The Perfect Storm that Sank the Nixon Presidency
On August 9, 1974, the 37th president of the United States, Richard Nixon, resigned from office. Citing a lack of political support in the Congress, which was moving toward the first impeachment of a president in more than 100 years, Nixon decided that the interests of the nation would be best served by his resignation.
For 50 years, conventional wisdom has held that the break-in of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and subsequent efforts to cover-up the involvement of some staff members of the Committee, and of the White House itself, alone led to the self-destruction of the Nixon presidency.
Yet, in recent years, the conventional wisdom is being reconsidered. Political events over the past decade are prompting a reassessment of whether Richard Nixon would have been able to complete his term of office had the political environment of 1973-4 more closely resembled the current political environment.
It is time to explore the environment in which Richard Nixon sought to save his presidency and to recognize that he never really had a chance to survive the perfect storm that sank his presidency.
The Opposition Congress
On January 20, 1969, a cold winter day in Washington, D.C., Richard Nixon took the oath of office to become the 37th president of the United States. As he stood on a platform erected on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol, sitting behind him were members of the 91st Congress, which had convened 17 days earlier.
Everyone on the platform applauded warmly when the new president was sworn in.
Despite the show of bipartisanship on Inauguration Day, Nixon must have known that he, a Republican, would have to work hard to pass his legislative agenda through the new Congress.
The new president faced a challenge that no new president had confronted since Zachary Taylor swore the same oath to become the 12th president in 1849. For the first time in 120 years – and only the second time in American history – a newly elected president came to office with both houses of the Congress in the control of the opposition party.
The new president had been elected in one of the 20th century’s closest elections. Not surprisingly, he was unable to carry with him a Republican majority in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. But this was to be expected. Since the 73rd Congress took office in 1933, the Democrats had a lock on the Congress. On the day Nixon was inaugurated, the Democrats had controlled Congress for all but four years since 1933. They would maintain control for all five-and-a-half years of the Nixon presidency.
The last time the Republican controlled Congress was in 1955. For 14 years prior to Nixon’s inauguration, no Republican had served as Speaker of the House, Majority Leader of the Senate, or chaired any Congressional committee or subcommittee. And few, if any, had held those leadership positions since 1949.
The Republicans had been in the minority for so long they had become accustomed to being the underdog – with little to no power to control the Congressional agenda, hold hearings, or even enact legislation. One could say they were suffering from a political version of Stockholm syndrome, where they became grateful for any influence the powerful Democratic majority would occasionally allow them.
Nevertheless, Nixon had great success in his first term building bipartisan support for his proposals. Bills to enact the Nixon administration’s agenda for everything from increased worker protection to protecting the environment, from launching a war on cancer to ending the war in Vietnam, and from fighting crime to fighting for increased opportunity for women and minorities, all passed the Congress and came to the president’s desk for signature.
Yet when five burglars connected to the Committee to Re-elect the President were arrested at the Democratic National Committee on June 17,1972, Democrats in the Congress would come to see an opportunity.
At first, what would become known as Watergate attracted very little attention. It certainly didn’t harm Nixon’s re-election. On November 7,1972, he carried 49 states and earned almost 61 percent of the popular vote in winning a second term.
Early in Nixon’s second term, however, increased press attention to the break-in led the United States Senate to establish a committee to investigate Watergate. Starting on May 17, 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee would hold 37 days of hearings. More than 300 hours of the hearings were broadcast on television. An estimated 85 percent of American households watched at least some part of the hearings.
Eight days after the hearings started, Elliot Richardson was sworn in as attorney general. On the same day, he named a Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Cox, who had served as the number three person in the Kennedy Justice Department, quickly assembled a large staff of 70 full-time lawyers. More than a dozen – including many in senior positions on the task force – had served in the Kennedy and Johnson Justice Departments.
Throughout 1973, a growing number of House Democrats drafted resolutions to begin an impeachment inquiry. On October 30, 1973, the House Judiciary Committee, on a strict party line vote, agreed to begin consideration of the impeachment of President Nixon. That was the last time the Republicans would stand together against impeachment of the president. When the full House later voted to authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate whether the president should be impeached, only four Republicans opposed the resolution, with 410 votes in favor.
One of the most aggressive Democrats seeking to remove Nixon from office was New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug. In the fall of 1973, the vice presidency was vacant due to the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Some House Democrats, including Abzug, wanted to delay the confirmation of Gerald Ford as Agnew’s replacement until Nixon could be driven from office. She colorfully told the Speaker of the House, Carl Albert (who would have become president if Nixon left office before Ford became vice president), “Get off your goddamned ass and we can take the presidency.”
Nixon eventually lost the support of most Republicans in Congress and all the Democrats. He resigned rather than put the nation through the first presidential impeachment in more than a century. In future impeachments, however, the president’s party in Congress would stick together.
When President Clinton, a Democrat, was impeached in 1998, every Democrat in the House, except for five, voted against impeachment. When the Senate voted to approve the Articles of Impeachment and remove Clinton from office, not a single Democrat voted guilty. When President Trump was impeached by the House in 2019, not a single Republican voted in favor. In the Senate, just one Republican voted to find Trump guilty. When Trump was again impeached in 2021, 95 percent of the Republicans in the House voted against impeachment. At the Senate trial, 86 percent of the Republicans voted not to convict.
Impeachment is a political act, in which a Congressional majority seeks to remove from office a president of the opposite party. That was true in 1974, and it is true today. Indeed, it resembles a vote of no confidence in a parliamentary system.
Impeachment is not the constitutional act the Founders envisioned to remove an official for only the most grievous violations of their oaths of office – treason, bribery, and other high crimes. It is, instead, what then-Congressman Gerald Ford called it in 1970: “[W]hatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
If the Republicans in Congress in 1974 had stuck together – as the Democrats did during the Clinton impeachment and the Republicans did in the Trump impeachments – President Nixon would have served his full second term.