President Richard M. Nixon announces his resignation: 8 August 1974 Posted on: 8 August 2014 Nixon says goodbye to White House Staff (Ollie Atkins, Wikimedia Commons)
The most powerful government ever to fall as a result of American covert action was the administration of Richard Nixon Christopher Andrew, For The President’s Eyes Only
Forty years ago, on the evening of Thursday, 8 August 1974, the 37th President of the United States addressed the nation in a television broadcast and announced that he was resigning with effect from noon the following day. On 9 August, Vice President Gerald Ford—who had himself only taken office in October 1973 when the previous incumbent had resigned when charged with bribery, conspiracy and tax fraud—succeeded to the most powerful job in the world. Political Ruin So ended the process of political ruin that began with the discovery in June 1972 of a burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington, carried out by ham-fisted covert operatives whose activities were traced back to the Republican White House and eventually to the President himself, despite elaborate efforts at concealment and misdirection. Investigations revealed a complex web of dirty tricks and covert operations authorised by Nixon and his close advisers, implicating all organs of the US government and intelligence establishment, and dating back long before Watergate. Now, as Jonathan Schell wrote in an illuminating series of New Yorker articles in 1975: ‘The body of secret information which had begun to build up in the White House as far back as the Kennedy years had grown to a size that was unmanageable within the framework of a Constitutional democracy.’ Incriminating tape recordings The Supreme Court ruled at the end of July 1974 that executive privilege was not unlimited, and that Nixon must surrender incriminating tape recordings—recordings he himself had ordered, obsessed with memorialising every detail of his presidency; he employed an army of ‘anecdotists’ as well as taking his own notes. The contents of the tapes finally destroyed Nixon’s credibility and led most of his Congressional supporters to vote in favour of impeachment. Even Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, National Security Adviser and close friend, had told him on 6 August that he should go: an impeachment trial would paralyse foreign policy and demean the Presidency.
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