I was on one of my backpacking canoe trips into Quetico Provincial Park in Canada during the week of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. Up to that point the political theatre in the nation had been stoked to climax. That summer I was one of the first to get and read a copy of Bernstein & Woodward’s All The President’s Men in June 1974.
The Washington Post investigative reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men was released in June 1976. It is about the Watergate scandal from the June 1972 break-in through to the resignations in April 1973 of White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman and the revelation by deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield in July 1973 about the White House tapes. It relates events behind the scenes of major stories and revealing of sources including detailed accounts of Woodward’s secret meetings with his source Deep Throat. “All the President’s Men, 1976” by thefoxling is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The reporting work of Woodward and Bernstein has been called “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time” (see – Roy J. Harris, Jr., Pulitzer’s Gold, 2007, p. 233, Columbia: University of Missouri Press). In 1976, a popular film adaptation of All The President’s Men was released starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. That same year, journalists Woodward and Bernstein published The Final Days, a sequel to All The President’s Men which I also read at its release that chronicled the last months of Richard Nixon’s presidency, starting around the time their previous book ended.Members and staff of the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974. Public Domain. The articles of Impeachment can be found here: https://watergate.info/impeachment/articles-of-impeachment/ – retrieved August 8, 2024.
Since it started in May 1974, I had been watching the congressional hearings as well as reading the newspapers mostly that summer on the fight over the White House tapes. On July 24, 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court in an unanimous decision said Nixon had to surrender the tapes and on July 27, 1974 the House Judiciary Committee voted for articles of impeachment of Nixon. This was coming to a head just days before I was getting ready to set out for week in the wilderness by way of Madison, Wisconsin and Ely, Minnesota.
Canoe trip group August 8, 1974. As we paddled, portaged and set up and broke camp for a beautiful week outdoors, we were all well aware of the heightened goings on in Washington D.C. regarding Nixon’s presidency. Since we had no media in the wilderness, we didn’t find out Nixon resigned, the first and only president so far in U.S. history to do so, until we returned to Ely, Minnesota for the return trip home. The author is standing in the center in open-collared green shirt.
In an evening televised address on August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation to be effective at noon on August 9, 1974. That day Nixon gave a farewell press conference in the East Room in mid morning before scores of White House staff and cabinet members joined by his wife, Pat, and two daughters, Julie and Tricia, with their husbands. Nixon was finally bowing to pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House.
I missed the resignation speech itself but saw the early morning press conference on tv at the outfitter’s. At the time, I thought Nixon was maudlin and mawkish. That’s still my take today though Nixon’s final presser is masterful melodrama. In the first days and weeks following the Nixon resignation – after years of political struggle at the highest levels of government – there was a sense of relief and being cast adrift in the nation. Real engagement returned it seemed following President Ford’s pardoning of Nixon on September 8, 1974. For me school had started again and I was playing football. But the rough and tumble of national politics gathered and regrouped again so to resume making all right in the world by way of that struggle for it.
President Ford announcing his decision to pardon Nixon, September 8, 1974, in the Oval Office. Public Domain. President Nixon’s grave in June 1994 at the Nixon Library adjacent to his childhood home in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon is buried next to his wife, Pat. Author’s photograph. Author at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in June 1994 – 20 years after the presidential resignation and about 6 weeks after President Nixon died at 81 years old on April 22, 1994. Author’s collection.
