David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
Never before had American public trust been so fragile. Never before had the travails of the occupant of the White House been watched with such scrutiny. Never before had a modern president himself been so divisive a figure. Never before had an American chief executive faced the full fury of the press, his opponents and, finally, his own party for such an extended period of time.
A half-century later, none of that seems so extraordinary any more. Not until a final element is added: Never before, and never since, has an American president resigned.
Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 would leave the presidency in the hands of Gerald Ford, who pardoned his predecessor for all offences he committed, or might have committed, while in office.
Richard Milhous Nixon had run five times for national office, twice as vice-president and three times for the presidency itself, emerging in triumph all but once. He had captured all but one of the 50 states in his re-election campaign less than two years before he departed the White House in disgrace. He had shattered psychological, cultural and geopolitical barriers with two countries – China and the Soviet Union – that he once had assailed as global pariahs, twin enmities that launched and sustained his career.
Next week, the United States – once again with public trust in tatters, once again with burgeoning divisions, though this time with an insurrection at the Capitol in the past and a critical election choice in the near future – marks the 50th anniversary of the reluctant, teary but ultimately cleansing resignation of Mr. Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974.
Once again, the country finds itself in a moment of controversy and contention. The immediate sting of Mr. Nixon’s resignation has passed, of course: Only a handful of his aides, themselves mostly tired and grey, remain; most of his assailants, too, have either died or mellowed.
But as the U.S. faces a November election choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, himself impeached twice and at the centre of more legal battles than even his tortured predecessor, there is fresh debate about the meaning of Watergate and Mr. Nixon’s decision to vacate the Oval Office.
Has time sanded away the peril that Watergate and Mr. Nixon’s personal demons presented? Was the president hounded from office by a vengeful coalition of the press and political opponents? Did the good guys – the heroes of the classic 1975 Jimmy Breslin book How the Good Guys Finally Won – win? Or were in fact the Nixon loyalists the good guys?
Did the Nixon agonistes – the title of a 1970 book by Garry Wills that gave an intellectual patina to the resentment of the president’s persistent opponents – foreshadow the crimes of Mr. Trump? Or were they precursors of a decades-long conspiracy of liberals to create a progressive polity and, in recent years, to pummel and punish Mr. Trump?
In a country where, as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead, these questions likely will persist for another 50 years.
The Nixon resignation occurred in a midsummer of misery. The final blow came after the president released the transcript of a series of June 23, 1972, conversations in which it became clear that he helped plan the cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee only days earlier. The recording, known as the “Smoking Gun,” showed that Mr. Nixon wanted a top CIA official to wave the FBI off its investigation. “That was like a gut punch,” said Richard Hauser, who had been in the White House counsel office for the final two years of the Nixon administration. After the tapes were released, he said, “it quickly became something like a death watch.”
Then came the sullen and sober pilgrimage, on Aug. 7, of three top Republicans to the White House to tell the president that he faced sure conviction and mortifying removal from office in a Senate trial that loomed after the certainty of his impeachment in the House of Representatives, putting him on the precipice of being the first president to suffer that shame in 106 years. As one of the Republicans, senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, had put it to his colleagues: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today!”
The next evening, Mr. Nixon told the country that he would leave the office at the following noon, and that Gerald Ford, his hand-picked vice-president, would succeed him.
Before he departed the White House, the man who once had declared “I am not a crook” delivered a treacly stream-of-consciousness valedictory that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger later called an “elegy of agony.” It included paeans to his parents and a poignant quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the death of his young wife that seemed to encapsulate the president’s own torment (“when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”)
“He was very much unguarded,” said Stephen Bull, Mr. Nixon’s personal assistant who was with him that day and through his cross-country flight on to his San Clemente, Calif., home. “It was a very, very sad atmosphere in the diplomatic reception room when he met vice-president and Mrs. Ford. He addressed him as ‘Mr. President.’ ”
Roger Porter, who began his White House fellowship shortly before Mr. Nixon resigned, recalled the day as “a mixture of sadness and relief.” Said Mr. Porter, who went on to work for Republican presidents Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and who now teaches an American presidency course at Harvard: “The sadness was that Richard Nixon, who had many redeeming qualities, lost the confidence of the Congress and the country and he recognized the necessity for moving on. That is a very difficult thing for any elected official to do.”
