Saturday is the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as president of the United States. The only president ever to step down, he did so when faced with the certainty of being impeached and removed from office.
To this day, Nixon remains the height of American political corruption. That lends perspective to today’s political climate.
Most presidents experience some degree of scandal, as policy mistakes, lapses of judgment, character flaws or, rarely, simple criminality. But only Nixon can be said to have mounted an outright assault on American democracy – and quite possibly committed treason.
Warren Harding was on the take. John Kennedy and Bill Clinton kept most of their sins personal. Iran-Contra reflected Ronald Reagan’s deep anti-communism. Those behaviors were wrong, but neither did they pose much of a threat to the country.
Nixon did. The Watergate scandal was not just about White House operatives breaking into offices of the Democratic National Committee. The name was also applied to a constellation of crimes that unfolded as the cover-up was exposed.
Watergate was at least the third burglary Nixon approved. He used federal agencies, slush funds and illegal wiretaps to spy on and harass political opponents and subvert the electoral process. He surrounded himself with like-minded souls, many of whom ended up resigning in disgrace or going to jail.
It keeps coming. In his 2014 book, Chasing Shadows, Ken Hughs says that during the tight 1968 presidential campaign then-private-citizen Nixon secretly persuaded South Vietnamese leaders to refuse peace talks, thereby prolonging the war, so that his opponent, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would get no boost from hopeful talk. (Something nearly outlined in Robert Altman’s fictional 1984 movie “Secret Honor.”)
If true, that was criminal and treasonous. But Nixon betrayed his thinking when he later said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
May we not see his like again.
