Richard Milhous Nixon

Nixon, Richard Milhous (9 Jan. 1913-22 Apr. 1994), thirty-seventh president of the United States, was born in Yorba Linda, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the second of five sons born to Frank Nixon, who ran a grocery store in Whittier, California, and Hannah Milhous. His mother's Quaker views and emotional restraint countered to a degree his father's combative and volatile nature: as an adult Nixon exhibited both characteristics. Hard work came naturally to him. He succeeded through perseverance rather than brilliance. A good student because he applied himself, Nixon excelled scholastically at both Whittier High School and Whittier College. His special talent was debating, although he doggedly tried to make "first string" on his high school and college football teams. These interests helped him develop skills he later used as a politician: perseverance and rhetorical attack. They also reinforced his combative, aggressive personality.

Nixon won a scholarship to Duke Law School in 1934, and graduated third in his class in 1937. After failing to receive an offer from a prestigious eastern law firm, Nixon practiced in Whittier from 1937 until 1942. During that time he courted and married Thelma Catherine Patricia "Pat" Ryan (Pat Nixon), whom he met during the rehearsal of a play after she moved to Whittier to teach high school commercial subjects. Even though as a young, successful lawyer he was one of Whittier's most eligible bachelors, they did not become engaged or married until three years later in 1940. They had two children.

In 1942 Pat and Richard Nixon moved to Washington, where Nixon first worked in the Office of Price Administration. Disillusioned by the red tape of the federal bureaucracy, he obtained a commission in the navy, serving in the South Pacific from 1942 to 1946, and left with the rank of lieutenant commander.

 
 
Early Political Career

Nixon's years as a politician before becoming president were peppered with controversy. Under the direction of Murray Chotiner, a campaign consultant for such Republican luminaries as Earl Warren and William Knowland, Nixon used Hollywood media campaigns and political packaging techniques (now considered commonplace) complete with innuendos about his opponents' presumed Communist sympathies. Such tactics proved successful in 1946, when he defeated five-term liberal Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis, and again in 1950, when he ran against the equally liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas for a U.S. Senate seat. These early congressional and senate races earned Nixon the reputation among Democrats as an opportunistic product of the Cold War, a "political polarizer" who would do anything to win an election.

In 1948 he proposed the Mundt-Nixon bill, which would have required individual Communists and Communist organizations to register with the federal government. In that same year, Nixon, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, initiated the successful attempt to discredit Alger Hiss by exposing his subversive connections with the Communist party in the 1930s. Ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers had claimed that he had known Hiss to be a Communist agent, accusations that Hiss emphatically denied. Nixon's painstaking and publicity-seeking tactics contributed to Hiss's indictment and subsequent conviction for perjury on 21 January 1950. The episode catapulted Nixon to national prominence and earned him the undying enmity of many liberals and partisan Democrats.

National attention over the Hiss case brought Nixon to the attention of Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for president in 1952, and won Nixon the vice presidential nomination. But almost immediately Nixon found himself in trouble when it was charged that he had created a slush fund of around $18,000 to further his political career. By going on nationwide television on 23 September, Nixon successfully defended himself and forced Eisenhower to keep him on the Republican ticket. In this broadcast he presented embarrassingly detailed information about his family's finances, including the fact that his wife Pat did not own a fur coat but only "a respectable Republican cloth coat." The speech is probably best remembered, however, because of his maudlin declaration that his children would keep a dog named Checkers, even though the cocker spaniel had been a political gift. The "Checkers" speech has been so satirized and condemned that it is often forgotten that it marked Nixon's debut as a successful television personality. Although what he said was denounced for its emotionalism, its illogical assertions, and implicit attacks on Democrats, he had already tried out much of it before live audiences with good results. In its uncut version, it still makes for powerful television and shows Nixon at his debating best--looking directly into the camera and delivering an effective, engaging, and emotional speech.

