A Look Back at the 50 Years Since Former President Richard Nixon’s Resignation: NPR

It was no longer a surprise, but it was still a shock.

On a Thursday evening in August 50 years ago, Americans tuning in to the evening news were informed that the president of the United States would resign the following day.

Nothing like this had ever happened before; but for those who had paid attention, it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a different outcome.

Richard Nixon’s resignation was the culmination of two years of tension-building controversy that began with a burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in June 1972.

Although initially considered a minor event, the burglary was connected to Nixon’s re-election campaign and the White House was implicated in the subsequent cover-up. There had been two years of persistent investigation and damning reporting, mounting evidence, and a steady erosion of support for Nixon in his own party and among the general public.

A Harris Poll released the week of his resignation found that two-thirds of Americans believed it was time to impeach and try Nixon.

But is it possible that this man reading his farewell statement directly to the camera from the Oval Office on August 8 was the same Nixon who had won 49 states, securing a second term as president just 21 months earlier?

“I have never been a quitter,” said the familiar voice. “Leaving office before my term is complete is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put America’s best interests first.”

He told the nation that he had concluded that he “may not have the support of Congress” to make the decisions he needed to make as leader of the free world.

The next morning, Nixon bid farewell to his staff at the White House and boarded a helicopter for the first leg of his long journey back to Southern California. His vice president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in with the chief justice within the hour.

Support base falling

Nixon had been struggling with his fate for two years, but he was forced to see that Congress would no longer support him in office. Articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice and abuse of power were moving through the House. They had the support of large majorities, including many Republicans.

In July, a half-dozen Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined all Democrats in voting for at least one article. Then the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over subpoenaed tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations that had been requested by Congress and prosecutors in the case. The tapes devastated Nixon’s account of what he knew about Watergate and when. Some of the Republicans who had voted against impeachment on the House Judiciary Committee were telling reporters they would have voted differently on the floor.

At the same time, in the Senate, it was increasingly clear that the two-thirds majority needed to convict the president and remove him from office would be available.

That explicit message had been personally delivered to Nixon in early August by several senior Republican figures, led by the venerable senator. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. Goldwater is said to have told the president that he himself would vote for conviction and removal.

What had been a facade of White House confidence and bravado finally collapsed, and Nixon knew what he had to do. On the night of August 8, he told the country that
he would resign the next day and his vice president, Gerald Ford of Michigan, would be sworn in to take his place.

The process had wound its way through investigations, Senate hearings, House hearings, and countless court appearances for those caught up in the larger drama. It had been a grueling process for all concerned, as Ford acknowledged when he announced, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

In particular, all three branches of the federal government were implicated, including intrepid actors in the executive branch, who saw their duty to the law and the Constitution rather than to the chief executive who had put them in office.

Even in Congress and the courts, the progress of the legal case against the president had been guided or facilitated by individuals with excellent republican credentials. Some had been appointed by Nixon or elected with his support. In short, the system was working, not only as designed but as idealized since the founding of the republic.

Third category burglary, first category mystery

Ultimately, Nixon was defeated when his own abuses of government power to preserve and protect his own political position were revealed.

Ronald L. Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, had initially derided what he called “third-rate burglary” — and it was a clumsy job, to be sure. But the serious legal exposure began when the president and his inner circle of advisers tried to buy the thieves’ silence and limit the damage. The cover-up turned out to be far worse than the crime. The story gained traction in late 1972 because law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, aided an investigation led by Washington Post.

All of this was then popularized by a movie All the President’s Men with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Send journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who told the story in the form of a journalistic detective story.

In 1972, the first attempts to unravel that story by the Send and other news organizations were overshadowed by the impending election and Nixon’s landslide victory. But during this same phase, prosecutors and judges were asking tough questions that the Nixon campaign and White House staff had difficulty answering.

One judge in particular, John Sirica, surprised many who knew his previous history as a Republican staffer. Sirica was unwilling to let the original burglars or others get away without testifying, putting pressure on the White House at a critical time. And he later issued key rulings on evidence that proved essential to cracking the case.

In early 1973, former White House counsel John Dean refused to be named Nixon’s scapegoat for the cover-up. and became the key witness in the first real public reckoning of the Watergate scandal.

That was the case with the Senate hearings that began in May of that year and ran through the fall, televised live every day by all three national networks. Those hearings were thorough and unrelenting largely because their co-chairs, Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina and Republican Howard Baker of Tennessee, were intent on getting to the bottom of the matter. It was Baker who asked what became the central question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

A nation both fascinated and exhausted

The months of televised Senate hearings changed the mood of the country. They also revealed the existence of tape recordings that would prove crucial to the case, recordings that Nixon had secretly ordered made of his conversations in the Oval Office.

They were subpoenaed by special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and when Cox refused to back down, Nixon fired him and appointed Texan Leon Jaworski. Although expected to be more tractable, Jaworski proved to be a pit bull in his own right. He ended up indicting, trying, and convicting several key members of Nixon’s inner circle, including his first attorney general, John Mitchell. He also declared Nixon himself an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

Months of legal proceedings and congressional battles had made Watergate a daily news story throughout 1973 and the first half of 1974. The country was exhausted and fearful of what the next phase might bring. That sense may have been central to Ford’s decision in September 1974 to grant Nixon an unconditional pardon for all Watergate crimes.

For many Americans, the pardon left the whole issue unresolved. For others, the dominant emotion was relief that “Watergate” was finally over.

It was also a celebration of the fact that even a president who had been re-elected to office by a landslide could be held accountable to the law. Just as importantly, it was an affirmation that political appointees could have a sense of duty.

In the past half-century, we have seen three impeachment trials in the Senate: one for Bill Clinton in 1999 and two for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2021. In each case, each article of impeachment passed along party lines in the House fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict under the Constitution. In each case, there were some votes cast across party lines, but there was never any real suspense.

Given the prevalence of partisanship in our era, it is difficult to imagine a return to the political dynamics of a half-century ago that led two-thirds of the country and Nixon himself to conclude that he needed to leave.