What Mr. Nixon and Watergate left behind are elements that the U.S. has not yet been able to leave behind. Some of it is language, such as the terms ”stonewall” and ”expletive deleted.” Some of it is the public’s expectations of the course of Washington scandals: leaks, unnamed sources, special prosecutors and counsels, televised hearings, Sunday-morning exhortations about truth, trust and honour. Some of it is a partisan tinge to the press that has antecedents in the colonial period, but that has taken on new colour since Watergate. And, more critically, some of it is persistent cynicism about civic life – never fully absent from American life, but amplified in the past 50 years.
Americans' trust in politicians has diminished further since the drama at the Watergate Hotel, where protesters massed this month to speak out against the Israeli Prime Minister's address to Congress.MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images
The result was an abrupt adjustment in the presumptions of American politics – the growth of a culture of accusation in which the burden of proof is shouldered by the accused rather than by the accuser – and a pervasive sense that politics is not on the level; that politicians are prone to dissemble and, more recently, to lie outright; and that politicians are prone to believe that they are above the law.
“It was a real blow to the American people to understand that their president was a crook, was a criminal,” said David Greenberg, a Rutgers University historian who is the author of the 2004 Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image. “Coming on the heels of the Vietnam War, when the president lied about a major military commitment that cost the lives of tens of thousands, it was a double whammy. It hit hard at Americans’ self esteem, to their belief the president was a person of special character.
“All of these beliefs, even if never rock-solid,” Mr. Greenberg said, “came under great scrutiny, producing great disillusionment, and that has remained.”
But there is a major, significant, difference between that time and now. There was a sense in 1974 that the system had worked, that it was robust enough to absorb the challenges an errant president might present, that its antibodies had repelled a damaged cell from the body politic and could do so again. The Boston Globe’s headline the day Mr. Nixon left office blared: NIXON RESIGNS. The words were placed over a sepia representation of the Preamble of the Constitution, which began, “We the people.”
Today, hardly anybody feels that the system works, that its guard rails are strong enough. Trust in American institutions has eroded substantially: In the Watergate period, only 14 per cent of Americans expressed very little or no confidence in Congress, according to the Gallup Poll. Today 51 per cent feel that way. In the Watergate period, 16 per cent expressed very little or no confidence in the presidency. Today, that figure is 43 per cent.
The Nixon presidency began with an entirely different trajectory. His inaugural address, little-remembered but in many ways as eloquent as John F. Kennedy’s fabled “ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you” speech, spoke of “a high adventure – one as rich as humanity itself, and as exciting as the times we live in,” and declared, “Our destiny offers not the cup of despair but the chalice of opportunity.”
He fought to clean the country’s air and water, to create a guaranteed-income scheme and a national health-insurance plan, all with hints of Scandinavian socialism and the hope of pulling millions out of poverty.
“I saw in Nixon as he weighed these issues not only his measuring the politics of them, but an idealism that many had commented on when he was younger,” said John Roy Price, a staffer who was involved in those efforts. “Along with that I saw a genuine appetite for policy and his understanding of how difficult it was realizing policy goals in Washington.”
There were higher hopes after his landslide victory over South Dakota senator George McGovern in 1972.
“The general atmosphere was ‘on to the second term’ – and full speed ahead,” recalled Dwight Chapin, the president’s appointments secretary during the Watergate period. “The Vietnam War was winding down and the president was getting ready to basically reorganize the executive branch of the government. Big things were going on and we were talking about a super cabinet and a more efficient government.”
But the break-in at the Watergate apartment complex on the Potomac – what White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler called “a third-rate burglary” – began the undoing of all the plans and, ultimately, the Nixon presidency.
Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward exposed many of Watergate's biggest scandals, aided by a well-placed source, revealed decades later as FBI deputy director Mark Felt.The Associated Press
Bob Woodward was a 29-year-old Washington Post night-police reporter who covered the arrest and arraignment of the bumbling Watergate burglars.
“I had never seen a burglar in a business suit,” he said. “When [James] McCord whispered he worked for the CIA I said to myself: Wait a minute: business suits, CIA, security guards. The imagination got tested. We wondered what was the threshold for dealing with the inconceivable.”
Mr. Woodward’s colleague, Carl Bernstein, swiftly developed suspicions that this break-in was no ordinary burglary.
“At the beginning, I had no idea the Nixon White House was involved at all,” he recalled. “But very soon that seemed possible – or at least it became impossible not to at least consider the Nixon White House had some involvement. Then things started to fall into place.”
