“Nixon Resigns”

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as US president. The second term of his presidency had been dominated by investigations into the Watergate scandal, and in his resignation speech on 8th August 1974 he conceded that he was vacating the office to avoid almost certain impeachment by both the House of Representatives and the Senate: “because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the nation would require.” (The speech was released on vinyl as Resignation of a President.)

Famously, at a press conference on 17th November 1973, Nixon had insisted: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” But after his so-called ‘White House plumbers’ broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Washington headquarters in the Watergate building, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered a criminal conspiracy that led all the way to the presidency. (Woodward and Bernstein’s work was one of the greatest examples of investigative journalism in newspaper history. Their main source, nicknamed ‘Deep Throat’, was deputy FBI director Mark Felt.)

It was the ‘smoking gun tape’ transcript, released following a Supreme Court ruling, that finally confirmed Nixon’s attempt to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate burglary. On the tape, a recording of an Oval Office meeting on 23rd June 1972, Nixon says that the CIA “should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period.” The transcript was published on 5th August 1974; Nixon resigned three days later. In his inauguration speech, Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford drew a line under the Watergate controversy and declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

In an interview with David Frost (broadcast on 19th May 1977), Nixon implied that a president has immunity from prosecution: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” At the time, this was seen as a gross misreading of the US constitution, though earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that a president does indeed have legal immunity for any official act carried out while in office. This ruling was particularly controversial as it came at a time when former president Donald Trump had been convicted of covering up a hush money payment and was under investigation for other crimes.