Nixon's resignation speech, August 1974

It's hard not to begin this talk with one of the most expressive of human sounds: a long, happy sigh, followed by two cheers for Gerald Ford. Not three. Not just yet. All incoming presidents get two cheers for the honeymoon. The third is reserved for a little later on, for that marriage between the president and the Congress, which President Ford yearned for in his address to both houses.

I don't want to crab things at the start, but it might as well be said now as later that the third cheer is never heard because, unlike the makers of a parliamentary system, the makers of the federal system arranged that the president and the Congress should be not bride and groom but natural enemies. After what the old colonials had been through, with the executive power of an eighteenth-century king, they were almost morbidly concerned to create a regular watchdog over the president, much more wary than the House of Commons is ever expected to be with the prime minister. And on four days in the spring of 1787 they discussed what you'd do with a president who takes to himself dangerous or criminal power. If they'd had tapes of that four-day debate, they would be wonderful to hear just now. Anyway, the writers of the constitution devised, to their satisfaction, a provision for removing a president and, after 187 years of all sorts of presidents and every sort of turmoil, including a civil war, the provision was used. 

It took two years from a short item in the papers about some comic burglary in Washington to the blinding headline, 'Nixon Resigns'. Two years for the ocean of literature on Watergate to be distilled into a single recording of a few minutes' telephone conversation between President Nixon and his closest advisor, Haldeman, in which, simply, sometimes blasphemously, the president expressed his alarm that the FBI was already on to the Watergate burglary and might trace it to the White House, in which he heard, and cursed, the rumour that his Attorney General Mitchell had known about Watergate and perhaps ordered it, in which he, thereupon, in tough, almost gangster language, ordered Haldeman to get hold of the head of the CIA and tell him to get the FBI to call off its investigation. 

The dynamite charge in this conversation was the simple fact that it took place on 23 June 1972, only six days after the burglary had taken place. Why did Nixon release this tape? Because he had to. Because he'd kept it from his lawyer. And when the Supreme Court ordered the president to give it up, the lawyer heard it for the first time, was stunned, and threatened to resign. Now, if he'd done that and was called later, either in the impeachment proceedings or in the coming Watergate cover-up trial, he would have had to say what he knew, or run the risk of a criminal charge. So, the president had to release the tape. And he added a pathetic hope that the house and the Senate would see it, as he put it, 'in perspective'. Well, they were able to do that right away, because, suddenly, the only perspective that mattered was the perspective of the two years between June of '72 and August of '74, during which it was now as plain as a red rag to a bull that the president had lied in every public statement about Watergate, every press conference, every speech. 

The conservative Republicans in the Senate, who had manned the last barricade on Nixon's side, and doggedly insisted they wanted positive, direct evidence that the president knew about Watergate before March 1973, well, now they had it. And, now that the man was down and almost out, the first gesture of compassion came from the only black man in the Senate. Senator Brooke of Massachusetts, on the morning the president was to make his last speech from the White House, said he would offer a resolution, presumably to be followed by a similar resolution in the house, promising that Congress would grant the president immunity from all further prosecution. Senator Brooke knew enough not to propose a law. The Congress cannot do that. It would be bypassing or violating the authority of the courts. But there's nothing technically against a joint resolution expressing the sense of Congress. Unfortunately, Senator Brooke did not check with the party leaders on both sides. They, and their counterparts in the house, were quick to say before the speech that it was beyond the power of Congress even to suggest to the courts that they would be generous not to act. And Senator Brooke recovered from this apparent gaffe by saying that his offer was predicated on the assumption that the departing president's speech would be contrite, full of penitence and apology, and would ask the forgiveness and the prayers of the American people he had betrayed. 

With this in mind, we were all the more curious to know if Mr Nixon, such a master of rhetoric and piety and moral zeal, would so drastically change his spots and beg for mercy and charity. But I don't think that anyone, except those who have known and watched him very closely in his Washington life for the past 28 years, could guess at the extraordinary sermon we were to hear: full of ringing declarations of bravery, quotations from Theodore Roosevelt about spending oneself in a worthy cause, ending with a pledge to go on, daring greatly, and to work for the great causes he had dedicated himself to, 'so long as I have breath of life in my body'. 

