organised the break-in at the Democratic Party
campaign headquarters in the Watergate Building
in Washington in June 1972; the purpose was to
steal information to help Nixon and discredit the
Democrats during the presidential election cam-
paign. The burglars were caught. Nixon had not
known about the burglary beforehand, nor had
he authorised the break-in, but some of his prin-
cipal aides were implicated. The White House
managed to keep the scandal from affecting the
elections in November 1972, which Nixon won
with a landslide majority, but the Watergate fuse
had been lit, to detonate early in 1973 as the cul-
prits were tried and threatened with severe sen-
tences. Some broke down and implicated the
president’s staff.
Criminal charges against senior White House
staff were nothing new in the 1970s, so why
did it touch the president himself? The judicial
investigations dragged on for months, with the
president defending himself with ever-less con-
viction. The administration lost even more cred-
ibility when Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned
after a tax investigation unconnected with Water-
gate. When Nixon was forced by the Supreme
Court finally to hand over the White House tapes
it became irrefutably clear that early on the
president had with his advisers tried to obstruct
justice, desperately trying to distance the White
House from Watergate and other dirty tricks. The
cover-up proved Nixon’s undoing. To liberals,
Nixon and the White House conspiracies had
become a real danger to American civil liberties
and constitutional government. With impeach-
ment imminent, Nixon was the first president to
resign. On 9 August 1974 he took off in a heli-
copter from the White House lawn, waving
goodbye to a small, tearful party. Outside the US,
where Nixon’s prestige stood high, the assess-
ment was more cynical – Nixon’s mistake had
been to get caught. He continued to be received
with respect in China and elsewhere after his fall;
his advice and help in international affairs has also
been sought by succeeding presidents. The good
that emerged from Watergate was that it acted as
a warning to subsequent administrations; the
‘fourth estate’, the press, with its rights of inves-
tigation and freedom to publish and uncover
wrong doing, criminal breaches through execu-
tive abuses, is a deterrent.
The vice-president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in
and saw Nixon’s term out. He began with an
unpopular move, granting a pardon to Nixon. He
gave the impression of a decent man, a clean
politician, but one who did not inspire and who
simply did not seem up to the job of running the
presidency. He frequently stumbled, sometimes
literally. His relations with Congress were poor
and American economic prospects worsened in
1974 and 1975. In foreign affairs detente made a
little dubious progress but this was overshadowed
by sweeping communist victories in Vietnam and
Cambodia. To be sure, the blame for these cannot
be placed at Ford’s door; they were the results of
a situation he had inherited.
Kissinger, appointed secretary of state, was the
star of the administration as he established new
records for ‘shuttle diplomacy’. During the
Middle Eastern crisis between Israel and the
Arabs (1973–5), world television showed the tire-
less secretary of state stepping out of his personal
plane in Arab and Israeli airports at a dizzying
speed. He accomplished a provisional disengage-
ment and an end of hostilities between Egypt and
Israel in September 1975. The achievement was
all the more remarkable in that he won acceptance
by all sides concerned as a mediator of goodwill,
although he had entered the US in the 1930s as
a Jewish refugee from Nazi German persecution.
Gerald Ford has probably been underrated. His
calm and reassuring manner helped to re-establish
the integrity of the presidency. He provided a tran-
sition from one of the lowest periods of American
self-confidence, a period of violence and assassina-
tions at home, of Watergate and Vietnam. Middle
America was learning to appreciate less dynamic,
less obviously ambitious politicians. They recog-
nised that Gerald Ford was an American like mil-
lions of others. The Democratic candidate for the
presidency, James Earl Carter, was another seem-
ingly ordinary American with whom millions could
identify. In November 1976 the US electorate
had a choice between two contenders ready to
lead the world, neither of whom some two years
earlier had been heard of outside their immediate
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