The revelation that the no. 2 man in the FBI, Mark Felt, was “Deep Threat” has given the media yet another opportunity to rehash what it sees as its greatest triumph in the 20th century: bringing down a sitting American president.

And in truth it represents a vindication for Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who have been suspected in some quarters of either using a composite or even, according to die-hard Nixon fans, making the Deep Throat thing up to mask some lucky guesses. But here’s another question worth pondering: Why did Watergate bring down Richard Nixon?

It was hardly the first or last scandal – or even arguably the worst scandal – to grip the American presidency. Two subsequent presidencies – that of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton – would also be marked by claims of scandal and cover-up that rivaled that of Watergate in constitutional seriousness. Yet both presidents survived.

Reagan always claimed that he hadn’t known about the Iran-Contra affair, which had been coordinated by a member of his National Security staff, Oliver North. But the underlying charge was serious: that the White House was sending money to the Nicaraguan rebels without congressional appropriation, a gross violation of the separation of powers.

For his part, President Clinton not only wagged his finger at the American people, claiming that he never had sex with “that woman,” Monica Lewinsky. He committed the much more serious offense of lying about it under oath – at a time when military officers were being forced out of the service for adultery. It wasn’t just about sex, as Clinton’s die-hard defenders tried to portray the matter. It was about the rule of law.

No, what brought Nixon down was not only his reputation as “Tricky Dick” but the fact that by 1974 he was losing political support for entirely different reasons. He had done some great things on foreign policy – extricating America from a nasty war in Southeast Asia and opening a relationship with China that would isolate and undermine America’s mortal enemy, the Soviet Union – but the effects were not immediately apparent.

But on the home front, Nixon had taken a robust if faltering economy and turned it into a hopeless muddle. He began by reneging on a 1968 campaign promise to rescind the 10% surtax on incomes instituted by Lyndon Johnson to pay for the war. Then he signed into law a ruinous increase in the levy on capital gains. Nixon also severed the dollar’s link to gold, in effect devaluing the dollar.

Finally, in a vain effort to contain the resulting burst of inflation, Nixon instituted wage and price controls, leading to vast new bureaucracies charged with deciding what to charge for everything from cars to toothpaste to a day’s work.

Nixon could still get himself reelected in a landslide in 1972, thanks to the fact that the Democratic nominee was the clueless George McGovern, but by 1973 the chickens were coming home to roost. Most notably, the OPEC oil cartel, seeking to defend its vast holdings of dollars against the Nixon devaluation, had begun raising oil prices sharply. By the spring of 1974, the oil price had skyrocketed to $10 a barrel from $2.90 in 1966, sharply squeezing a middle class already angered that inflation was pushing them into tax brackets formerly reserved for the wealthy.

Both Reagan and Clinton presided over powerful economic expansions, which helped insulate them from scandal. But by 1975 the American public had had enough of Richard Nixon, who had turned out to be Herbert Hoover without the charm. Both Reagan and Clinton, of course, presided over robust expansions.

None of which is to argue that Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t deserve their Pulitzer Prize. But neither the press nor Mr. Felt brought down Richard Nixon. The American people brought him down. Failure to understand that may account for why an increasingly arrogant media subsequently pursued every “-gate” in sight, real or imagined, mainly succeeding in driving public trust in itself ever lower.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.