When it was over, one can only say, in all charity, that the network commentators were stunned, or, for the moment, bemused by the tune they'd heard so often from men who had fought noble causes and lost them. He sounded, somebody said, like Adlai Stevenson on the night he conceded his defeat by Eisenhower. The gallant loser in a great cause. And then Senators came on the air, and Nixon's opponent in the '68 campaign, Hubert Humphrey, the ageing Democratic liberal, said, incredibly, 'that it was a noble speech on the highest level of statesmanship'. 

Well, there was one voice and, so far as I heard, one voice only that spoke for, I'm convinced, millions of Americans aghast at a speech of breathtaking gall. I ought to mention his name. He is Roger Mudd, of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He's a blue-eyed, virile looking man, with shortish hair and a look of agreeable surprise. After the Nixon speech was over, he had a look of total bafflement and incredulity. Not only could he not believe what he'd heard from the president, he couldn't believe the indulgent things that were being said by his colleagues. What had Nixon said about Watergate? Nothing, but the hint that he'd made a mistake of judgement. Not that he'd plotted, conspired, obstructed justice, lied, was aware of bribes and hush money, that he'd used the two chief intelligence agencies of the government to cover up a plot he publicly pretended to abhor. 

And why had he been forced out? There was not even a hint that he had been. He'd mentioned only that he had lost his political base in Congress. Well, most presidents, especially after the off-year Congressional elections, lose that. But Mr Nixon made it seem, as Roger Mudd put it, that for some obscure reason he wouldn't go in to, a bunch of craven politicians in the house had deserted him. Too bad after all that dedication to splendid causes. 

There are, it seems to me, two explanations of Mr Nixon's extraordinary final speech. Either he is, and has been all along, a man without a conscience who genuinely believes, and there are such people, that what he does, however dark and devious, is done for a worthy end. Or he was deliberately doing what he'd advised Mr Agnew to do in his dark hour. 'Never give in! Never admit you're down!' If that was it, then it's possible that, once again, Mr Nixon has been too smart for his own good. If he could have shown, at the end, a truly contrite heart, a humble air, it might have given pause to the courts, to Special Prosecutor Mr Jaworski in particular, who is still charged with tracking down the Watergate wrongdoers. And to Judge Sirica, who is to preside over the coming Watergate cover-up trial. That's supposed to start next month and some of the defendants have already asked for a stay because of the new evidence, uncovered by the tapes that incriminate Mr Nixon. 

There are 35 men indicted or already convicted of crimes connected with the cover-up. And, to them, surely, the main fact about the transfer of power from Nixon to Ford is that President Nixon is now Mr Nixon and therefore an ordinary citizen who, according to the constitution, is quite liable to prosecution for crimes in the ordinary way. Mr Jaworski would be well within his rights in summoning a Grand Jury and, on the basis of the new and damning tapes, asking them to indict the man who could not be indicted as president. And, quite apart from the move to see Mr Nixon come to trial which, by the way, had strong backing at the American Bar Association's Annual Convention this week, there is the question of the feelings and the probable strategy of some of the main defendants in the coming trial. Haldeman is one. Mitchell another. Dare a jury send them to jail for conspiring to obstruct justice when it can be shown that they were the pawns controlled by the king himself? It seems inevitable, very likely anyway, that these men, who did what they did on the orders of the president, would want to have Mr Nixon called as a witness in their defence. One defendant has already got out a subpoena to that end. We're only within earshot of what could turn out to be a legal blockbuster. It's muffled from us now in the breaking waves of applause for President Ford, and the knowledge, after the most grilling investigation ever done on one man by the FBI – it was done when Mr Nixon nominated him as vice president after Agnew had to quit – the knowledge that, whatever else Ford is, he is a plain, forthright, decent and blamelessly honest man. 

The impulse to cheer prompts, among many people, the complimentary impulse to forgive and forget. To say that Nixon and his wife and children have suffered the supreme humiliation and should be left alone. If he were alone in his crimes, so, indeed, he should. But there is, for instance, John Dean, in prison who, it now appears, spoke the truth from the start. There are those 35 others. They, too, have wives and children, and jobs gone forever. And they may not all be overcome by the milk of human kindness when they think of Mr Nixon, secure in his mansion at San Clemente, with the taxpayers' blessing of $156,000 a year, for life. 

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.