the Watergate exhibit against the other things Nixon accomplished in the White House, from protecting endangered species and the environment and workers’ rights to Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that get funding from the federal government.

They spent a good bit of time in a room documenting Nixon’s trip to China, which ended decades of isolation and dramatically reset our relationship. Both of my girls were adopted from China. Would they be here if it wasn’t for that trip?

“Nixon achieved things that were very significant that still impact our government today,” my eldest declared as we left. “Even though he did something really wrong, it’s not like he got away with it. He paid for it. I think he needs to be judged on the whole of his accomplishments.”

My youngest, the girl obsessed with sticky tape who just this morning scraped some off her bed frame, concurred. Trying to tease out the difference between the constitutional crisis 50 years ago, and the one today, she offered this: “At least back then, nobody died.”

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