1 янв 1974 г. - Nixon resigns presidency over watergate

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watergate: Term referring to the 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. by men working for President Nixon’s reelection campaign, along with Nixon’s efforts to cover it up. The Watergate scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation.

Scandal is endemic to politics. Yet what became known as the Watergate affair — or simply Watergate — implicated President Richard Nixon in illegal behavior severe enough to bring down his presidency. Liberals benefitted from Nixon’s fall in the short term, but their long-term retreat continued. Politics remained in flux because while liberals were on the defensive, conservatives had not yet put forth a clear alternative. As in the economic realm, the years from 1973 to 1980 were defined by a search for order in American politics.


Early on the morning of June 17, 1972, something strange happened at Washington’s Watergate Office Building. Five men carrying wiretapping equipment were apprehended there attempting to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Queried by the press, a White House spokesman dismissed the episode as “a third-rate burglary attempt.” In fact, the two masterminds of the break-in, former intelligence officers G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, worked for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), Nixon’s official reelection campaign organization.

The Watergate burglary was no isolated incident. It was part of a broad pattern of abuse of power by a White House obsessed with its political enemies. Liddy and Hunt were on the White House payroll, part of a clandestine squad hired to stop leaks to the press but whose activities escalated far beyond that mandate — to arranging illegal wiretaps at opposition headquarters as part of a campaign of “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. There was no clear evidence tying Watergate directly to the president, and Nixon might have ridden out the scandal by firing his guilty aides, or by doing nothing at all. But it was election time, and Nixon did not trust his political future to such a strategy. Instead, he arranged hush money for the burglars and instructed the CIA to stop an FBI investigation into the affair. His actions amounted to obstruction of justice, a criminal offense.


Nixon managed to keep the lid on the Watergate incident through his successful reelection in the fall of 1972. But early the next year, one of the burglars began to talk. In the meantime, Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward uncovered CREEP’s links to key White House aides. In May 1973, a Senate investigating committee began holding nationally televised hearings, at which administration officials implicated Nixon in the illegal cover-up. The president continued to deny involvement, but by June of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began to consider articles of impeachment. With conviction in the Senate almost certain, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign his office. The next day, Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. Ford, the former Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, had filled the vacancy left by Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in October 1973 for accepting kickbacks while governor of Maryland. A month after he took office, as polls showed that a majority of Americans believed Nixon to be guilty of crimes, Ford stunned the nation by granting Nixon a “full, free, and absolute” pardon.


Tourists in front of the White House reading headlines dated August 8, 1974, that proclaimed “Nixon Resigning.” Richard Nixon, the 37th American president, resigned on that summer day rather than face impeachment in the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate, which observers at the time considered a near certainty.

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