Nixon and Watergate

Nixon continued to plead innocence. During a speech in front of journalists, the president proclaimed inexplicably: “I am not a crook.” Nixon’s pleas rang hollow though as more facts emerged about what actually happened. Realizing he could no longer tempt the patience of the American people or the halls of Congress, Nixon released transcripts of the tapes, though he still withheld releasing the tapes themselves. The transcripts were heavily edited, but did reveal something of Nixon’s personality to an increasingly suspicious American public. Peppered through the text was the term “expletive deleted,” which needed no explanation. Nixon’s racism and anti-Semitism were also revealed, shocking many Americans who earlier had supported him.

One such transcript featured 18 1/2 minutes that were erased. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Wood claimed she had accidentally erased those 18 1/2 minutes, though forensics later determined that the erasures were done in increments, punching holes in Wood’s claims.

As support for the president plummeted, Nixon’s argument for executive privilege in the case of the United States v. Nixon was struck down by the Supreme Court on July 24, 1974. Nixon had no choice but to release the tapes on July 30th. What was contained in the tapes validated Dean’s version of the events which took place in the weeks and months following the break-in. Rather than face impeachment hearings, Nixon resigned ten days later.

Incoming President Gerald Ford, who had replaced Nixon’s first vice president Spiro Agnew after he resigned because of fraud and corruption charges, pardoned the former president, stating that “At long last, our national nightmare is over.”

Yet the Watergate scandal, following on the heels of the chaos and unrest of the 1960s, had hardened the American electorate and made it more cynical. Woodward and Bernstein would go on to write a bestselling non-fiction account of their investigation, which was later turned into the 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. The two celebrated journalists inspired a generation of young people to enter the profession. A number of men who were members of Nixon’s administration, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others, some of whom left the White House before they could become embroiled in the scandal, continued to have long careers in politics and in the Republican party. Diane Sawyer, who worked in Nixon’s White House, sat in the helicopter that spirited the disgraced president from the White House for the last time. She later became a journalist and news anchorwoman on ABC. Nixon passed away from a stroke in 1994, leaving behind a legacy as thorny and complicated as the man himself. But Frank Wills’s quiet and dutiful contribution to uncovering the break in went largely unsung, even after his death in 2000. Yet one can only imagine what direction history would have taken had Wills not discovered that duct tape on a warm evening in 1972.