Analysis: We forget how hard it is to oust a president, even when the evidence of wrongdoing is unambiguous
But Nixon was driven from office, you say. Well, consider how arduous a task it was, how many miscalculations he made, and how long it took. And even then, at the end, when he resigned the office in August 1974, four out of 10 Americans didn’t want him to go.
Nixon had kept the economy roaring for the 1972 election, but the bill came due in 1973. The stock market crashed. Americans were confronted by double-digit inflation, soaring meat and oil prices, and lines of angry motorists at gasoline stations. In 1973, the Justice Department concluded that a sitting president could not face indictment. The only constitutional remedy for alleged presidential criminality, the department ruled, was impeachment. Yet that process had been tarnished by the Radical Republicans’ partisan assault on President Andrew Johnson in 1868, and was suspect among all but the most radical, liberal Democrats. The necessary votes for conviction seemed an insurmountable hurdle.
He claimed executive privilege – a legal doctrine that protects deliberations in the executive branch from undue scrutiny. He had watched it used to great effect, from both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, during his career. Truman had wielded it against Nixon and Congress in the Alger Hiss spy case in 1948, and Eisenhower had employed the privilege against Congress during the McCarthy Era, when Nixon was Ike’s vice president.
The president – increasingly desperate – appeared on national television on April 29, 1974 with a stack of bound volumes that contained edited versions of the tapes. Even in their expurgated form the transcripts put damning words in Nixon’s mouth. “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else,” he was heard to say.
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