 
 
Service as Eisenhower's Vice President

During his years as Eisenhower's vice president, from 1953 until 1960, Nixon campaigned widely for Republican candidates and in the process obtained the unenviable reputation of being the party hatchet man, especially because of his attacks on Adlai Stevenson, twice Eisenhower's Democratic opponent. As a result, elements within the press, many academics, and liberals in general found it easier to criticize the conservatism of the Eisenhower administration by forgoing attacks on a popular president and concentrating instead on the personality and campaign tactics of his vice president. In the process they overlooked Nixon's consistent support for educational reform and civil rights.

Nixon's apprenticeship under Eisenhower left him with strong impressions about how the cabinet in general and the National Security Council should be run. At the time, however, he remained outside President Eisenhower's private group of advisers. Occasionally humiliated by Ike in public, Nixon bided his time and mended his own political fences by courting both moderate and conservative Republicans and creating a "centrist" image of himself among supporters within his own party, which ensured his presidential nomination in 1960. By his own efforts, Nixon upgraded the office of vice president and gave it a much more meaningful and institutionalized role than his predecessors had. Nixon's public image as a leader benefited when Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955, a bout with ileitis in 1956, and a stroke in 1957. Throughout these illnesses, Nixon handled himself with considerable tact, presiding over nineteen cabinet sessions and twenty-six meetings of the National Security Council. Following his stroke, Eisenhower worked out a plan with Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Attorney General William Rogers to create the office of acting president in the event he became incapacitated from illness. This formal agreement substituted under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for a constitutional amendment (not ratified until 1967) granting the vice president full authority to govern when the president could not discharge the powers and duties of his office. Nixon's stature was further enhanced by several well-publicized trips abroad on behalf of the president. In 1958 he traveled to Latin America; in Caracas anti-American protesters stoned his car. The next year Nixon confronted Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in an impromptu and much-noticed "kitchen" debate in Moscow.

 
 
Unsuccessful Campaign for the Presidency (1960)

Nixon's unsuccessful campaign for the presidency against John F. Kennedy in 1960 was fraught with ironies and political lessons he never forgot. Repeatedly the press described Kennedy as a "youthful front runner" representing a new generation, even though Nixon was only four years older than his 43-year-old opponent. In the course of the campaign, Kennedy successfully projected an image since found wanting: that of a devoted father and family man in robust health, an intellectual who was seemingly less of a cold warrior than Nixon. The fact that Nixon's congressional and vice presidential records on social issues, especially civil rights, and foreign policy were more liberal than Kennedy's were lost in the Democrats' media blitz.

During the 1960 campaign, Nixon learned the hard way the significant role that television could have in forming impressions and shaping opinion. In his television debates with Kennedy, Nixon won the rhetorical points, but Kennedy won the hearts of the American people. The election proved the closest in U.S. history since Grover Cleveland defeated James G. Blaine in 1884. To his credit Nixon did not challenge this 1960 election that he lost by only 112,000 popular votes, even though such luminaries of the Republican party as Bryce Harlow, Herbert Klein, Len Hall, Thruston Morton, and even Eisenhower, all urged Nixon to contest the results. Many question whether the Democratic candidate legally won Illinois or Texas, whose combined electoral college tally tipped the election in Kennedy's favor, 303 to 219. Moreover, there were confused returns from Alabama, and the closeness of the vote in Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, and Hawaii meant that a shift of less than 12,000 votes would have given Nixon a majority in the electoral college.

Temporarily retiring to private life, Nixon wrote his first book, the bestseller Six Crises (1961). He decided with great reluctance to run for governor of California in 1962, and his defeat prompted his much-quoted remark to reporters that they would not "have Nixon to kick around anymore." Defeat also spurred him to move to New York, where he joined a prestigious law firm. Most important, however, he continued to build bridges between moderate and conservative factions within the Republican party, especially after the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater's overwhelming defeat by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. In the ensuing years, Nixon earned a reputation as a party healer and foreign policy specialist, which resulted in his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1968.

