Nixon’s resignation provides a road map for how Biden’s presidential campaign could end

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For months, U.S. commentators and political figures have processed the judicial peril of former president Donald Trump through the prism of Watergate: landmark trials, feuds with lawyers, Supreme Court rulings, even talk of imprisonment.

Now it’s Joe Biden’s turn.

With the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation now less than a month away – commemorations and retrospectives are well under way, and so the events of the summer of 1974 are top of mind in Washington and beyond – the resolution of Mr. Biden’s place atop the Democratic national ticket is increasingly being viewed through the Watergate experience.

Though Mr. Biden insisted again Monday that he would not depart the presidential race, Watergate and the last days of the Nixon presidency could eventually serve as a playbook for party elders, many of whom were politically engaged during that period, as they try to prod the 46th president to abandon his campaign for re-election – perhaps even nudge him from office entirely.

Representative Jerrold Nadler of California, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee – which 50 years ago approved two articles of impeachment against Mr. Nixon – has joined the growing group of members of Congress calling for Mr. Biden to stand down after the President’s calamitous performance in last month’s debate. Mr. Nadler was 27 years old and a legislative assistant in the New York State Assembly when senators Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and Barry Goldwater of Arizona, plus Representative John Rhodes of Arizona – all senior Republicans – travelled to the White House with the message that Mr. Nixon’s impeachment in the House was certain and his conviction in a Senate trial was likely.

That pilgrimage of doom is just as vivid in the memories of the two leading Democrats in Mr. Biden’s Washington. Former speaker Nancy Pelosi of California was 34 and part of Representative Phillip Burton’s political circle when that delegation drove the 16 blocks between the Capitol and the White House. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York was 23 and already had involvement in Democratic politics.

The President was 31 years old at the time. He would have known Mr. Rhodes, who had just succeeded Gerald Ford as House Republican leader. Mr. Biden was serving with Mr. Goldwater, who a decade earlier was the GOP presidential nominee, and with Mr. Scott, who was the Republican leader in the Senate.

“Hugh Scott was a canny and flexible politician who knew when to strike and when to hold back,” said Michael Birkner, a Gettysburg College historian who has studied the Pennsylvania Republican. “His political instincts were almost always right on target. He understood that Nixon was done, he knew the message had to be delivered, and he knew that he would be listened to.”

Aside from Mr. Nadler, the group of Democrats who have broken with Mr. Biden include the top Democrats on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

Like the Biden debate debacle, the confrontation with Mr. Nixon was prompted by the accumulation of party anxiety about the sitting president – and then a jolt from a single, discrete event.

In the Biden case, it was his pallid debate mien and his verbal lapses. In the Nixon case, it was the release of the White House recording of a June 23, 1972, conversation that became known as the “smoking gun” tape. It indicated that the 37th president was guilty of obstruction of justice.

Just as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was privately expressing doubts to Mr. Nixon, eight senior Republicans were conferring on Capitol Hill. They nominated Mr. Goldwater to speak with Dean Burch, a fellow Arizonan who had been chairman of the Republican National Committee and at the time was a presidential counsellor, to arrange a session with Mr. Nixon.

That prompted White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, concerned about the optics of a delegation from the legislative branch of the government bringing down the leader of the executive branch, to help shape the message the legislative trio would deliver to the president.

He counselled Mr. Goldwater not to use the word “resign,” because, as Mr. Haig said, Mr. Nixon was “almost on the edge of resignation, and if you suggest it, he may take umbrage and reverse.” In the event, the lawmakers simply told Mr. Nixon that political support for him, even among fellow Republicans, had collapsed on Capitol Hill. “It’s grim,” Mr. Scott said. “Hopeless,” Mr. Goldwater added.

“The grey eminences who went to the White House to talk to Mr. Nixon just before he resigned were bearing an anticipated message,” recalled David Eisenhower, who had married Mr. Nixon’s daughter Julie more than five years earlier and was part of the Nixon inner circle, in an interview Monday. “We had talked about this a lot.”

Still, the president winced “involuntarily” at the news, according to the account of Garrett M. Graff in his 2022 book Watergate: A New History. The Nixon family opposed resignation. But that evening Pat Nixon, the president’s wife, told his daughters, “Your father has decided to resign.”

History never repeats itself exactly – or even neatly. The circumstances of 1974 and 2024 are different. In the Nixon case, the June 23 tape presented damaging evidence (though 50 years later, some Nixon loyalists believe the president didn’t fight hard enough to retain office). In the Biden case, the situation is less about facts than judgments about Mr. Biden’s frailties and his fitness for office.

But the Nixon case may present a road map for the resolution of the Biden case.

“This is one of the few times that gets the context exactly right,” said Rick Perlstein, author of a series of books about Republicans and conservatives. “The Goldwater group basically told the president that he was doomed. They were merely conveying information. They were counting votes. The most shrewd people in this debate are not looking to diagnose Biden from afar. They are simply people who are counting the votes.”