The Nixon team fought those suspicions and battled the Post reporters and then the legal system over other evidence, eventually employing a strong-armed cover-up.
“Nixon abused power,” said John Dean, the White House counsel who was one of the architects of the cover-up and who eventually went to prison. “He had a legitimate motive, not that his methods were appropriate. He always dreamed of being the peacemaker that his mother wanted him to be. He just thought that the world was ruthless and he had to be ruthless to deal with it.”
Former White House counsel John Dean went to prison for his role in Watergate, which he says was an abuse of power by Mr. Nixon.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Inside the White House, the Nixon adviser (and later political commentator and two-time GOP presidential candidate) Patrick Buchanan suggested the president burn the recordings made on a secret Oval Office tape recorder, thereby denying his assailants the evidence they used to persecute and prosecute him.
Other Nixon loyalists now believe he didn’t fight hard or long enough – that, in short, he didn’t adopt a long-term strategy that encapsulated the phrase that John Ehrlichman, the White House domestic affairs adviser, coined in a vital March, 1973, meeting on how to handle the growing Watergate threat: a “modified limited hangout,” especially when the “Smoking Gun” from June 23, 1972, tape was released.
“We didn’t put up a good enough defence,” said long-time Nixon aide Kenneth Khachigian. “We didn’t review the June 23 tape carefully enough. As it turned out, it wasn’t a smoking gun but instead a water pistol … But everybody was so tired that our defence team was nowhere near as vigorous as Trump’s lawyers are now.”
There are regrets now on the other side, though they don’t lean to leniency.
“I always thought – and argued for this – that Nixon should have been indicted within minutes after his resignation,” said Jill Wine-Banks, a Watergate prosecutor. “The evidence was clear and there wouldn’t be an issue in 2024 about whether a president or a former president has immunity.”
The president’s resignation was a signal moment in American history, a moral reckoning by a man who had lived on the moral precipice as a crusading Red-baiter on Capitol Hill; lost a close election to Mr. Kennedy in 1960; made a bitter withdrawal from politics after losing the 1962 California gubernatorial election; sculpted a “New Nixon” persona of idealism and vision in a comeback to win the 1968 election; and then descended into a miasma of deceit and deception in a doomed effort to salvage his presidency and, to his mind, his soul.
“What Nixon did was wrong,” said Timothy Naftali, the Montreal-born historian who is the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “But he knew the difference between right and wrong. By resigning, he did the right thing by his lights.”
The irony is that at the heart of contemporary debates about Watergate and the Nixon resignation isn’t the 37th president; at the heart of these disputes is the 45th president. “President Nixon obviously made his resignation inevitable,” said Bobbie Kilberg, who served on Mr. Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council. “But Nixon did almost nothing compared with what has gone on with Trump.”
Mr. Dean, the White House counsel whose damaging Capitol Hill testimony was a marker on the route of Mr. Nixon’s decline, said, “Trump has changed our perception of Nixon and of misconduct in the White House. He’s made Nixon look like a choirboy.”
And Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, said that Mr. Trump “has committed offences that in many ways are far more damaging to the constitutional order than Nixon ever dreamed of and he’s still around.”
But there is a new revisionism taking form in conservative circles that portrays Mr. Trump as the heir of the resentments of progressives who first plotted against Mr. Nixon. The argument is that Mr. Nixon’s resignation was a dry run for what the “Deep State” is trying to do to Mr. Trump.
“Watergate was a coup d’état by the elites against a man that 60 per cent of Americans had picked and who represented a profound threat to the elites’ existence,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview.
Mr. Gingrich, who in 1972 was chairman of the Nixon re-election committee in his state of Georgia, argues that Watergate must be re-evaluated in the context of the Trump era.
“It leads to a totally different narrative,” he said. “Nixon was still a creature of the relatively rational system of American politics that had grown up after World War II. He couldn’t believe the entire system had been corrupted, and he felt that he must have done something wrong and that his duty as a good citizen was to get out of the way. Nixon is the first clear indication of the corruption of the establishment, which decided that destroying Nixon was an absolute moral cause, just as destroying Trump is an absolute moral cause.”
Newt Gingrich, who spoke at July's Republican covention, was chairman of a state re-election campaign for Mr. Nixon in 1972.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Mr. Naftali, the former chief of the Nixon library, believes there is little value in comparing Mr. Nixon with Mr. Trump.
