WASHINGTON — Exactly 50 years ago, a beleaguered President Richard M. Nixon walked into the Oval Office, stared into the television cameras and performed an act that still resonates in today’s vastly changed political world.
He resigned from the presidency.
“I hope that by taking this step we will hasten the beginning of the healing process that is so desperately needed in America,” President Nixon said in a prime-time address on August 8, 1974.
The level of American political recovery over the past half century is debatable.
Nixon’s resignation remains a unique event in American history: It and the Watergate scandal that marred his presidency led to a political environment that was more partisan, cynical, and distrustful of government.
“Vulnerable” to a corrupt president
Some historians and political scientists say Watergate proved, in the words of Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, that “our Constitution works.” Others say that half a century later, the institutions that held Nixon accountable are broken and too many leaders have tried to wield Nixon-style power while avoiding the landmines that ended his presidency.
“We remain incredibly vulnerable to an unscrupulous president,” said Michael Genovese, a political scientist at Loyola Marymount University and author of “Watergate.”
A more partisan world
“To me, the story of Watergate is the story of the system working as it was meant to,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told USA Today. But Graff noted that it’s unclear whether the system would work as well in these polarized times.
“Unfortunately, today’s politics make it very difficult to apply the standards that were widely agreed upon in 1974 to any president,” Graff said.
Partisan polarization is one reason why another Nixon-style resignation is hard to foresee.
In 1974, a significant number of Republicans supported removing Nixon from office.
In past decades, political parties have become more unified in their defense of embattled presidents, whether it be Bill Clinton over his affair with a White House intern or Donald Trump over allegations surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
The party-controlled U.S. House of Representatives impeached both Clinton and Trump (Trump has been impeached twice), won acquittals in the Senate thanks to the loyalty of his partisan base, and resisted calls for his resignation.
Nobody wants to be another Nixon.
A system under stress
Nancy Cussop, a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, said things have “changed dramatically” since Watergate and Nixon’s resignation. “We’re not doing traditional politics anymore.”
Opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s had already led to a growing number of Americans losing faith in the government.
After Nixon resigned from office, the scandal prompted a reaffirmation of Congress’ authority and new ethics laws, a strengthened role for the courts in checking presidential power, and new importance to the media as a public watchdog.
But over the past half-century, these institutions have suffered many reputational blows due to relentless attacks by Trump and his MAGA supporters, who vowed to “clean up the swamp” in Washington after his 2016 victory.
But it’s not just an issue for the former president’s supporters: A Gallup poll last year found that 8% of Americans have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the institution of Congress, and 17% said the same about the nation’s criminal justice system.
“Trust in the system is essential,” Cussop said, “and the system is really under strain right now.”
No one has tested the post-Watergate system more than Trump. He is the only former president to be convicted of a crime (in the New York hush-money case) and the only one to face criminal charges in four separate criminal cases, including charges related to the January 6 attacks and the concealment of classified documents.
Trump has been impeached twice, once for pressuring Ukraine’s leader to investigate Biden and once for the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Former White House counsel John Dean, who was a key witness against then-President Nixon, told CNN that Trump’s efforts to target the results of the 2020 election are “far bigger than Watergate.”
Still, Trump and many of his supporters reject the comparisons to Nixon.
In 2019, after Dean criticized Trump’s behavior during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the then-president told reporters about Nixon, “He’s gone. I’m not going away. That’s a big difference. I’m not going away.”
A Brief History of the Watergate Scandal
Nixon’s resignation brought an end to the Watergate scandal, which had lasted more than two years and transformed the presidency and the politics surrounding it, along with the Vietnam War.
It began on June 17, 1972, with the break-in at the Watergate complex on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, a failed attempt by the Nixon reelection campaign to bug the Democratic Party headquarters.
Shortly after the break-in, Nixon intervened personally in an obstruction of justice case, discussing with aides how to thwart the FBI investigation that would lead to the uncovering of all sorts of “dirty tricks” used by the Nixon campaign during the 1972 election.