Nixon became his party's standard bearer because of his political moderation, not his extremism. In contrast to the 1960 campaign, circumstances were very much in his favor. The Democratic party was hopelessly divided over the Vietnam War and haplessly led by Hubert H. Humphrey in the wake of Johnson's unexpected refusal to run again, Robert Kennedy's assassination, and George C. Wallace's strong, racially explosive third-party bid. Had President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam and renewed the Paris peace talks before the end of October, Humphrey might have been able to squeeze by Nixon, for the election results proved to be almost as close as they had been in 1960, with Nixon winning by 500,000 popular votes and receiving 301 electoral votes, compared to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace. Contributing to Nixon's success in 1968 was the sharp decline in Democratic strength in the South; from that point on, Republicans could increasingly count on the region for support.

 
 
First Term as President

During his first term Nixon set a fast pace on both domestic and foreign policies. He initiated environmental legislation, attempted reform of both welfare and health care, undertook significant government reorganization, and strengthened the civil rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and women. At first, the Nixon administration outpaced Congress on environmental legislation because it relied on the permit authority in the Refuse Act of 1899 to begin to clean up water supplies before either house formulated comprehensive water pollution enforcement mechanisms. Nixon's Family Assistance Plan (FAP) for drastically reforming welfare--defeated by a combination of liberals and conservatives--was at the time the most progressive put forward by any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. It would have redirected welfare in the United States from the service-oriented program of Aid to Families of Dependent Children (AFDC) to an income-maintenance system for working and nonworking poor families. FAP constituted a negative income tax or guaranteed annual income for all poor households, including those headed by single women.

His administration also compiled an impressive civil rights record through such affirmative action programs as "set-asides" in government contracts and through financing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's enforcement of civil rights acts and guidelines. As president, Nixon only reluctantly undertook desegregation of southern schools after several Supreme Court decisions left him no recourse. Despite his continued opposition to school busing, by the end of 1972 his administration had reduced the number of African-American children attending all-black schools in the South to 8 percent. Nixon's New Economic Policy, moreover, was unprecedented (since World War II) in establishing wage and price controls to curb inflation, and he daringly "floated" the dollar on international currency markets.

At the time the president's significant domestic reforms took a back seat in the public mind to his seemingly dazzling foreign policy accomplishments. Much to the surprise of many who considered him an inveterate cold warrior was his administration's accommodation with the two major Communist powers, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. His broad geopolitical and structural approaches to U.S. diplomacy ushered in a transition period marked by the end of the bipartisan Cold War consensus in Congress. Nixon took advantage of this opportunity to fight the Cold War by other than traditional containment policies. He was the first president to deliver annual State of the World Addresses to Congress.

To effect his "grand design" for the world, Nixon chose Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor whom he scarcely knew, as his special assistant to the president on national security affairs. They soon established so close a relationship that conflicts between Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Kissinger usually ended in favor of the latter. Rogers finally resigned in September 1973, and Kissinger replaced him while retaining his original post.

Shortly after Nixon and Kissinger joined forces, they reorganized the National Security Council, ensuring a White House-centered model for decision-making in foreign policy. The NSC was turned into a series of interdepartmental groups all subjected to review committees headed by Kissinger. This design undercut the preeminence of the State Department by placing the formulation of foreign policy in the White House. Advice from the NSC was not always consistent. In the spring of 1969 it approved the secret bombing of Cambodia, but it recommended no U.S. military response in the EC-121 incident, involving the shooting down of a U.S. Navy plane by North Korea. Nixon also consulted the NSC on ways to keep Taiwan in the United Nations with a "two China" policy; to conduct secret incursions into Cambodia and Laos; to negotiate the détente agreements with the Soviet Union; and to determine Middle Eastern policy as well as policy in Angola and southern Africa in general.

