Remembering Nixon’s resignation, 5 decades later

CU Boulder political science professor Kenneth Bickers reflects on what made the ex-president's decision to step down following the Watergate scandal a watershed moment in American history and how it has influenced politics today

In a solemn television address 50 years ago this week, on Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign from office-becoming the first American president ever to do so.

It was a stunning turn of events for Nixon, who just two years earlier won his reelection bid by a landslide. However, as details of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C., became public, leading to congressional hearings and impeachment proceedings, Nixon finally bowed to pressure from Congress and the public to leave the White House.

"By taking this action," Nixon said in an address from the Oval Office, "I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America."

At the time, Kenneth Bickers was a young teenager spending the summer at his grandparents' house in Cheyenne. In the days leading up to Nixon's resignation, Bickers would spend his mornings watching TV broadcasts of the congressional hearings regarding the Watergate break-in, as new damning details became public about the White House's involvement and its attempts to cover up the affair.

"That was my education in politics. It was what got me interested in what would eventually be a major in political science and later a PhD in political science, and it was the seminal event of my development," says Bickers, a University of Colorado Boulder Department of Political Science professor since 2003, whose area of focus is American politics and public policy.

With the 50th anniversary of Nixon's resignation, Bickers recently reflected on what he believes made Nixon's resignation a watershed moment in U.S. history, its lasting impact upon American politics, and offered his thoughts on how things might have gone very differently if Nixon had pursued a different path. His remarks have been lightly edited and condensed.

Question: Can you set the scene prior to Nixon's election in 1972 and into 1973, as details of the Watergate break-in started to become public?

Bickers: In 1972, Nixon was the incumbent going into that election, and the economy was actually in really good shape. We were certainly mired in the Vietnam War, and there had been a lot of protests in the street, but those had kind of diminished from the high point of 1968 to 1969.

And then the Democrats had a catastrophic convention in 1972, with the naming of a Democratic vice-presidential choice, (Thomas Eagleton), who was subsequently replaced. It was one of the most poorly managed conventions since the 1920s, and so Nixon benefited from the ineptitude of the Democrats in 1972.

But Nixon also had a lot of assets going into that year, which was part of what made the whole Watergate break-in totally inscrutable. I mean, it should have been clear to anybody that he was going to win in a huge way. Nobody could have foreseen the magnitude at the time, but it certainly looked like he was going to win.

So why the third-rate burglary of the DNC in the Watergate building? And then why cover it up? None of that made any sense.

Question: Today, some may see Nixon's resignation as inevitable, but a poll taken in 1973 found only 25 percent thought he did anything wrong that would reach the level where he should be removed. So, he still enjoyed widespread support at the time?

Bickers: That's true. He still enjoyed wide support, and I think there was disbelief at the time that things could be as bad as the allegations suggested.

And I think if he'd been honest about how stupid that burglary was, if he had simply fessed up and taken his lumps at the time, none of that would have happened (the congressional investigations ultimately leading to his resignation).

This is where we learned that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, because it was the cover-up that was at the heart of the allegations against Nixon. He didn't break into the Watergate; it was this team of former CIA operatives that did that, or it included some former CIA operatives. Whether it was paid for by his campaign or not, obviously a presidential candidate isn't in charge of the books for a multimillion-dollar campaign operation.

So, it was the cover-up. And then the thing that ultimately sealed the deal was the Oval Office tapes with the famous missing section that had somehow inadvertently been erased.

Remember, at the time trust was still very high of our national leaders. And remember, huge majorities had voted for him just before that in the 1972 election-it was the second-largest victory in American history at that point. So, there were a lot of people who had supported him. And it takes a lot to move people away from their prior commitments, their prior beliefs and their prior expectations.

Question: Is it fair to call Nixon's resignation a watershed moment in American political history? If so, what makes it so?

Bickers: It certainly was watershed, because he was the first president and the only president to resign. We'd never experienced that before.

The other thing is that it's a watershed event because it exposed the kind of deceit and corruption that can reach the highest office in the land-and it changed the way people view politicians.

Confidence in the national government-trust in the institutions of our national government, the presidency, Congress, and so forth-absolutely craters starting in about 1973 and 1974, and it has never recovered. It has come back some, but never to the levels that existed when Nixon was first elected president, or when he was reelected president.

That loss of confidence in public officials has been a permanent change, and I don't think it was just Watergate. The shifting (and in many cases untrue) stories about the Vietnam conflict, the protests and riots over civil rights, and the assassinations in 1968 of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.-all of those play into the absolute loss of faith in our leaders.

Here we are five decades later, and that's still true. People are much less trusting of national leaders than was routinely the case before Nixon's resignation. We are a much more jaundiced people than we were in the pre-Watergate era.

Question: In the 1970s, Republican and Democratic lawmakers came together in a bipartisan way on challenging issues, including pushing for Nixon's ouster once details of the Watergate break-in came to light. Do you think it's possible for Democrats and Republicans to work together that way today?

Bickers: We're living in one of the most polarized periods in American history. We've had periods that were as polarized, but you'd have to go back a long way to find that, as in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and obviously the Civil War itself.

Maybe unusually, in the period coming out of World War II-when America was clearly on the top in the world in terms of its economic and military and political powers-while there were obviously differences between Republicans and Democrats, those differences were smaller, and there were more places where they could agree. It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. It was under Nixon that the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed, with Democratic support.

That's gone. It's hard to imagine anything big happening in a bipartisan way today.

Question: In his resignation announcement, Nixon said he hoped his action would hasten the healing process in the country. Do you believe it did that?

Bickers: Probably. We don't get to replay history with a change where Nixon doesn't resign and compare what did happen to what might have happened, but probably it did. And I think Vice President Gerald Ford showed quite a lot of courage in pardoning him. That may well have cost Ford the opportunity to be elected in 1976.

There were a lot of people-particularly on the Democratic side-who wanted to see Nixon criminally charged and potentially sent to prison, and that was short-circuited by the pardon.

But the pardon probably did help lower the temperature some, because I think to watch a former president tried in court for crimes and then potentially sent to prison, that inflames the supporters of that party and unites them in a way that might otherwise not happen.

Question: Any thoughts as to how Nixon would be remembered today, had it not been for Watergate?

Bickers: There were a lot of other things happening after Nixon's reelection in 1972. The economy began to start showing signs of problems that were later going to swamp the Carter administration in the late 1970s. So, wage and price controls were instituted by Nixon after his reelection to try to bring down inflation. The post-World War II legacy of American manufacturing that was in Nixon's period as president had turned and started going south-and permanently so at that point.

In the war in Vietnam, we were not getting out in a way that looked like it was going to be a success. We were going to have to abandon South Vietnam in some way, which of course did happen, but not until after Ford was president.

All of that was happening, and so that would have been part of his legacy. Had he finished the second term successfully, those would have been marks against him. But a lot of presidents have had recessions. A lot of presidents have had economic issues. Unfortunately, a lot of presidents have had foreign policy failures.

Nixon would have had all of those things on his record, but were it not for Watergate, he would have finished out his term of office and been viewed as a president of two consequential terms. That's not how we remember him today.

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