Half a century ago, Nixon became the only president to resign

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

On a Thursday night in August 50 years ago, Americans turned on the evening news to be told the president of the United States would resign the next day.

Nothing remotely like this had ever happened before; but for those who had been paying attention, it was increasingly difficult to imagine any other outcome.

The resignation of Richard Nixon was the culmination of two years of swirling controversy that began with a burglary at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in June 1972.

While initially viewed as a minor event, burglary was connected to Nixon’s reelection campaign and the White House was involved in the subsequent cover-up. There had been two years of persistent probes and damning reports, mounting evidence and a steady erosion of Nixon’s support in his party and from the public at large.

A Harris Poll published the week of the resignation found two-thirds of Americans thought it was time for Nixon to be impeached and tried.

But could this man reading a farewell statement straight to camera from the Oval Office on August 8 be the same Nixon who had carried 49 states in winning a second term as president just 21 months earlier?

“I have never been a quitter,” said the familiar voice. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first.”

He told the nation he had concluded that he “might not have the support of the Congress” to make the decisions he had to make as the leader of the Free World.

The following morning, Nixon bid goodbye 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, took the oath of office with the chief justice of the Supreme Court within the hour.

Shrinking base of support

Nixon had battled against his fate for two years but was forced to see Congress would no longer sustain him in office. Articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice and abuse of power were moving through the House. They had the backing of big majorities, including many Republicans.

In July, a half a dozen of the House Judiciary Committee’s Republicans joined all of its 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 sought by Congress and prosecutors in the case. The recordings devastated Nixon’s account of what he knew about Watergate and when. Some of the Republicans who had voted against impeachment in the House Judiciary were telling reporters they would vote differently on the floor.

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

That explicit message had been delivered to Nixon personally in early August by several senior Republicans led by the venerable Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the GOP presidential nominee in 1964. Goldwater was reported to have told the president he himself would vote for conviction and removal.

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

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

Notably, all three branches of the federal government had been engaged – including intrepid actors within the executive branch, who saw their duty to the law and the Constitution more than to the chief executive who had put them in office.

In Congress also, and in the courts, the progress of the legal process against the president had been driven or facilitated by individuals with sterling Republican credentials. Some had been appointed by Nixon, or elected with his endorsement. In sum, the system worked, not just as designed but as idealized from the founding of the republic.

Third-rate burglary, first-rate detective story

In the end, Nixon was done in by the exposure of his own abuses of government power to preserve and protect his own political position.

Ronald L. Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary, had initially scoffed at what he called “third-rate burglary” — and it was a botched job to be sure. But the serious legal exposure began when the president and his innermost circle of advisers tried to buy the silence of the burglars and limit the damage. The cover-up proved far worse than the crime. The story got traction in the later months of 1972 because some elements of law enforcement, including the FBI, aided an investigation by the Washington Post.

All this was later popularized by a movie All the President’s Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which retold the tale as a journalistic detective story.

In 1972, early efforts to unravel that story by the Post and other news organizations were overshadowed by the pending election and Nixon‘s overwhelming victory. But during this same phase, prosecutors and judges were asking difficult questions that Nixon’s campaign and White House personnel were hard pressed to answer.

One judge in particular, John Sirica, surprised many who knew his earlier history as a Republican staff member. Sirica was not willing to let the original burglars or others get away without testifying, putting pressure on the White House at a critical moment. And he later issued key rulings on evidence that proved critical to cracking the case.

Early in 1973, the former White House attorney John Dean refused to be made Nixon’s fall guy for the cover-up and became a star witness for the first real public reckoning of Watergate.

That came with the Senate hearings that began in May that year and stretched into the fall – televised live daily by all three national TV networks. Those hearings were searching and relentless 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 it all. It was Baker who asked what became the core question: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

A nation both mesmerized and exhausted

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

These were subpoenaed by the special counsel Archibald Cox, and when Cox refused to back off, Nixon fired him and named Texan Leon Jaworski. Although expected to be more tractable, Jaworski proved to be a pitbull in his own right. He wound up indicting, trying and convicting several key members of Nixon’s inner circle, including his first attorney general, John Mitchell. He also named Nixon himself an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

The long months of legal process and congressional wrangling had made Watergate a daily news staple through 1973 and the first half of 1974. The country was exhausted and dreading what the next phase might bring. That sense may have been key to Ford’s decision in September 1974 to grant Nixon an unconditional pardon for all crimes related to Watergate.

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

It was also an occasion to celebrate the fact that even a president who had been returned to office in a landslide could be held accountable to the law. Equally important, it was an affirmation that political appointees could have a sense of duty.

In the half century since, we have seen three impeachment trials unfold 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 approved along partisan lines in the House fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict under the Constitution. A few votes were cast across party lines in each instance but there was never any real suspense.

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