 
 
Improved Relations with China and the Soviet Union

Nixon's successes in improving relations with the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union are often cited as his presidency's most important diplomatic achievements. Both were important components of his grand geopolitical design. Since 1949 the United States had refused to recognize Communist China. Nixon reversed this standard Cold War policy by first ordering a number of unilateral gestures of reconciliation. Normalization of U.S. relations with China was designed to bring this giant Communist segment of the world into the ranks of "civilized" nations. The obvious importance and success of rapprochement were symbolized by the president's trip to the People's Republic in February 1972 with its attendant joint "Shanghai Communiqué." Rapproachment with China laid the foundation for formal diplomatic recognition in 1979 under the Carter administration.

Nixon's attempts to achieve détente with the Soviet Union proved more problematic because it entailed complex changes in established Cold War political and economic policies. Among the motives guiding such changes were the anxiety of avoiding nuclear war, the desirability of building a network of mutually advantageous relationships, and the wish to modify Soviet behavior by ensuring de facto acceptance of international cooperation and competition (sometimes referred to as "competitive coexistence"). Nixon's underlying assumption was that international stability would be enhanced by according the Soviet Union a greater stake in the existing status quo. To a lesser degree détente was a response to the domestic and international economic problems that the United States faced as result of the Vietnamese war. The one thing détente did not represent under the Nixon administration was a continuation of the traditional Cold War policy of containment.

The success of détente depended on the personal interactions among several powerful individuals--and their perceptions of their respective nations' relative strength and the tangible benefits accruing from "relaxed tensions." In May 1972 Nixon traveled to Moscow and signed ten formal agreements with Soviet leaders. They provided for the prevention of military incidents at sea and in the air; scholarly cooperation and exchange in the fields of science and technology; cooperation in health research; cooperation in environmental matters; cooperation in the exploration of outer space; and facilitation of commercial and economic relations. The most controversial agreements, however, consisted of an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an Interim Agreement on the Limitations on Strategic Arms (a continuation of SALT I), and a statement called the Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations. Earlier Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) held in Helsinki in 1969 and Vienna in 1970 had led to the two arms-control documents at the 1972 Moscow summit. One limited the deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs) to two for each country, and another froze the number of offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at the level of those then under production or deployed. Unlike SALT I, the ABM Treaty was of "unlimited duration . . . and not open to material unilateral revision." Until the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the last half of the 1980s, the ABM Treaty essentially succeeded in relegating deployment of conventional ballistic missile defense systems to minor strategic significance.

SALT I, on the other hand, was an agreement of limited, five-year duration and attempted to establish a rough balance or parity between the offensive nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers, despite ongoing "missile gaps" related to specific weapons. SALT I did not stop the nuclear arms race; it recognized that unregulated weapons competition between the two superpowers could no longer be rationally condoned. Freezing further missile buildup, SALT I ensured that when SALT II was signed in 1979 the total American-Soviet missile strength would remain essentially unchanged.

Détente with the USSR soon floundered after Nixon left office. Of equally debatable value was the Nixon Doctrine, issued in 1969, according to which the United States would no longer commit troops to East Asia (and implicitly in other parts of the world). In fact, subsequent administrations engaged in unprecedented arms sales to foreign nations and continued to deploy American troops abroad.

 
 
The Vietnam War

Although Nixon came to office committed to negotiating a quick settlement of the Vietnam War, he ended up expanding and prolonging the conflict in the name of "peace with honor." While gradually withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Vietnam under the policy of so-called Vietnamization, the president allowed Kissinger to initiate secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Begun in August 1969, they were largely unproductive by the time they were made public--over Kissinger's protests--in January 1972. Only marginally better terms were reached in 1973: North Vietnam agreed to allow the greatly weakened South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to remain in power in return for the North's being able to keep troops in place below its border. Whatever gain the United States could claim as a result of that agreement paled beside the loss of an additional 20,552 American lives during the three-year negotiation period. The fatal weakness of the diplomatic arrangement reached in 1973 was evident two years later, in April 1975, when President Gerald Ford was compelled to order the emergency evacuation of the last remaining U.S. troops from Saigon.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger ever admitted that their policies destabilized most of Indochina, leading--in addition to the collapse of South Vietnam--to the massive loss of life and defeat of non-Communist regimes in Laos and Cambodia. With the exception of ending the draft, creating an all-volunteer army, and finally publicly endorsing the return of U.S. POWs as a major condition of peace, practically every action taken by Nixon with respect to Vietnam created resentment, suspicion, and protest from those who opposed the war. Following Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the antiwar movement had grown in intensity rather than diminished. In this polarized atmosphere, Nixon made support of American involvement in the war a matter of patriotism, which he considered to be the attitude of the "silent majority," while antiwar protestors vilified and demonized him.

