August 8, 2024, marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States. His resignation came after the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend Nixon’s impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors. In this episode, historians Garrett Graff, author of Watergate: A New History (2022), and Robert Doar, president of AEI, join Jeffrey Rosen to discuss Nixon’s resignation and its enduring legal legacy.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Garrett Graff is a bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist. He currently serves as a columnist for The Washington Post, and hosts the award-winning history podcast, Long Shadow. His recent book, Watergate: A New History (2022) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Robert Doar is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He previously served as served as a co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger and as a lead member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity. He has written about lessons from the Nixon impeachment inquiry for AEI’s blog, and recently in July, AEI hosted an event reflecting on the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s impeachment and the state of impeachment today.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resources:
- Garrett Graff, “Watergate: A New History (2022)
- Garrett Graff, “A Vice President’s Life Can Change in a Flash. Nothing is the Same After,” Washington Post (July 23, 2024)
- Robert Doar, “Five Lessons from the Nixon Impeachment Inquiry,” AEI Blog (Oct. 3, 2019)
- Robert Doar, Opening Remarks, “The Impeachment of Richard Nixon: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary,” AEI (July 25, 2024)
- New York Times Co. v. United States (The Pentagon Papers Case) (1971)
- United States v. Nixon (The Tapes Case) (1974)
Excerpt from interview: Garrett Graff highlights Richard Nixon's significant achievements which were overshadowed by Watergate.
Garrett Graff: Part of what I think is the shame of Richard Nixon is that he, by any other measure, is one of the most consequential leaders of the 20th century. That this is a man who was on five presidential tickets between the 1952 and 1972, which is a record tied only by FDR himself, as a young congressman, Richard Nixon helps fuel the red scare and give life to sort of the era we now know as McCarthyism, in the presidency he shaped and escalated and eventually wound down the Vietnam War. He signed the Clean Air Act, created the EPA, created OSHA, transformed the post office into a quasi-private government enterprise, hiked Social Security payments, declared the War on Cancer, signed Title IX, transformed the military by ending the draft, and helped push forward civil rights. He brought more than a thousand women into previously male middle management roles in the US government, and brought the first female military aids to the White House. He averted a larger war in the Middle East amid the Yom Kippur War. He brought detente with the Soviet Union, reopened diplomatic relations with China. He's the first president to visit a communist country. He's the first president to visit Moscow. He's the first president to visit China. And all of that ends up getting subsumed into sort of this one word that we now define Richard Nixon with, the Watergate scandal.
And Nixon comes to the presidency and understands that the taping system is a terrible idea. He inherits the taping system that Lyndon Johnson had. John F. Kennedy, of course, had a taping system in his White House as well, which is how we have such amazing records of what took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the debates in the cabinet room. Richard Nixon had all of that infrastructure torn out as he came into the White House in '69. But then as he begins to rack up this incredible record of achievement as president, Richard Nixon, again, sort of the paranoia and conspiracy that drives him in his mind begins to get concerned he's not going to get credit for his great presidency. And that there are these people, his advisors like Henry Kissinger, specifically Henry Kissinger, who are sort of saying one thing in the Oval Office and then saying something else at the cocktail parties in the evening in Georgetown. And that basically Henry Kissinger is out there taking credit for all of Richard Nixon's successes and laying the blame for all of Richard Nixon's failures at the feet of Richard Nixon.
So he wants a taping system that is going to capture an accurate record of his presidency so that both he can write his own memoirs later, but that he can also catch these advisors in their lies about what they really told him behind the closed doors of the Oval Office. So he secretly installs this taping system with one important difference. Lyndon Johnson could turn his taping system on and off. Richard Nixon is sort of a klutz, and they don't, he doesn't actually think he sort of can fumble his way through turning this system on and off. The aides who are working with him on it are like, don't worry Mr. President, we'll just set up a voice activated recording system that will always be running and you don't need to worry about it at all. And to me, there's sort of this great question of if Richard Nixon had been slightly more technologically adept, would he have retired as a successful two-term president in January, 1977 without ever facing sort of the ignominy of his, the end of his resignation in the summer of '74. So this taping system, as we've sort of talked about, is secret even to his top aides. Henry Kissinger has no idea in Miranda warning terms, that anything he says in the Oval Office can and will be used against him in Richard Nixon's future memoirs.
