My ringside seat at the Nixon resignation melodrama

American politics seem particularly febrile in 2024. The sitting President has withdrawn from the election, days after his predecessor was shot campaigning at a rally in Pennsylvania.

But American democracy is by nature restless and tumultuous. It’s worth remembering that 50 years ago this week, Washington was in turmoil over the question of whether Richard Nixon was going to resign.

Those early days of August 1974 seem like yesterday to those of us who became swept up in them. At the time I was a 31-year-old MP, five months into my first parliamentary term as an opposition backbencher. My summer recess took me to the home of a hospitable Anglophile hostess in Georgetown. In her basement lived two presidential aides who helped to give me a ringside seat to the resignation melodrama. At its peak I was invited by them to lunch in the White House Mess, where the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, persuaded me to write a letter to the soon-to-depart president. This correspondence started a relationship which eventually led to me becoming Nixon’s biographer.

My lunch in the White House Mess took place in the days before the president resigned

The countdown to the president’s resignation began on 16 July 1973, during the Watergate hearings of the House Judiciary Committee (‘the greatest show on Earth,’ according to the historian Theodore H. White) when a staffer, Alexander Butterfield, unexpectedly disclosed that Nixon’s Oval Office contained a voice-activated taping system. This caused a sensation. ‘NIXON BUGS HIMSELF,’ screamed the headlines. They triggered a legal battle which ended with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the tapes were not covered by executive privilege and must be handed over to the Judiciary Committee.

One of the subpoenaed tapes recorded on 23 June 1972 became known as the ‘smoking gun’. It showed that Nixon had discussed ordering the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in.