Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned
I argued in August 1974 that the president should stay and fight. History has vindicated my view.
By Kenneth L. Khachigian
Aug. 7, 2024 4:01 pm ET
Rose Mary Woods, President Richard Nixon’s personal secretary, told me, “Your memo is good.” But it was clear Nixon would never see my 11th-hour plea for him not to resign. It was Aug. 8, 1974, and she was already tearfully typing his resignation letter.
I was a 29-year-old aide futilely counseling the president that because impeachment pressures were magnified by the day’s passions, he needed to pursue his constitutional defenses and force the House and Senate to take a principled stand.
As a central player in the administration’s anti-impeachment work group, I had been ready for the fray when, on the afternoon of Aug. 5, chief of staff Al Haig brought our team together, reporting a problem with one tape recording. In the moment’s frenzy, we tragically misread that June 23, 1972, conversation between Nixon and then-chief of staff H.R. Haldeman—about Haldeman deterring the Federal Bureau of Investigation from probing campaign funds channeled through Mexico—as a “smoking gun.” Even John Dean, who had cooperated with prosecutors and Senate investigators as White House counsel, has since acknowledged that the “smoking gun” was “shooting blanks”—that Nixon and Haldeman only sought to protect anonymous campaign contributions the Justice Department already agreed were outside the scope of the FBI’s Watergate break-in investigation.
Working under intense operating pressures and lacking accurate analysis, our team took a vote tally, and—with me as the lone holdout—counseled resignation. If we hadn’t rashly misinterpreted the tape and released it that afternoon, Nixon might have survived to fight another day.
What have I learned in the 50 years since? Although we are a long way from the summer of 1974, the Watergate pieties haven’t changed, and the media retrospectives this week will likely be repeating all the clichés about saving America: “The system worked.” “No man is above the law.” But a genuine retrospective of Nixon and Watergate needs to be shorn of cant and caricatures, unburdened by the clockwork bromides of “crook” or “resigned in disgrace.”
I hope new generations are open to some different thinking—or at least a balanced treatment that goes beyond the story of bungling burglars and political damage control. It must include how the “Watergate affair” was also the culmination of Nixon’s political opponents’ long-yearned-for goal of destroying him. Nixon had a political target on his back from his congressional days of vanquishing the communist Alger Hiss, a favorite of Washington’s intellectual left. Through his entire presidency, Congress was controlled by opposition Democrats, with confrontation aggravated further by Nixon’s determination to end the Vietnam War he had inherited from the Kennedy and Johnson administration planners at the State and Defense departments.
Sen. Edward Kennedy set up the Senate Watergate Committee. Three months later John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign director of opposition research against Nixon, Archibald Cox, was hired as Watergate special prosecutor with a staff seeded from the ranks of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. The subsequent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, expressed concern in an internal memorandum that his chief deputy reflected “an attitude I discussed with you before—the subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost.”
Watergate scholar Geoff Shepard has unearthed further damning evidence that the special prosecutors had several unethical private meetings with Judge John Sirica in the absence of attorneys for Nixon and Watergate defendants—each violating the most basic legal protections. Nixon’s adversaries weren’t looking only for the truth. They were looking for a scalp.
I have also come to believe there is an unacknowledged motive for the unceasing demonization of Nixon and Watergate. If the Washington culture of elite media and the political left can successfully define Nixon as the pinnacle of deceit and dishonesty, then their own immorality, corruption and abuse of power will seem trivial by comparison. By portraying Nixon as the ultimate sinner, they might make their own governmental and institutional malefaction appear less repugnant—a convenient salve for the sanctimonious voices heard this week.
The good news for Nixon is that the worst has been said. His antagonists are left with no rungs to climb on their ladder of hatred. On the other hand, records continue to unfold in the archives of the misconduct among his pursuers. Time and history are on Nixon’s side.
On May 4, 1977, Nixon phoned in to the “viewing party” in my home where his former staff had gathered to watch the David Frost Watergate interviews. After surveying our opinions on how the program went, he concluded, “There’s nothing we can do about it now. Watergate is there; so be it. I’m not just going to go away like a lot of them would like me to do.”
And he didn’t. He wrote nine bestselling books and collaborated with me in the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns to provide private and unofficial advice to Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton has acknowledged that Nixon provided welcome advice during his presidency. Nixon traveled the world and doted on his grandchildren, and he and Pat Nixon saved the U.S. government millions of dollars by relinquishing their Secret Service protection to pay for their own personal aides.
I still believe he shouldn’t have resigned. If we knew then what we know now and we had more resources, access to social media and a better defense, the president may have served out his second term. Yet he spared America the agony caused by the hysteria of the times.
Richard Nixon didn’t resign in disgrace. He resigned in dignity.
Mr. Khachigian was chief speechwriter to Ronald Reagan, an aide to Richard Nixon and is author of the memoir “Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan and Nixon.”