And this taping system became public in those Ervin committee hearings in the summer of '73 and touched off this incredible battle over the tapes. Again, going back to the President's Council being involved, the President's Council was trying to find ways to cooperate with the investigation as it unfolds. So one of the things that they turn over to the special counsel in the spring of '73 is the president's so-called White House Daily Diaries, which are the sort of daily schedules that list what meetings take place, who enters the Oval Office at what time, who leaves the Oval Office at what time, who Richard Nixon telephones, who calls the president, and so on and so forth. And so the special counsel in the summer of '73, hears about this taping system and then has this incredible wealth of a roadmap to every meeting that has taken place in the Nixon White House. And so he's able to sort of go back through these Presidential daily diaries, look for the most interesting looking meetings that might sort of bear fruit on what, if any, coverup was taking place, and they write these subpoenas for these specific meetings based on the White House Daily Diaries.
And the whole center of this becomes a battle over these tapes that ends up going all the way up to the Supreme Court and results in that 9-0 decision in the summer of 1974 in Nixon v. US holds that the president has to comply with basically the judicial process. In this 9-0 decision that the Supreme Court says the president is not above the law and he has to turn over these tapes about these specific meetings. And as Robert says, that sort of kicks off this final moment as everyone is confronted with the sort of inescapable evidence that Richard Nixon was involved in the coverup from the earliest moments.
Excerpt from interview: Robert Doar explains how the House Judiciary Committee built a bipartisan case for Nixon's impeachment.
Robert Doar: Well, I was 12 years old and well, I might have been a precocious 12-year-old. I wasn't really in the front row seat every day, I was going to school in New York. But, these previous activities, the Senate inquiry, the special prosecutors investigation, and journalism, led to enough there to make the leaders of the House of Representatives decide that this enormous responsibility of impeachment. Remember, we've had a few impeachments since then. They haven't gone so well; they've been kind of disasters. But at the time that this impeachment was being considered, we hadn't had one for a hundred years, and that had been a disaster. So this was a very rare and unusual thing. And the first decision this Congress had to make, the House of Representative, was which committee should get this responsibility? And instead of setting up a special committee, they gave it to the House Judiciary Committee and just took their chances on a very new and untested chairman, Peter Rodino. And they said, Well, let's do it in the, where it should go in the normal course of a congressional business. 38 members, more Democrats than Republicans, for sure, but freshmen and old people that had been around for a long time, Barbara Jordan, Charlie Rangel, a lot of people that became famous later.
And they said, it's your responsibility, you do it. And then Chairman Rodino decided to do it in a very careful and bipartisan, and not in the beginning, judgmental way. And he was given the leeway to do that by the Democratic leadership and by his Democratic members on his committee mostly. And of course, the Republican members appreciated it and thought that was, if we're gonna do this, we should do it in a serious lawyer-like way. And they picked a Republican lawyer, who had been working in New York, but had been working in the Justice Department in the '60s in the Civil Rights Division, my Dad, to come down. My dad had a reputation that was very strong for integrity, and he certainly was a Republican. And Chairman Rodino said, I want the special counsel to be the council to the whole committee. I'm not gonna divide this into a minority staff and a majority staff, that Republicans cooperated in that. And then they decided that in order to get the evidence in front of the members, they had to do it in a way that was very slow and judicious and plotting, but didn't tilt, didn't sort of go at it in a prosecutorial way, but more as an inquiry. They created these statements of information, which were step-by-step accounting of activities in the Nixon White House on a whole range of events that each were well documented and each were presented to the full committee.
