Nixon's resignation - 9 August 1974

Nobody has ever denied America a gift for melodrama in its history as well as its literature, but I’ve noticed there’s an equally reliable and lamentable tendency in Europe to report even the gravest American political upheaval as some sort of comic horror film.

Watergate, it’s true, started out as an almost absurd late night movie – a raid two summers ago on one of the two political parties’ headquarters by six men claiming that they were saving the country from a takeover by Fidel Castro. In the beginning indeed, Watergate was freely called here the Watergate Caper; and once the men were caught, tried and imprisoned, everybody breathed again. Not least the President who said that the culprits had been punished and that was the end of the affair.

Through the summer of the 1972 presidential campaign, very few people knew more or suspected more to justify what seemed at the time the preposterous charge of the democratic candidate Senator George McGovern that Watergate was a symptom of the most corrupt presidential administration in 50 years, and he was thinking then of the money-grubbing and bribery scandals of President Harding’s regime in the '20s. A little later on, Senator McGovern said this was the most scandalous regime in American history.

Well presidential campaigns are never noted for sober language and nothing much more was heard about it until it came out that one at least of the burglars had been a close adviser of the president. That’s when the president made his first public statement assuring everybody that nobody in, or ever connected with, the White House had anything to do with it. And then those two young reporters from the Washington Post started to dig and found that the real pile of dirt – enormous sums of hush money – lay, so to speak, in the basement of the White House.

In all the intervening public airing of this malodorous affair, we have to admit that there’s been a wealth of melodramatic and even comic detail. But as the blame began to be placed more and more at the door of the White House, we also came to see that the deepening suspicions about President Nixon’s inner circle bewildered the American people, brought the American system into contempt abroad, and threatened, as they still do, the strength of the North American Treaty Alliance, the ability of the United States to bargain about arms with the Soviet Union. Threatened, in a word, the defence of Europe.

Now long before these fears were widely dispersed among sensible men, some newspapers – both here and abroad – began to jump the gun and talk about impeachment. They inferred and actually welcomed the possibility of impeachment from a riot of rumour and uncorroborated testimony. For the longest time, it was the unsupported testimony of one man, John Dean. Most of these gun jumpers here were already sworn enemies of Mr Nixon, especially liberal papers and commentators who, when the same roughshod inferences about their friends were being drawn by the late Senator McCarthy, howled in protest about the scoundrelism of damning a man before he could defend himself or assuming a man’s guilt on the basis of his indictment by a grand jury.

Well we did go through a disreputable period when McCarthyism was again the weapon, but it was attached to the other foot. And then the digging went deeper and the dirt piled up and it became plain as a stink bomb that most of the smell was coming from the White House and impeachment became a possibility and then, in the past few months, a probability.

If the American people floundered for a painfully long time in a fog of bewilderment and cynicism, they were brought back to a sense of the toughness of their system and the responsibility of the Congress by the recent and, as it turned out, the decisive public hearings of the House Judiciary Committee. These were the hearings that ought to have been televised at length abroad for I believe they would have shown that, in a crisis of power, the federal system has serious and effective weapons which make the people of the United States and their elected representatives sovereign, and only the people.

Not many Americans, I believe, could tell you offhand what the House Judiciary Committee is about. They may know from the textbooks that it’s the body empowered to screen new laws, to look into (on behalf of the Congress) any legal dispute between the other branches of government that might affect the constitutional power of the Congress. It also is given the job of drafting articles of impeachment of a president, a vice president or a federal judge. It is, you might say, the DA, the district attorney, of the Congress. It prepares the case, or it says there is no case.

Now since there has only been one case of presidential impeachment since the Republic began, naturally none of us on the outside has ever seen the judiciary committee at work. And I’m always in two minds about the wisdom of televising the proceedings of any national legislature, but I’m certain that the decision to let the judiciary committee’s hearings be televised – not in part, but, as we say, gavel to gavel – was not only wise, but was God sent.

Here we saw 38 men and women, all of them experienced lawyers, talking, debating with good temper, cogently, often subtly, discussing the grounds for impeachment far more thoughtfully than most newspaper editorials anywhere have done.