“It’s not helpful for the country to be talking about whether Trump makes Nixon look better,” he said. “These are two different stories. There was a red line for Nixon that he would not cross. Nixon had a sense of shame. He did not want to bring down the Constitution of the country around him. He was secretive because he knew that abusing power was wrong. Donald Trump speaks publicly, with joy, about abusing power.”
Mr. Nixon escaped the rare sanction of presidential impeachment – not employed since 1868, for Andrew Johnson – by resigning. But there have been three impeachments since then – one for Bill Clinton over his sexual relationship with a White House intern and two for Mr. Trump. Even the notion of a presidential resignation, a notion floated during the Clinton crisis, seems less potent.
“The stars didn’t crash into each other and the universe did not come to an end when Nixon resigned,“ said John Robert Greene, a retired Cazenovia College historian. “We have witnessed a resignation and we are still here to talk about it. It doesn’t seem the nuclear bomb that it was in 1974.”
Mr. Nixon's ghost haunts the Clinton White House in The Globe's editorial cartoon from Dec. 21, 1998, when lawmakers were preparing an impeachment trial for the Democratic president. The Senate acquitted him of perjury and obstruction of justice.Brian Gable/The Globe and Mail
The Hoover Library and Archives at Stanford University is currently hosting an exhibition called Un-Presidented: Watergate and Power in America. Before it closes on Aug. 11, the U.S. will have re-examined the resignation of Mr. Nixon in multiple forums and retrospectives. It will have brought the country back to a period when Mr. Nixon was top of mind.
“Nixon is a bit like Trump in that even among polite people it is difficult not to have an opinion,” said Luke Nichter, who holds an endowed chair in presidential studies at Chapman University, 18 kilometres from Mr. Nixon’s birthplace. “Everyone who was alive back then had a strong view of Nixon. Two generations of Americans – the children and the grandchildren of the huge majority that put him over the top in a landslide believe he was a crook and deserved to be impeached. As Americans, once we decide we know history a certain way, it’s very difficult to move off it. As new material comes out, I wonder whether people will be receptive to a fresh assessment.”
Shortly after the resignation, George H.W. Bush, who’d served as Mr. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations before becoming chair of the RNC, told a friend: “I don’t care if I ever see Richard Nixon again. He lied to me, and friends don’t lie to friends.” But Mr. Bush, at the centre of American politics for a generation, did of course see the former president again. But he was not immobilized by Watergate.
In a letter Mr. Bush wrote me in 1999, the 41st president said that commentators should not assume that “every post-Nixon President had his whole life shaped forever by Watergate itself,” adding, “Watergate was bad but it did not indelibly stamp every president forever more.”
George H.W. Bush, left, joins Mr. Nixon, right, and the three other living ex-presidents at the time for 1990's opening of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif. Mr. Bush argues that Watergate should not be seen as tarnishing the presidency for all time.Gary Cameron/Reuters
And yet the Nixon years, and his resignation, have been for a half-century a prism through which Americans view the contemporary world.
“I thought Nixon at the time was kind of a dweeb and was not a guy you would trust with your dog if you went on vacation for a week,” said Mac Stipanovich, a onetime pugilistic Republican strategist who left the party because of his disdain for Mr. Trump. “By the standards of the time – and those standards have changed – he did wrong. But the things that brought him down may not even last a news cycle now.’’
Geoffrey Shepard, who worked on Mr. Nixon’s Watergate defence team and today is the most active keeper of the Nixon flame, believes that Americans’ views of Mr. Nixon have mellowed. “The visceral Nixon haters, who felt about Nixon the way some people feel about Trump, have faded or passed away,” he said. “The actions and shenanigans of successor presidents and preceding presidents have come to light – and so, in retrospect, many people are hard pressed to remember what exactly Nixon did.”
Perhaps. But as the Watergate scandal and resignation recede into a misty past, there remains a tint of tragedy to the entire episode.
“I was saddened as Watergate unfolded,” said Mr. Price, who left the White House a year before the break-in and the beginning of the cover-up. “Saddened for the country. Saddened for my many conscientious and honourable friends who were still in the administration and now looking for a lifeboat as the ship sank. Saddened for our country. Saddened for the man who concluded his time was over, his many hopes unrealized, his nakedness of emotions and deep internal conflicts and animosities, his jealousies, exposed.
“For a very private man,” he continued, “this had to be almost unbearable.” It ultimately was unbearable for an entire country.
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