Why Did President Richard Nixon Resign?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:01

This week marks the 50th anniversary of a truly unique event in American history. The one and only time a president left the White House by choice, not due to death or the 22nd Amendment, but resignation.

Never before and not yet since has any other president done this. So this week, I want to know, why did Richard Nixon resign? Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I am joined by an emeritus professor of US Studies at University College London and an expert on the US Presidency.

His most recent books include Reagan, American Icon and FDR Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America. But he also knows a fair amount about Richard Nixon as well. So it's a pleasure to welcome back to the podcast Ewan Morgan.

Iwan Morgan: 00:01:19

Thanks, Liam. Glad to be back here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:22

Yeah, really good to get you back on for this. I always feel like when there's something to discuss about a president, you're on my sort of speed dial list of people to get on the podcast.

Iwan Morgan: 00:01:31

Very nice to meet the title.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:34

There's. There's so much that we could talk about about Nixon.

But before we go specifically into the reasons that led to his resignation, I just wonder if you could give us just a little bit of background on the Nixon presidency and how we got there.

Iwan Morgan: 00:01:50

Nixon is elected president in: 1968

se when he enters politics in: 1946

ess, House of Representative,: 1946

Remarkably, a narrow victory by Kennedy amid allegations of vote fraud in Texas and in Illinois. Nixon believes he should have won.

ome governor of California in: 1962

But he bounces back in: 1968

And Nixon presents himself as a man of experience who will get America back on Track.

In: 1968

ng how do I get re elected in: 1972

Although he wants to get out of Vietnam, he expands the Vietnam War through authorizing incursions into neighboring Cambodia and Laos, which is are very unpopular with student protesters. And generally Nixon appears to be an uncertain candidate for re election.

ties about his re election in: 1972

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:24

But I mean Nixon must have done something right in his first term to win re election, right?

Iwan Morgan: 00:05:31

Well, yes. Nixon in the court of history did some things that were very good.

He desegregated the southern public schools, for example, more schools in the south were desegregated on his watch than under JFK and Lyndon B. Johnson. By and large he kept hold of his base, the silent majority base that remained loyal to out of patriotism to the Vietnam War. So he had a solid base.

e because of what happened in: 1960

And he was determined that he would maximize his chances of re election. And he was helped by the fact that the Democrats chose the weakest possible candidate to run against him. Senator George McGovern of South Carolina.

Now why did George McGovern become the Democratic candidate?

re were new rules in place in: 1972

So instead of having a boss controlled party as critics charged, the Democrats decided to in effect democratize the presidential selection process by having by establishing primaries to choose the presidential candidate. Now primaries existed before, but they were not the main route to the nomination.

In: 1972

Liam Heffernan: 00:07:59

Wow. It's mad to think just how much that's swung over the years.

I mean, you could argue Kamala Harris was campaigning from the center and I guess that would go down as a fairly disastrous loss to Donald Trump. But conversation for another day maybe.

think I'd like to stay on the: 1972

Iwan Morgan: 00:08:28

Okay, well, as part of Nixon's re election concerns, he decides that he cannot rely on the Republican National Committee to promote his case. That he needs a band of loyalists who will do anything to get him reelected.

And this leads him to the establishment of the Committee to Re Elect the President that he puts under a political associate called John Mitchell, who served as Attorney General in the first term but resigned office to run creep. Now CREEP did all kinds of things. It gathered political intelligence about opponents.

It did disruptive actions to, you know, disrupt presidential Democratic rallies. It did everything it could to maximize Nixon's chances.

onal headquarters on. In July: 1972

And of course these burglars were caught red handed in the break in into the Democratic National Headquarters which was located in the Washington hotel and apartment and office complex in Washington D.C. hence the name Watergate. Okay. Now the, the burglars, the most incompetent burglars in history, it would have been had a connection back to Crete. And Nixon knew this.

He hadn't. He. There's no evidence that he had actually authorized the breaking.

What he does is that he engages pretty soon afterwards in a cover up of the connection to the break in or the connection of the White House to the break in. And what happens is that he is caught on tape in the Oval Office secret recordings. The burglary takes place on the 17th of July.

And on the 23rd of July, Nixon discusses with his Chief of Staff H.R. halderman, how they're going to cover up the connection of the burglars to Crete and obviously Crete to the President.

And that is the smoking gun tape that will do for Nixon in less than a year and a half time. So in two years time. Sorry, yeah, in less than two years time.

ere we are in is that in July: 1974

on to them. And it's in early: 1973

And I'll give you a detailed breakdown of how they went off the rail.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:30

One thing that doesn't make sense to me here, and maybe this is a reflection of how political campaigning has maybe changed over time, is you mentioned that Nixon didn't explicitly. There's no record of him explicitly authorizing the break in.