The great fear that many people had was that the committee would be seen as a simple two-way mirror. If you’re a Democrat, you look at things one way; if you’re a Republican, another way. The first debates deepened this fear in many people because the votes to recommend each article of impeachment seemed to follow the party bias.

It was possible for last-ditch Republicans to harp on their theme that the whole of Watergate was a Democratic plot, but then once the drafting of the articles was done and the committee began to argue over them and amend them, it became pretty clear that the opponents of impeachment had, to put it mildly, a point.

From mountains of testimony, from the vast and murky evidence of the presidential tapes, they all agreed that the president had demeaned himself as a man, that the tone of his discussions with his aides was vulgar, tricky, and lamentable in the highest officer of the land. But they held to the point that a man might be vulgar, devious, even foul-mouthed, even personally immoral, even dishonest, but unless he was dishonest in the actual performance of his presidential duties – in other words, unless he had failed in the oath he takes on the day of his inauguration, the oath faithfully to execute the laws of the United States – he might still not have committed an impeachable offence. Inference from all that testimony was not enough.

There was no clear, they said, direct evidence, nor testimony, that the president knew about Watergate or had tried to cover it up before the date he said he’d first heard about it, 22 March 22 1973. They stuck with this point. But the seriousness and fairness of the committee appeared when the Democratic legal counsel drew up two articles of impeachment: one, that the president had evaded income taxes; the other that he’d lied to the Congress about the secret bombing of Cambodia.

Now it’s difficult for a public man to keep track of all the details, the allowances, the exemptions he may claim on his income tax. We are all at the mercy of a tax accountant or a lawyer. They decided, wisely I think, to give the president the benefit of the doubt.

On the secret bombing of Cambodia, they began to think of Kennedy’s entirely secret plan to invade Cuba. The fact that it failed does not exonerate him from the secret assumption of a power that the Constitution denies him. This, too, seemed very dangerous ground, so Democrats swung over against it and it was defeated.

On the main charge that the president had obstructed justice, some Republicans swung over. You know if you hear of a felony and don’t go to a judge or a policeman and report it, you are liable to a criminal conviction. The committee decided there was enough evidence to warrant recommending that article of impeachment to the house, and the first count of the house when the hearings were over, private count, showed that the president was pretty certain to have a large majority against him.

Still, there was for ten members of the committee out of 38 that missing link – incontrovertible proof that the president knew about Watergate and had tried to suppress the knowledge of it before 22 March 1973.

And then this week, it came as undeniable as a summer lightning storm. The Supreme Court, you recall, ordered him to give to the courts more tapes. His lawyer heard them and was amazed. He’d never been told what was in them, and he told the president that if he didn’t release them, one in particular – he, the lawyer – would quit the case.

So with ghastly reluctance, the president released the thunderbolt, the tape on which he clearly heard about Watergate and then ordered Haldeman to get the CIA to stop the FBI investigating it – positively, clearly, in pretty rough language. The date of that talk was 23 June 1972, only six days after the break-in, nine months before the president claimed he first heard about it.

In itself it is damning in the extreme, but it also casts a new and damning light on many, many ambiguities of the tapes already out. He knew. He covered up. He lied steadily and unblinkingly to the press, to many a public audience, to the people.

Within 24 hours, the ten holdouts on the judiciary committee, Republicans and some Southern Democrats, reversed themselves and said they would now vote for impeachment. The head count in the house showed an overwhelming majority against him. His support in the Senate dwindled below the one-third he would need to save him.

So now he could resign and assure himself of $156,000 a year pension and allowances, or be impeached, convicted and have $18,000 pension as an old Congressman and an old sailor. He could still face criminal prosecution once he was restored to ordinary citizenship, so he might bargain for immunity, as Vice President Agnew successfully did. He might go on believing, against all the omens, that he’d salvage one-third of the Senate.

These were the awful alternatives he faced as the leading conservatives in the Senate met to decide whether to tell him he had to go. And the rest you know.

In the enormous reverberation of his downfall, we should remember that what doomed him in the end was the 8-0 verdict of the Supreme Court three weeks ago that he must deliver up what turned out to be the fatally incriminating tape.

It was the assurance the country has sadly needed that, in any showdown about the supreme power in the land, the court, representing the people of the United States, is supreme and not the president, whoever he is.

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