Watergate
Facing Congressional and special prosecutor investigations into a crime he directed, President Nixon broadly asserted executive privilege and obstructed justice to obscure the truth, leading to an impeachment inquiry and, eventually, his resignation.
Issue
On June 17, 1972, burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Once it was clear they were after campaign intelligence, President Nixon, who was running for re-election, denied any involvement. Nevertheless, subsequent reporting by the Washington Post and an investigation by the FBI linked the Nixon campaign and the attorney general to the perpetrators. These revelations led to the appointment of Archibald Cox as Special prosecutor, and spurred the creation of the Senate Watergate Committee.
In his testimony to the Senate Committee, former White House Counsel John Dean mentioned that Nixon kept recordings of his Oval Office conversations. Subsequently, both Cox and the Watergate Committee began to pursue these key pieces of evidence, which came to be known as the ‘Nixon tapes’.
Nixon believed that executive privilege shielded him from having to turn over these records. Hoping to shut down the special prosecutor’s investigation for good, in October of 1973, the president instructed both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy to dismiss Cox. Both men resigned rather than following Nixon’s orders in the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’.
Nixon’s action was met with widespread criticism from Democrats, and some Republicans as well. The House voted to open an impeachment inquiry early in 1974. A few months later, impeachment hearings began in the House Judiciary Committee, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that Nixon’s claim of executive privilege over the tapes was invalid because they were pieces of evidence pursuant to a criminal investigation. Within a week, Nixon was forced to turn over the ‘smoking gun’ tape on which he discussed his involvement in organizing the break-in.
Once the tape went public, Congressional Republicans could no longer avoid such direct evidence of wrongdoing. Choosing their oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law over partisan loyalty, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater led a delegation of Republicans to the White House to urge the president to step down. With a majority of politicians from both parties now supporting his removal from office, Nixon had little choice. On August 8, a little more than two years after the break-in, he resigned to avoid the embarrassment of his inevitable impeachment.
Causes
Nixon held a commanding political position in 1972 and was poised for a big win in the election that year. Nevertheless, the president’s well-documented paranoia toward his political enemies and the government bureaucracy compelled him to spy on the Democratic Party’s plans. The break-in itself was perpetrated by ‘the Plumbers’, a group Nixon previously assembled to root out White House information leaks following the explosive and damaging unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers.
With two sets of investigators closing in on the tapes of his Oval Office conversations, Nixon became one in a long line of presidents who asserted executive privilege over personal documents. Unlike past presidents, Nixon believed that this power was absolute and exempt from oversight by the other branches of government. The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Nixon rejected this assertion.
The so-called ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ sent a shockwave through Washington. NBC’s primetime broadcast was interrupted by the news with anchor John Chancellor declaring that the country was “in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history”. House Democrats mobilized behind impeachment proceedings. Even some notable Republicans expressed concern about the move, though they didn’t turn on Nixon en masse until many months later with the release of the ‘smoking gun’ tape.
With Nixon’s approval rating already down to around 25%, public support for impeachment and removal only experienced a slight uptick. On the eve of his resignation in August 1974, eight out of ten Americans approved of his exit from office.
Outcome
In the aftermath of the Watergate affair, Congress reasserted some of its power over the executive branch by instituting multiple reforms. The core of this effort was the Ethics in Government Act passed by Congress in 1978. This bill included a provision called the Independent Counsel Law that codified the process of appointing an attorney to handle future investigations into high level issues and potential scandals involving the executive branch. This law, as well as another important reform called the Presidential Records Act have been subsequently dismantled by members of both political parties. Campaign finance regulation, another core aspect of the Watergate reforms, was upended by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United in 2010.
Feature image: President Nixon speaks on the phone in late October 1972 (Source: Richard Nixon Library)