But CREEP itself is an acronym which stands for the camp, the, the, the Committee for the re election of the President. So it's not exactly a subtle acronym. And this burglary happened in Washington.

It feels to me like it wouldn't have taken much digging for Democrats to uncover a connection between the burglars, who you said yourself were fairly incompetent, and creep.

And regardless of whether Nixon authorized it or not, regardless of whether he had nothing to do with it or not, just having a link between the burglary and CREEP would surely have given the Democrats just the ammunition they needed to obliterate the Nixon re election campaign.

Iwan Morgan: 00:13:34

Well, yes, that's reading into the past with clarity. Of course at the time no one could understand what these people were doing there.

And no one understood that at the time how connected they were to the Committee to re elect the President. For all people knew, this was just people who had stumbled into the building. It's crazy that the burglary took place in the first place.

What were they doing there? Well, they were gathering political information that they could find. They were hoping to get the dirt on the Democrats to help Nixon.

And Nixon didn't need to do this because anybody with a jot of sense back then would see that Nixon was going to obliterate George McKellar. That actually happened and it attests to the insecurity of the Nixon White House.

But no one can believe at the time that the President of the United States is connected to this. You know, in our most cynical age, that would have been the first assumption back in those days.

You know, the President had a quality of, you know, morality, leadership and honesty. And the media had never dug too closely about presidential misdemeanors in the past.

ng yourself in the context of: 1972

rghers go to trial in January: 1973

And Sirica decided that the only way to break the vow of silence that these people have apparently is to give them really stiff sentences, the stiffest sentences under the law that is allowed. And when these sentences are handed down, one of the burglars, a man called James McCord, decides that he's going to spill the beans.

rd spilled the beans in March: 1974

And in February: 1973

And now the, this new committee, under the chairmanship of North Carolina Senator Ervin, has something that it can go on. And although the committee starts its investigation slowly, they build up.

th of April: 1973

But Dean fears that he'd been made the fall guy who's thrown to the lions.

,: 1973

Nothing to do with me. So it's Dean versus Nixon. Who do you believe? The President or this guy nobody's ever heard of?

Well, the next step in the whole thing, Nixon is forced by public opinion and indeed political opinion to get the Attorney General of the United States to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate what's going on with Watergate. And the special prosecutor chosen is a guy called Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor. The fact he's from Harvard is enough.

Is like a red rag to a bulletinix. And, and he's also a JFK ally. That's a second no, no for Nixon. He can't stop his Attorney General from appointing a man of honor to the position.

And Cox joins forces with the Watergate committee in a two pronged attack on the White House or a two pronged investigation. I have to say, in the White House. Now to this point, it's Dean v. Nixon. Who do you believe?

July: 1973

Liam Heffernan: 00:20:18

Wow.

Iwan Morgan: 00:20:18

Now this is a bombshell. Nobody knows anything about this. But now, quite clearly, the tapes become the focus of the investigation.

And for the next year or so, the battle is to get the release of the tapes. Nixon said no, not releasing the tips. They contain national security materials. They're my property anyway. I'm not giving them up.

Slowly but surely, however, he is worn down. Cox continues to hammer away at him. Special prosecutor Cox continues to hammer away at him.

And in October: 1973

He's made this huge public relations gaffe and suddenly the weight of public opinion descends on him.

And realizing his mistake, he agrees to the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who if anything, is even more assertive than Cox was. But we're still in the game of who do you believe? Can we get the tapes to show which side is telling the truth? And that goes on for some time.

In the meantime, Jaworski is investigating the the Nixon White House aides and he gets them before a grand jury.

st of March: 1974

r this. Okay, Fast forward to: 2024

What happens in: 2024

Now, Nixon would have got off under that, but The Supreme Court 50 years earlier has handed down a much more constitutional, I would say judgment in requiring it comes before the Supreme Court. It doesn't even go through the lower court. It's fast forwarded straight to the Supreme Court by the special prosecutor.

July: 1974

Nixon does release them on the 5th of August, and it's quickly discovered that the tapes have the smoking gun evidence of the previous July that Nixon has engaged in a cover up just days after the Watergate break in. And the Republicans in the Senate are agassed.

Now, while this has been going on, the House Judiciary Committee have been drawing up impeachment articles against Nixon. Of course, it's the Senate who will decide on impeachment.

When those impeachment articles come from the lower house, that is a constitutional procedure for impeachment. After they discover the truth of the smoking gun tapes, a group of senior Republican senators go and see Nixon and they say, look, it's over.