The discussions were recorded by a recording system that Nixon had installed for the historical record, and in the summer of 1973 a select Senate committee uncovered the existence of White House tapes that revealed the Watergate cover-up.
The Nixon Tapes
Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor in charge of the grand jury investigation, sought to subpoena the tapes, but Nixon refused to turn them over, arguing that executive privilege protected them from legal scrutiny.
On October 20, 1973, President Nixon fired Cox over the tape controversy, forever known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Public and Congressional pressure forced Nixon to appoint Texas attorney Leon Jaworski as the new special prosecutor.
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives began an impeachment investigation, and on July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend impeachment against Nixon.
The House never took up impeachment, and Nixon’s fate was already sealed.
Three days before the committee’s first vote, the Supreme Court ordered President Nixon to turn over the tapes, one of which was supposed to contain a “smoking gun” argument about interference with the FBI investigation.
After the tapes surfaced, an event that would be unimaginable today, a delegation of Republican congressional leaders converged on the White House and told President Nixon that he could not survive an impeachment vote in Congress.
With hands together
Nixon decided to speak on the evening of August 8, 1974, to inform the nation that his resignation would become effective at noon the following day.
Instead of apologizing, Nixon said, “Watergate has led me to the conclusion that I may not be able to get the Congressional support I believe is necessary to support very difficult decisions and to carry out this job in a manner worthy of the national interest.”
Before leaving the White House on August 9, Nixon gave a farewell speech to his staff in which he recounted the advice he tended to ignore.
“Always do your best,” Nixon said, “never be discouraged, never be servile, and always remember: Others may hate you, but those who hate you will not win unless you hate them, and then you will destroy yourself.”
Fear factor
Like many shocking political events, including the Jan. 6 riots by Trump supporters, Watergate had its roots in an election.
Nixon and his allies had been somewhat skeptical about his chances of reelection in 1972, having lost so narrowly to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and won so narrowly to Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Nixon defeated Democrat George McGovern in 1972 and won 49 of the 50 states, but he and his allies engaged in a campaign that landed some of his closest aides in prison and led to the only presidential resignation in history.
The election fraud hasn’t stopped.
Trump and his aides have continued to make false accusations about the 2020 election that contributed to the Jan. 6 riot and are part of criminal charges pending against him in Washington, D.C., and Georgia.
“This election is not our finest moment,” said Tom Cronin, a political scientist and co-author of “The American Presidency Paradox.”
Watergate Aftermath
In 1999, approaching the 25th anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward published Shadows: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate.
“After more than 25 years covering presidents, I remain astonished at how his successors never fully grasped the depth of the distrust left by Nixon’s legacy,” Woodward wrote during the Clinton administration. “New ethics laws, a reinstated Congress and a more inquisitive media transformed presidential privilege and daily life.”
The repercussions of Watergate continue to reverberate.
The Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that a president cannot be prosecuted for “official” acts while in office, a ruling critics say would have spared Nixon from Watergate crimes if such legal precedent had existed.
President Ford’s decision to grant a preemptive pardon to President Nixon in 1974 remains a topic of debate among historians, some of whom believe it unintentionally encouraged future presidents, particularly President Trump, to test the limits of the law.
The issue of pardons could come up again as President Joe Biden considers whether to pardon his son Hunter Biden for a federal firearms conviction, and if Trump is elected to a second term and in a position to pardon himself for the allegations against him.
“A much more cynical turn”
It’s doubtful that Watergate would play out in the same way today, due to what Graff called “a much more cynical turn in American politics.”
Other experts agree. Luke Nichter, who has compiled a book of Nixon tape transcripts and teaches history at Chapman University, says students today have a similar reaction when taught about Watergate: “Was it really that big a deal? We’re accustomed to suspicions about government corruption and deep-rooted partisanship.”
“The current political environment is beginning to make that seem quaint,” Nichter said.