In general, Nixon's foreign policy did not succeed in the Third World. Both his and Kissinger's indifference and geopolitical calculations resulted in policies that often failed to take into account the economic and social realities of individual nations. For example, U.S. relations with India deteriorated because Pakistan served as the conduit to China in the early secret stages of rapproachment. In turn, this led to Pakistan's suppression of Bangladesh's independence and to India's decision to develop nuclear weapons--all because Nixon and Kissinger decided that the United States "could not let an American/Chinese friend (Pakistan) get screwed in a confrontation" while the Soviets seemed to be allying themselves with India. In his foreign economic policy, Nixon employed far fewer questionable tactics (with the exception of the economic warfare his administration conducted against Salvador Allende's government in Chile in 1971-1973) and followed the counsel of a much broader group of advisers than he did with respect to other aspects of diplomacy.

 
 
Reelection in 1972

Improved public relations tactics, along with economic policies that brought the nation out of a recession, progressive domestic programs, and some personal foreign policy achievements (except for Vietnam) ensured Nixon's reelection in 1972. By choosing the staunchly liberal, antiwar candidate George McGovern, the badly divided Democratic party turned the contest into a rout. To most voters Nixon simply seemed the safest candidate. In fact, Nixon seemed to have achieved the goal of his first inaugural address when he said: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another." He won by a stunning landslide: 520 electoral votes to 17 for McGovern and a margin of almost 18 million popular votes.

During his truncated second term, Nixon undertook few domestic policy initiatives, and most of his efforts in foreign affairs were not successful. In the Middle East, in particular, he and Kissinger pursued a policy that seemed to negate itself: that of stalemate. Early in Nixon's first term, Secretary of State William Rogers and the assistant secretary of state responsible for Middle Eastern affairs, Joseph Sisco, had hammered out a plan that called for a more neutral stance toward Israel and the Arab nations and substantial Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory in return for a contractual peace brokered by the United States and the USSR. Although the Rogers Plan was meant as a realistic proposal to the Soviets, Kissinger met separately with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and told him that the White House was not in fact interested in pursuing the proposal. In October 1969 the Soviet Union officially rejected the Rogers Plan, leaving the Nixon administration with no apparent positive alternative until the aftermath of the October War of 1973, when Israel, with belated U.S. support, devastatingly turned back its enemies and took additional territory. Kissinger at that point undertook what was popularly known as "shuttle diplomacy," traveling back and forth among the Arab nations and Israel. By then, however, the years of stalemate had cost the United States more than Kissinger could ever gain back. Relations with even the best of American friends among the Arab states were further worsened when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed oil exports to the United States in retaliation for American support of Israel during the October War. Domestic consequences followed: during the first months of 1974 the decreased, intermittent availability of car fuel led to long lines at gas stations and public anger at the Arabs.

