Reliving Watergate
What should we learn from the one time a president was held accountable?
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Here’s what happened over the week ahead in American history…
August 8
1863: Tennessee's military governor Andrew Johnson frees his personal slaves, a date that came to be celebrated as Freedom Day in the state
1968: The Republican National Convention in Miami Beach nominates Richard Nixon for president
1974: President Richard Nixon announces he will resign at 12 pm the next day
1996: President Bill Clinton gives a startling announcement about a rock — ALH84001 — that seems to indicate the presence of life on Mars.
August 9
1890: The Daughters of the American Revolution hold their first meeting.
August 10
1776: Word of the United States Declaration of Independence reaches London
1821: Missouri is admitted as the 24th US state
1846: The Smithsonian is founded
1993: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice
August 11
1972: The last US ground combat troops depart South Vietnam
1892: Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden is arrested in Fall River, Massachusetts on two counts of murder
August 12
1867: President Andrew Johnson defies Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin Stanton
1922: Frederick Douglass' home in Washington, D.C. is officially dedicated as a national museum
August 13
1942: The Manhattan Project is officially created
1950: President Harry Truman gives military aid to Bảo Đại’s Vietnamese regime
1993: The US Court of Appeals rules Congresspeople must save all E-Mail
2014: Deaths from Ebola pass 1,000 in four West African nations. Over the summer and fall fears about Ebola would grow around the world and in the US
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more. This week is Nicole Hemmer’s turn at the typewriter.
Richard Nixon was always a parsimonious eater. His breakfasts were typically spare and health-conscious: wheat germ, fruit, some cottage cheese or yogurt. But one morning on this week in 1974, he decided to indulge, ordering up corned beef and a poached egg from the White House chef. After breakfast, he signed perhaps the most important document of his presidency: a one-line letter that read simply, “I hereby resign the office of the President of the United States.” A few hours later, he was on a flight to California when, somewhere over Missouri, the plane’s call sign changed from Air Force One to SAM 27000. It no longer had a president aboard.
Nixon’s resignation, announced the day before he officially stepped down, remains a touchstone for presidential accountability. The Watergate scandal, a mix of crimes and cover-ups exposed throughout 1973 and 1974, still shapes the way most Americans think about how presidential wrongdoing is exposed and how accountability is meted out. As evidence of criminality mounts, public and political support vanishes and the president, unable to sustain his legitimacy, slinks away to exile.
It’s a sturdy, sticky model, which is why Watergate is so frequently invoked when presidents are accused of crimes and violations of their oath. But it’s also a model that has never been replicated. Plenty of presidents have faced serious investigations: Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton and his financial dealings in the Whitewater controversy, Donald Trump and his multiple impeachments and now felony convictions. But even in a case like Iran-Contra, where multiple high-level administration officials were indicted and explosive evidence of crimes were revealed, the accountability mechanisms left the president untouched. And more than that, those officials received pardons from George H.W. Bush in his last few weeks in office.
I think about this often, because Watergate still looms so large in our political discourse. We want it to be a model for how accountability should work; instead it’s an exception that shows how much work needs to be done to hold government officials accountable to the laws they enact, enforce, and interpret.
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Just catching up on this now. I've always wondered why Nixon's resignation letter was addressed to the Secretary of State (Kissinger). Do you know why?