Nixon resignation made history worth remembering

Last week was the thirty-ninth anniversary of a seminal event in United States history.

On August 9, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon became the first American chief executive to step down from office.

Millions of people had listened to or watched the Senate Watergate hearings the previous year. The hearings detailed a series of abuses by Nixon and his top aides, both the break-in at the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington and the elaborate and illegal cover-up by the administration.

In early 1974 impeachment proceedings began in the House of Representatives. There were three charges against Nixon that were eventually approved by the House Judiciary Committee.

He was charged with obstruction of justice for the cover-up, abuse of power for using the Internal Revenue Service, FBI and other federal agencies to go after his political enemies, and for his refusal to provide to Congress with papers and other information it deemed necessary to carry out the impeachment proceedings.

Knowing he couldn’t win an impeachment vote by the full House, the equivalent of an indictment, and that he would also lose in the trial phase in the Senate, Nixon quit.

CNN commemorated this event last week with a new film compiled principally from home movies taken by three of Nixon’s top aides, H. R. Haldeman, John Erhlichman and Dwight Chapin.

These names are now fading into history, but during the Nixon administration they were at the pinnacle of power, especially Haldeman, the president’s chief advisor, and Erhlichman, who was in charge of domestic programs.

Aides’ home movies comical

Their home movies are almost comical. The aides all recalled in subsequent interviews how much fun they had had when times were good before the scandals began to unravel.

And they were able to keep a lid on the Watergate mess through the 1972 election, easily defeating a decent and accomplished senator from South Dakota, George McGovern.

By that time the Vietnam War had begun to override every other national concern and the Nixon forces were able to paint McGovern as a weakling whose antiwar stance was out of synch with the American people. And Nixon aides, led by Chapin and a young operative by the name of Donald Segretti, launched a series of dirty tricks against the Democratic nominee.

McGovern didn’t have a chance.

Forty years after this low point in American history it’s interesting to speculate on what may have happened if McGovern had been able to win that election. Surely, the Vietnam War would have ended a couple of years earlier than it did in 1975 when Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, oversaw a humiliating and hasty exit from Saigon.

And McGovern, a “prairie populist” who was at the far left side of the political spectrum, would surely have tried to push through progressive legislation. At that time even Nixon had supported a national health insurance program and McGovern may have been able to get a similar plan through the Democratic Congress.

As it was, the nation had to wait nearly four decades until Barack Obama’s election and his Affordable Care Act.

Republican politicians have tried to link the Watergate affair to the recent Obama administration “scandals” like IRS scrutiny of certain political organizations and widespread National Security Agency record-keeping of emails and phone calls. But anyone who paid attention during the Nixon years knows this is way off the mark.

Nixon and his minions used the federal government like a chainsaw to slash at his political enemies and were restrained from utilizing the worst abuses only because they knew they would be caught.

But they were caught anyway.

And we should all pause August 9 of every year and be grateful that the system worked.

Posted by Bruce Garlow on August 15, 2013. Filed under Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry