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United States v. Nixon: The Ruling That Made Resignation Inevitable
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to surrender the White House tapes, it answered a question American constitutional law had never settled — and ended a presidency. Episode 8 traces the legal chain from the Watergate break-in to the Smoking Gun tape that left Nixon nowhere to hide.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Can a president of the United States place himself above the law? That wasn't a philosophical question in the summer of nineteen seventy-four.
Let's go back to where the thread starts. June seventeenth, nineteen seventy-two.
On July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-three, a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield sat before the Senate Watergate Committee. He was asked a routine question about whether there was any way to verify what had been said in various White House meetings.
Nixon's response to Cox's subpoena was not to negotiate or comply. It was to try to make the problem disappear.
The case was called United States v. Nixon.
What the tapes contained was worse than most had imagined. The recording from June twenty-third, nineteen seventy-two, just six days after the Watergate break-in, showed Nixon and his chief of staff H.R.
Before the tapes confirmed everything, there was testimony. John Dean had served as White House counsel.
Running beneath all of this was the investigative work that kept the story alive when official Washington wanted to let it die. Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post were meeting with a source they called Deep Throat.
There's another layer to this that deserves attention. Nixon tried to use the machinery of government to protect himself.
On the evening of August eighth, nineteen seventy-four, Richard Nixon addressed the nation from the Oval Office. He announced that he would resign the presidency effective the following day.
The lasting consequence of Watergate isn't just a cautionary tale about cover-ups. The cover-up was worse than the crime, yes, but the deeper lesson is structural.
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