We're not going to vote for you. The evidence is that you lied, you committed numerous transgressions, we've supported you all along and you've lied to us.

We're not having it any longer. There aren't enough votes to save you. There would be a 2/3 majority in the Senate as required for impeachment.

And Nixon decides at that point to resign office to avoid almost certain impeachment by the United States Senate.

Liam Heffernan: 00:25:44

That was a pretty thorough timeline from re election to almost certain impeachment.

And it kind of answers the next question I was going to have, which was, did Nixon resign because he was going to be removed from office and it was about saving face, or was he just doing it because of the mounting public pressure to do so?

Iwan Morgan: 00:26:07

Well, the combination of reasons why Nixon resigned, first and foremost, of course, would have been the ignominy of going through a Senate trial. By the way, the President wouldn't have appeared in the trial, his lawyers would have pleaded his case.

But the ball game was gone and Nixon knew that he's drinking quite heavily at this time. If you see the Oliver Stone film Nixon, it appears that Nixon has always got a glass of whiskey in his hand.

Well, that was a film told in the Series of flashbacks. And the audience then realized that it's the same scene where Nixon is drinking. But Nixon was drinking heavily and he couldn't drink.

He couldn't handle it. He's undergoing a personal collapse and he decides, okay, there's nothing for it.

You know, he knows he's going to be remembered forevermore the President who resigned office.

But he also knows that if he is impeached, you will then have a new legal procedure which where he is in the dock in a court of law for the crimes that he's committed. Impeachment will be the first stage in a legal process that will eventually end up with him in the dock and is found guilty, he'll go to prison.

There's also the question of if he is impeached, he loses everything. He loses his presidential pension, his presidential perks. But if he resigns, he keeps a lot of things. Nixon weighed everything up.

Even in his very emotional state. It's a rational choice. And he resigns. Now the resignator public is absolutely mad with him. You know, people sort of say he should be impressed.

Prison, you know, President of the United States doing this is a terrible disgrace, a very bad reflection on the country. But then Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, throw the spanner into the. A massive spanner into all this.

,: 1974

The pardon says he is pardoned for any crimes he has committed or may have committed. Nixon accepts the pardon and now he's not going to prison. He's going to backed and staying in the San Clemente White House. That appears to be that.

However, the public is even more up in arms over the pardon than it was over the resignation. There's a cover up going on. People said Nixon resigned as part of a deal with Ford where Ford would pardon him. In fact, there wasn't a deal.

But Forde believed he should Nixon to save the country from the anguish of a trial of the former President. He did a good thing, but he did it in a bad way.

He should have prepared the country with arguments, okay, you know, we need to look at this rationally and unemotionally and this is the best thing for the country. But he didn't. He just drops it on the United States like that. And the sense of a cover up. Because now the pardon becomes part of the COVID up.

What's Nixon actually guilty of? Nixon said, well, I'm not guilty of anything. I'm not guilty of anything. Nobody has found me guilty of anything.

So the pardon becomes part of the ongoing Watergate cover up.

ion going all the way back to: 1914

failure to win re election in: 1976

It's one, one of the factors.

Liam Heffernan: 00:31:26

Yeah. One thing that I'm really curious to, to get your thoughts on is that Nixon isn't the only president to have been impeached.

I mean, even in the last 30 years, we, we've seen the, the, the Monica Lewinsky scandal with Bill Clinton. We, I mean, Donald Trump has been impeached twice. Neither of them at any point felt the need to resign or ever seemingly close to having to do that.

So why Nixon? What was it about this that got as far as it did?

Iwan Morgan: 00:31:57

Well, the Watergate tapes were clear evidence of Nixon's guilt. In an earlier time, the political parties were not ideologically disciplined, polarized. They were broad coalitions.

And there was a sense that there were standards in public life that had to be upheld.

This was before you had the kind of diversified online media you have today with political discourse, politics, national politics, and certainly presidential politics was meant to set standards for the nation. So Nixon's misdemeanors were shocking. Yes, Presidents had done dodgy things before, but usually in the name of national security.

Nixon's was a selfish action designed to protect himself from knowledge that he had been involved in this illegal political activity. When you fast forward in the Clinton affair, the Monica Lewinsky affair, well, you know, okay, Clinton behaved very badly. Did he lie under oath?

Well, probably, but not conclusively. If you study the transcripts, Clinton's slipperiness gets him off it. And, you know, people thought, oh, you know, this is ridiculous.

We don't want to hear the President of the United States getting blow jobs and much more important things going on.

o tried to impeach Clinton in: 1998

We have a situation where the parties are so polarized that they rarely join together in any vote in Congress.

