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The years between the election of Richard Nixon in November 1968 and the defeat of Gerald Ford in November 1976 were a period of unusual concentration of public events in American life. The United States withdrew from Vietnam; Congress and the Supreme Court recast the country's domestic law on civil rights, abortion and voting; the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 triggered an oil crisis that ended the long post-war boom; and the Watergate scandal, which began as a minor break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972, ended with the only presidential resignation in American history in August 1974. By the end of the Ford administration the public's trust in government had fallen to levels that had no modern precedent.
This lesson covers the Nixon presidency and its end. It examines Nixon's domestic record, the 1972 re-election campaign, the Watergate break-in and cover-up, the congressional and judicial investigations that followed, the discovery and disclosure of the White House taping system, Nixon's resignation on 9 August 1974, and Ford's pardon of Nixon on 8 September 1974. It then sketches the political, economic and cultural context of the 1970s: the 1973 oil shock, stagflation, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Helsinki Accords, and the election of Jimmy Carter in November 1976.
Richard Nixon had served as Dwight Eisenhower's Vice-President (1953–61) and had lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy by a fraction of a per cent. His return to political life in 1968 was built on a pledge to restore "law and order" after the urban disturbances of 1965–68 and to end the Vietnam War. He defeated the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey by roughly 500,000 votes and the segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace by a wider margin.
Nixon's domestic record is harder to caricature than his foreign-policy record. His administration created the Environmental Protection Agency (December 1970), signed the Clean Air Act (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972), established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (December 1970), proposed a form of guaranteed minimum income (the Family Assistance Plan, 1969, which Congress did not pass), and presided over the final desegregation of Southern public schools — more schools were desegregated under Nixon than under Johnson or Kennedy. On the other hand, his administration pursued a "Southern strategy" designed to attract former segregationist Democrats to the Republican Party; used the FBI and the IRS against perceived political enemies; maintained an "enemies list" in the White House; and conducted the secret bombing of Cambodia in the face of congressional ignorance.
He appointed four Supreme Court justices — Warren Burger (Chief Justice, 1969), Harry Blackmun (1970), Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist (both 1971) — who shifted the Court from the liberal activism of the Warren era, though the Burger Court went on to decide Roe v. Wade (1973) and United States v. Nixon (1974) against the administration's expected positions.
| Year | Domestic event |
|---|---|
| 1970 | Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA created |
| 1971 | Nixon imposes wage and price controls; ends Bretton Woods gold standard |
| 1972 | Title IX (equal access to education for women); Nixon visits China |
| 1973 | Oil embargo begins October; Roe v. Wade in January; Paris Peace Accords in January |
| 1974 | Nixon resigns 9 August; Ford pardons Nixon 8 September |
Nixon faced re-election in 1972. He was expected to win: the Democratic primary had produced Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a candidate from the anti-war left whose campaign was underfunded and poorly organised. Nixon's own organisation, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, widely known by its acronym CREEP), was the opposite: lavishly funded, centrally disciplined and, as events would demonstrate, willing to operate outside the law.
On the night of 17 June 1972, five men were arrested at approximately 2.30 a.m. inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office and residential complex in Washington, DC. They were carrying photographic equipment, electronic surveillance devices and approximately 2,300insequentially−numbered100 bills. They were well-dressed, wearing suits and rubber surgical gloves. Two of them, James McCord and E. Howard Hunt, had connections to the CIA; a third, Bernard Barker, had a notebook whose address book included the telephone number of the White House.
The White House's immediate response was denial. On 18 June 1972 the press secretary Ron Ziegler described the event as a "third-rate burglary attempt". On 22 June 1972, asked whether anyone in the White House had any knowledge of the break-in, Nixon replied: "No, I can say categorically… that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident." That statement, repeated in various forms over the following year, was the foundation of what became known as the cover-up.
Nixon won the election on 7 November 1972 by one of the largest margins in American history. He carried 49 states, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, and took around 61 per cent of the popular vote.
Two young reporters at The Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, were assigned to cover the arraignment of the five burglars on the morning of 17 June 1972. Over the following months they filed a sequence of stories that slowly established the break-in as one incident in a wider campaign of political sabotage funded by a secret White House slush fund. They relied on documents, on testimony from former CRP officials and, famously, on a senior anonymous source whom Woodward referred to by the codename "Deep Throat" — later disclosed, in 2005, to have been W. Mark Felt, then Associate Director of the FBI.
Other news organisations, notably The New York Times and Time magazine, joined the investigation in late 1972 and 1973. The Sunday-morning television programmes and the nightly news followed.
The Senate established a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, in February 1973. Its televised hearings, broadcast from May to August 1973, drew an audience of around 85 per cent of American households at some point. Ervin's folksy courtroom manner and the committee's systematic interrogation of witnesses turned the scandal into a public spectacle.
The decisive disclosure came on 16 July 1973. The former Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield, asked a seemingly routine question by the committee's minority counsel Fred Thompson, testified that Nixon had installed a voice-activated tape-recording system in the Oval Office, in the Cabinet Room, at Camp David and in his private office in the Executive Office Building. From that moment, the questions in the investigation became simple: what did the tapes contain, and would the committee be allowed to hear them?
In May 1973 the Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law School professor and former Solicitor General. Cox subpoenaed a specific set of nine tapes. On 20 October 1973 Nixon ordered Richardson to dismiss Cox; Richardson resigned rather than comply, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. The Solicitor General, Robert Bork, carried out the dismissal. The events became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Public outrage produced more than 50,000 telegrams to the White House in 48 hours and forced Nixon to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who took up precisely the same subpoenas.
One of the nine subpoenaed tapes, a recording of a 20 June 1972 conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, contained an 18½-minute gap. Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified that she had accidentally erased part of the tape while answering the telephone; the resulting photograph of her contorted attempt to demonstrate the manoeuvre — foot on a pedal while stretching to a telephone — became one of the symbols of the scandal. Forensic analysis concluded that the tape had been erased in several overlapping operations.
On 24 July 1974 the Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon (decided 8–0, with Rehnquist recused), ruled unanimously that the President was not above a criminal subpoena and that the tapes must be handed over. Among the tapes released was a recording of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on 23 June 1972 — six days after the break-in — in which Nixon instructed Haldeman to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation. This was the "smoking gun" tape: direct evidence of criminal obstruction of justice by the President.
The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Peter Rodino, had been conducting formal impeachment proceedings since early 1974. On 27–30 July 1974 the committee approved three articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. The smoking-gun tape became public on 5 August 1974. Republican leaders, including Senator Barry Goldwater, visited the White House on 7 August and told Nixon that his support in the Senate had collapsed to a handful of votes.
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