Power, Lost and Found: America At Century’s End 505Saturday Night Massacre.” Finally, a lower-level official in the Justice
Department fired Cox. His name was Robert Bork and would come back into
the limelight when he was nominated, but defeated, for a seat on the Supreme
Court when Ronald Reagan was president.
Nixon finally released the tapes, with an infamous18-minute gap in one of
them, and the House of Representatives in the summer of 1974 voted to
impeach Nixon [an impeachment is an official accusation of a crime, not a
conviction]. They charged Nixon with obstruction of justice, abuse of presi-
dential power, and violation of the constitution. Nixon was in desperate
condition politically so he released more tapes, but those made things worse
for him. They revealed that in June 1972, when the scandal began, the pres-
ident had ordered the CIA to force the FBI end its own investigation into
Watergate on the grounds of “national security.” Impeachment was inevitable.
Nixon was a beaten man and on August 9th, 1974 resigned the presidency and
left for California. Before he departed he spoke one last time to the White
House staff, in ironic words, “Always give your best, never get discouraged,
never be petty; always remember others may hate you, but those who hate
you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Nixon clearly had destroyed himself, but about a month later, his successor
Gerald Ford gave him a pardon, meaning that he could not be brought up on
any charges related to Watergate in the future. Nixon was a free man and
would eventually return to public life, wealthy and influential. As a postscript
to Watergate, the security guard who discovered the break-in in 1972, Frank
Willis, later spent a year in jail for shoplifting a $12 pair of shoes. Such was
the nature of power in America. By the mid-1970s, the country had suffered
immensely as its entire concept of democracy, much of it mythical anyway, was
ripped apart by a president who, critics said, acted like a monarch and was
often called “King Richard.” But he did give both Gil Scott-Heron and Tom
T. Hall something to sing about, which in itself was a virtually unimaginable
feat just a couple years earlier.
Nixon’s Economy, Oil and Shocks
While Watergate dominated and brought down Nixon, there were other
issues of great and grave importance during his administration as well. As we
have seen, he oversaw the escalation and eventual end of the Vietnam War. At