What We Can Learn from Nixon’s Resignation

August 6, 2025

On August 9th, 1974, after two years of the Watergate scandal tearing apart the nation, Richard Nixon resigned with this one-sentence letter:

The Watergate saga had begun 26 months earlier, June 17th, 1972—when five burglars were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Dressed in suits, they carried elaborate bugging equipment, cameras, pen-sized tear gas guns, and $2,300 in $100 bills. At their arraignment the next day, the men identified themselves as Cuban exiles and “anti-communists.” One admitted to being ex-CIA. 

Odd as those details were, it all might have been successfully spun as over-zealous Nixon supporters run amok if Washington Post reporters hadn’t noticed a strange notation in one of the burglar’s address book: HH (written like + signs) at street WH beside a White House phone number. This turned out to be for Howard Hunt, the burglars’ handler, and a White House consultant.

That led to unearthing all sorts of “campaign dirty tricks” Nixon’s people were doing to undermine his strongest potential Democratic opponents. Leading those efforts was a 31-year-old attorney and recently returned Vietnam vet, hired to work for Nixon's re-election campaign by a college friend, who just happened to be Nixon's White House appointment secretary.

The stunts ranged from sophomoric pranks, like releasing mice at campaign rallies, to more insidious disinformation, like stealing candidates’ stationary to fake damning letters about other Democrats to weaken them with scandal and eliminate them from the primary race. For example—using stolen letterhead from then front-runner Senator Edmund Muskie to forge and “leak” these lies: that one Democrat primary rival senator was employing call girls, another had fathered an illegitimate baby with a 17-year-old, and that Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm had been confined in a psychiatric hospital.

In November ’72, Nixon defeated George McGovern (a “peacenik” candidate he had hoped to run against) in a historic landslide.

Returned to office, Nixon denied reports of Watergate and election interference as “absurd fiction,” dismissing it as "a 3rd rate burglary" and the shocking “dirty tricks” as efforts of fanatics he claimed to know nothing about.  

He also exploited his power and federal agencies to smear and go after his "enemies" (see memo on left page below of spread from TRUTH, LIES, AND THE QUESTIONS IN BETWEEN). He authorized diverting campaign contributions to use as hush money to coerce the Watergate burglars (and others) to stay silent or lie.  

He fought and delayed every subpoena for evidence and testimony from the DOJ Special Prosecutor and the Senate Watergate Committee, claiming executive privilege or national security.

All tactics that sound eerily familiar (and are explored in TRUTH, LIES, AND THE QUESTIONS IN BETWEEN during 1973—when Senate hearings revealed one shocking revelation after another and Congress, the president, and the courts got into a checks-and-balances slugfest, unmatched until now).

The differences then: Americans were allowed to hear the truth. And we listened.

After a turbulent year of hearings and bombshell news reports, Nixon orchestrating the firing of the Watergate Special Prosecutor (in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre”), and other unprecedented power-plays and stand-offs, the Supreme Court quickly and unanimously ruled Nixon had to turn over taped conversations he'd secretly recorded in the Oval Office. His own words clearly revealed his involvement in the scandal.

At that point, Republican leaders, including arch conservative and longtime friend/ally, Barry Goldwater, heeded the evidence of Nixon’s abuse of power. They put country over party and went to the White House to tell Nixon that Congress would impeach him if he didn't resign. Added Goldwater, “There are only so many lies you can take.”

Under such pressure from his own party leaders, Nixon resigned.

Gerald Ford was sworn in as president, summarizing the impact of Watergate: "Our long national nightmare is over."