And when you think that you need a 2/3 vote in the Senate to impeach a president, the possibilities of a 2/3 vote in the polarized, tightly contested political times of today, where Senate majorities are very small, and indeed a presidential majority much more important to impeachment, small Senate majority, you're not going to get 66 votes unless a significant number of the other side cross the floor to join. And the Republicans were not going to vote with each Trump.

And that means that today the impeachment weapon is not an effective instrument of public control, of presidential control.

Liam Heffernan: 00:35:20

Yeah. So.

So then how do you think Nixon's resignation and, and the Watergate scandal that preceded it changed the American public's expectation of the presidency?

Iwan Morgan: 00:35:33

Well, I think it had a huge effect in disillusioning the public that the President was a figure of huge moral character, unquestionably honest, and would always act in the national interest. And it led to a period of skepticism in American politics, feeder of skepticism, perhaps, that has never really receded.

You know, Nixon's misdemeanors meant that when later presidents engaged in misdemeanors, Ronald Reagan in the Iran Contra affair, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Donald Trump in the two impeachment episodes of his first term, you know, people sort of said, well, a lot of some people, but enough so the public opinion was not clear cut, would say, well, you know, we can't trust anybody anyway. So that shattering of public trust. Trump, I think, is different because his MAGA base gives him an unshakable foundation of loyalty.

But the maga, of course, is about, I would say, one third of the electorate, but they are unshakable. And you also have a media now highly fragmented, highly polarized.

And there will always be media outlets who say, you know, Donald Trump is being victimized, the Justice Department is being weaponized.

And there wasn't the same sort of sense that in the Nixon era that in the national interests we have to investigate President and if he is guilty of the charges laid against him, we've got to get rid of him. And enough Republicans thought that Republicans were shocked by the revelations. They really were.

And you know, back in those days, the party was under moderate leadership, not under the kind of right wing leadership it is today, where they would go to the wall. Right. For Trump, right or wrong.

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:16

It's interesting and, and I guess it is so hard to, to make that comparison now because of just how different the sort of political climate is. But I, I'm just keen to know, you know, to sort of bring this all to a close. What lessons, if any, did America learn from Watergate?

Iwan Morgan: 00:38:35

Well, it's difficult to put that into a neat little few sentences. I think that the, the lesson from Watergate was that there is a problem at the top that can we actually trust our leaders?

And that sort of, how can I put this antipathy to politicians, which is somewhat characteristic, which is characteristic for own times, has its roots there.

So, you know, but it didn't generate a kind of new reform movement that set out to clean up politics and make it more democratic with a small D more subject to popular control. Yes, certainly post Watergate reforms were enacted.

One was to do with campaign finance and that was reformed to eliminate many contributions in politics because Nixon had milked business donors for huge contributions to his re election campaign. So that was one.

The second was that Nixon, during his second term, because he was at odds with the Democrats over Watergate, began impounding funds that Congress had voted for, particular programs and impoundment means that the President doesn't spend money that Congress has voted for certain purposes. So a law was passed making impoundment, presidential impoundment of congressional appropriations illegal.

And finally, on the issue of presidential records, whose property were they? Laws were passed stating that the presidential records were public property and had to be lodged in the National Archives.

The presidents could not claim ownership of them. Now fast forward 50 years later to Donald J. Trump or the Trump era broadly.

gone, okay, yeah, firstly in: 2011

In: 2011

But now big money folks. And who's got the biggest money?

Well, a lot of money into the unions, put a lot of money into the Democratic campaign, that also some business contributions to the Democrats, but most of the money flows into Republican coffers. That's the first thing. The second thing, Trump of course thought that the presidential records of his first term were his.

So he takes as many as he can carry back to wherever they lives in Florida. And the fact that he isn't prosecuted for that, well, that establishes the President who owns presidential records. Thirdly, well, that's it.

Impoundment, campaign finance, presidential records, the Watergate reforms being thrown out the window.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:50

A slightly down note to end on, but maybe reflective of the current administration.

I mean, there's a whole lot more to talk about about, you know, Nixon and his presidency and everything around Watergate, but that's probably one for another episode. So for now, Ewan, as always, thank you so much for just kind of unlocking that vault of knowledge that you have on all things US Presidents.

For anyone listening, if you want to find out more and you enjoyed what we talked about, I'll put links to everything that was mentioned in the show notes, so go and check out those. But. But Ewan, if anyone wants to connect with you, where can they do that?

Iwan Morgan: 00:43:31

that I wrote back in the year: 2002

Liam Heffernan: 00:43:56

Wonderful. And we'll link to that in the show notes as well. For anyone that wants to read that, you can find me on social media as well.

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Iwan Morgan: 00:44:34

Goodbye Sa.