Think of this now, they met, I think three times a week for six to eight weeks in executive session. And that's all they did. These 38 members listened to this evidence presented to them in a way that couldn't be said to get them headlines every day in the newspaper, or they weren't, they tried to remain leak proof. They weren't allowed to divulge information. They sort of went into a process that was very unlike the normal way in which Congressional Committee inquiries take place. And then as that evidence was brought before them in that way. And the Republican members, Caldwell Butler, one of the most conservative members of Congress, Hamilton Fish, longstanding Republican stalwart, Larry Hogan, the father of the current governor of Maryland, Bill Cohen, Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin, these are all conservatives plus Southern Democrats. Walter Flowers District voted overwhelmingly for Nixon. Walter Flowers was a Democrat from Alabama, Ray Thornton from Arkansas. These were places where Nixon was extremely popular. They began to say, Well, that may be true, but this evidence, these facts block by block. And this is a very key ingredient that Garrett, I think brings out in his book, but really was brought out first by the Judiciary Committee. It was not a smoking gun.
There are smoke guns, there are a lot of them. The President really shouldn't be impeached for a single action on a March day in 1972. He should be impeached for a pattern or practice over a long period of time, of repeated abuses of power and violations of his oath of office. And it's that cumulative pounding away of fact after fact. Now, I should say there were some things they looked into, which some liberal Democrats wanted them to impeach the President on but they rejected. His tax returns, not worthy of impeachment, concealing the bombing of Cambodia, not worthy of impeachment, issues concerning impoundment, not worthy of impeachment, but these two obstruction of justice concerning a valid investigation into the Watergate inquiry. That was very clear. If you just looked at the evidence and abuse of power in this whole array of activities that preceded the Watergate Break-in, those were serious. Those were things that raised the level of impeachable conduct and high crimes and misdemeanors. And one more thing, they also, I think by their actions, I don't know that every one of them in their own way would say it this way, but they made it clear that they were impeaching the president for presidential conduct, for abusing the power of the President, violating his oath of office to take care, to execute the laws faithfully.
Those are things only a president can do and aren't necessarily covered by the criminal code. And so the idea that you take, you need to find an actual violation of the criminal code to impeach the president, they would say that's too small. We need something bigger, high crimes and misdemeanors speaks to violating your appropriate role as the President of the United States. So, that's what they did. And the other shining moment besides the, I always like to think of those evidentiary hearings as being quite remarkable 'cause they're so unusual and brave, and they took some flack for the amount of time they took. But the debates were also quite remarkable. They then, and this was before C‑SPAN, and they had televised the Senate inquiries and they had been high drama, but a little bit of a circus. And then the Judiciary Committee debates were much more formal. Each member was given 15 minutes to make a statement, and then they had several days of debates on each article, and there was back and forth, and there were Republicans who were adamantly opposed to impeaching the President, and they were given their time to engage in a debate. And then the votes came. And then, and around that time, the court ruled, and this is what I also think is quite remarkable, the court ruled and the tapes that had been withheld were released.
The House Judiciary Committee's summary of information and case against the President on the Watergate matter said that he was involved in the coverup and participated in directing the CIA to tell the FBI, that this was something that they should stay out of, that Judiciary Committee's evidence. And the members came to believe based on the evidence that Nixon was involved from day one. The special prosecutor's attitude about it was, Well, you might not be able to get that, but on March 21st he's clearly involved. Well, when the tapes came out, the key tape was the June 17th tape, which confirmed exactly what the Judiciary Committee's findings had been without having the actual tape to rely on. And I think that's a kind of remarkable marshaling of the evidence and putting the evidence through so that this jury, the 38 members of the Judiciary Committee could come to it. I should say one thing about Dad, you know, Dad's theory of being a good lawyer was if you try a case and you do your best, and when you win the case and you go ask the jury afterwards, Boy, that lawyer must have been really good, he persuaded you to come in for him, the jury should say, Oh, no, no, the lawyer wasn't that great. The facts were so clear.
I didn't really, the lawyer wasn't, no, no, this wasn't about lawyering. This was about the facts. And I think that's what happened in part with not only Dad, but with the entire legal staff of the impeachment inquiry staff that he had put together. They had put a case that was so strong and so solid that the facts stood for themselves and lawyering or what's that? That song from the Broadway show, all that jazz, there was no jazz. It was just the facts.
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