 
 
Watergate

Meanwhile, a cloud was forming over the Nixon presidency that would eventually overshadow everything else in which the White House was involved. The Watergate affair had its origins in a second break-in, on 17 June 1972, of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex along the Potomac in Washington, D.C. The culprits, caught by Washington metropolitan police, were on the payroll of the president's reelection campaign and ostensibly were seeking to steal or photograph files in an effort to uncover and deflect DNC strategies directed against Nixon. In all, twenty individuals with ties to the president or to his reelection campaign were indicted for crimes related to the break-in and the subsequent attempts to cover up any links to the White House. The cover-up resulted in criminal convictions of some of the president's closest advisers, including his two chief aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman; the counsel to the president, John W. Dean III; a special assistant to the president, Charles Colson; and the president's former attorney general, John Mitchell. Also implicated were prominent Republican party officials. The men actually involved in the break-in, the "Plumbers" as they were called, were largely under Ehrlichman's supervision and had engaged in previous break-ins. Several of the Plumbers--such as E. Howard Hunt, James McCord, and G. Gordon Liddy--were former CIA or FBI agents specifically employed by the White House and paid with Nixon campaign funds to carry out political espionage. They, in turn, hired the four Cubans arrested in the Watergate complex.

Despite multiple investigations by public officials and private individuals, many factual questions about the Watergate incident remain unanswered, and its historical significance is still disputed by scholars. For example, the true reason for the original break-ins at the Watergate office complex remains unknown. Conventional wisdom holds that the burglars were after political intelligence to use against the Democrats in the presidential campaign, even though the DNC had moved its central operation from Washington, D.C., to facilitate organizing its nominating convention in Florida. The scheme of bugging the offices apparently originated with Liddy. The original bugs, however, were not placed in or near the office of the chair of the DNC, Lawrence O'Brien. Instead, they were put in outer offices that had been designated for the work of state party chairmen and the Young Democrats--but were often unoccupied. Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that a call-girl service operated out of these offices and that John Dean indirectly ordered the break-ins to discover whether the name of his future wife might be on a telephone list of prostitutes. Neither this nor any other theory has been satisfactorily documented.

 
 
The Charge of Obstruction of Justice

The Watergate affair, however, encompasses a host of illegalities and unconstitutional acts associated with the Nixon administration, including bribes offered to indicted defendants, the solicitation of illicit campaign contributions, and the compilation of an "enemies list" (with the aim of taking revenge on party or administration figures deemed to be disloyal as well as on outsiders opposed to the president, especially antiwar protesters). Possibly none of the crimes and misdemeanors brought out by the affair would have resulted in the impeachment of the president had not his closest aides and Nixon himself engaged in a cover-up. The charge of obstruction of justice was based on the destruction of incriminating evidence and interference in federal investigations. Even the obstruction charge might not have led to impeachment if the "smoking gun" tape of 23 June 1973 had remained undiscovered; on the tape the president can be heard approving a plan to direct the CIA to request that the FBI halt its investigation into the source of the cash possessed by the Watergate burglars and into the "silence" money promised them by the administration. The tape for 20 June 1973 is equally famous because of a gap of eighteen and a half minutes during which Nixon first discussed Watergate with Haldeman. Although the president's personal secretary was blamed for the erasure, the evidence of her culpability is not conclusive. The recorded conversations between the president and his aides came from 4,000 hours of secret, voice-activated tapes made, at Nixon's behest, in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Old Executive Office building, and Camp David between February 1971 and July 1973.

After the existence of the tapes came to light, the first of several serious constitutional issues arising out of Watergate surfaced. Instead of destroying the tapes, Nixon tried to assert his control over them by claiming executive privilege when Congress and the first Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, requested the originals or unedited transcripts. On 24 July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Nixon that the president could not retain possession, thus significantly limiting executive privilege with regard to presidential documents. By the time the decision was handed down, Nixon had fired Cox in the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of 20 October 1973, over which Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned.

