On the 50th anniversary of his resignation, we can see Nixon as a tragic figure
Aug. 8, 1974, was a Thursday, and had it been a routine summer night, families across the country would have settled in to watch repeat episodes of “The Waltons” or “The Streets of San Francisco,” or maybe they would have tuned in to “The Mac Davis Show” or “Dean Martin’s Comedy World.”
All that programming was shoved aside, though, for an event that was grim and, at the same time, reassuring.
At 9:01 p.m., President Richard Nixon started an Oval Office address, reading it off sheets of paper. He spoke vaguely about losing his political base, and touched on what he called “the Watergate matter.” He also proclaimed, “I have never been a quitter.”
But then he stated, just a few moments later, that he was indeed quitting, that his resignation would be effective at noon the next day, and his vice president, Gerald Ford, would become commander in chief. After he was sworn-in, Ford proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
The details of that prolonged bad dream are now sketchy to the generations that have been born and have come of age since Nixon exited the stage, and the crimes that Nixon was accused of – in a nutshell, trying to obstruct the investigation of a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee carried out by burglars secretly working for his campaign – have perhaps lost their power to shock. It’s also worth noting that had a reel-to-reel tape machine not been recording every one of Nixon’s Oval Office utterances, he might well have been able to finish out his term.
The Watergate scandal that toppled Nixon was just one of a series of blows that were inflicted on America in the 1960s and 1970s. It followed the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnam, the collapse of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, urban and campus unrest, and the oil crisis sparked by the Arab-Israeli war. Even after Nixon was safely retired in California, there was more tumult to come – stagflation, the hostages in Iran and the collapse of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
Nixon’s resignation was grim because no president had ever had to step down because the sheriff’s posse was at his door. But it was reassuring because the system worked. Truly, no man was above the law.
Until his death in 1994, Nixon worked diligently to repair his reputation, and the half-century since his presidency ended has given historians time to evaluate it. In a ranking of White House occupants released for President’s Day this year, Nixon came in at No. 35, sandwiched in between Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. This actually is something of an improvement for Nixon – in the years after Watergate, it was not uncommon to find him lumped in with James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson at the bottom of the list.
Nixon does indeed deserve credit for substantial accomplishments. The opening to China occurred during his tenure, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency. The voting age was lowered to 18 on his watch, and the military draft ended. He signed Title IX in 1972, which kicked off a whole new era for women in college sports, and signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If these were the cornerstones of Nixon’s legacy, he would probably move up in the presidential rankings.
But he needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War and was undone by his own paranoia and corruption. In the end, Richard Nixon was a tragic figure.
“I gave ’em a sword,” he remarked later. “And they stuck it in, and twisted it with relish. And if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”