The second constitutional question arising from Watergate concerned the grounds for impeachment. After those directly involved in the 1 June 1972 break-in that launched the affair were convicted on 30 January 1973, they were threatened with extremely heavy sentences by Judge John J. Sirica; one of those convicted, John McCord, then sent the judge a letter, released on 23 March, implicating the Committee for the Re-election of the President (often derogatorily called CREEP) and the White House. By June, when John Dean, who technically had been investigating Watergate for the president, decided to testify before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin (D-N.C.), the president's closest advisers--including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean himself--had already resigned. Once Dean began testifying, the "stonewalling" started to crumble. Constitutional responsibility for sorting through the mounting evidence against the president and his top aides ultimately fell to the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Peter W. Rodino (D-N.J.). In the wake of the Cox firing, it took the House of Representatives until 6 February 1974 to approve an official impeachment inquiry into the president's conduct.

The heart of the case rested on the report of the second Watergate special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, which stated that "beginning no later than March 21, 1973, the President joined an ongoing criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruct a criminal investigation, and commit perjury (which included payment of cash to Watergate defendants to influence their testimony)." In addition, a federal grand jury secretly named Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator because Jaworski had recommended that there be no formal indictment of a sitting president. Most of the other charges against Nixon and his administration, except for questionable campaign contributions and antitrust suits, were not pursued by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force. The WSPF concluded that there was "insufficient evidence and/or substantial legal problems mitigating against . . . bringing . . . criminal charges" for the misuse of federal agencies or mistreatment of antiwar protesters. It also found that the Ervin committee had "exaggerated" the use of federal agencies, such as the Internal Revenue Service, for or against the president's friends and enemies. And the Rodino Committee voted against potential impeachment issues such as the secret bombing of Cambodia and the impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress.

 
 
Nixon's Resignation (1974)

Despite the spectacular revelations at nationally televised hearings of the preceding year, the Senate dragged its feet in attempting to resolve the intensely debated question of impeachment into the summer of 1974. Until just before his hand was finally forced, Nixon could still take solace in his popularity ratings. But on 9 August 1974, following the disclosure of the "smoking gun" tape, the president chose to resign rather than face certain impeachment, despite his assertion that he had been acting in the interests of national security. His claim was that he had wanted to avoid exposing various subversive activities sponsored by the United States against Cuba, activities that several Republican and Democratic administrations had promoted. The extraordinary scene of Richard M. Nixon departing one last time with his family from the White House grounds by helicopter was watched by millions on television. The ex-president, the first to resign from office, maintained a determined smile and at the top of the stairway leading into the craft gave a victory salute to those in attendance.

The constitutional crisis brought about by Watergate precipitated demands for accountability on the part of government officials and for greater access to government information. Congress was soon to act on bills designed to open up the executive branch to public scrutiny and to reform elections and the financing of political campaigns. Hastily drafted and passed, much of the supposedly ameliorative legislation either failed or was ignored by Nixon's successors, as in the case of the War Powers Act, or had unintended negative consequences, as happened with the campaign finance reform measures that led to the creation of political action committees (PACs) and unlimited "soft-money" contributions. As time went by, even the special prosecutor system initiated with Watergate was called into question because of what was perceived as the waste of money on dubious investigations into the conduct of subsequent administrations.

In an effort to put the Watergate affair to rest, at least as it was related to the president who had resigned in disgrace, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, gave him an unconditional pardon on 8 September 1974. Nixon had appointed Ford in October 1973 to be his vice president as the result of another, unrelated scandal that had forced the resignation of Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon's running mate in both 1968 and 1972. (Agnew was found to have accepted money for political favors when he was governor of Maryland.) Freed from any federal criminal or civil liability connected to Watergate, Nixon did not hide in private life. He wrote several books and traveled extensively. Abroad, he remained widely respected for his foreign-policy views; at home, his rehabilitation proceeded slowly. Pat Nixon, his wife of more than four decades, died in 1993.

The following year, Richard Nixon succumbed to a stroke in New York City, his family having honored his living will that extraordinary measures not be taken if he were to suffer a catastrophic disability. At his funeral, prominent Republicans and Democrats alike eulogized him as an elder statesman respected for his expertise in foreign affairs. In popular opinion, however, his name remained synonymous with the Watergate affair and all of its murky, myriad meanings.