On Sunday, January 26, the New York Times published an online article revealing that in August 2019 the president, himself, had told John Bolton, his former and fired National Security Advisor, “that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” (See NYT Jan. 26 online, published as a front page article in the NYT’s print edition on Monday, January 27) (emphasis added).

The President shot back the same day with a tweet, categorically denying Mr. Bolton’s account “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens,” adding that book sales was the real underlying reason for Bolton’s claim.

The incendiary information reported in the New York Times article is allegedly delineated over a dozen pages in Mr. Bolton’s book manuscript (“The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir”), which his attorney submitted to the White House on December 30 for a classified information review.

Ignoring the revelation of Mr. Bolton’s potentially incriminating manuscript, the next day the President’s outside defense counsel, Jay Sekulow, emphatically stated on the Senate floor that “[n]ot a single witness testified that the president himself said that there was any connection between any investigation and security assistance, a presidential meeting or anything else” (See WSJ, National Review) (emphasis added).

For the Democrats, this last-minute, bombshell development “essentially confirms the president committed the offenses charged in the first article of impeachment.” Senator Schumer emphasized that “[w]e have a witness with first-hand evidence of the president’s actions for which he is on trial.“ (See WSJ, RealClear Politics). Predictably, impeachment trial House Managers are demanding Bolton’s testimony, because “[t]here can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president’s defense.”

While Democrats demand more witnesses and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority leader, has acknowledged in a closed-door meeting of senators he may not have sufficient votes to block Democrats from summoning witnesses (see PBS, WSJ), such as Mr. Bolton, the essential reality is that Democrats do not have the two thirds Senate vote, 67 senators, to convict and remove President Trump.

And this is not innately a Democratic party failure. Republicans failed to reach the two thirds vote requirement in the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, and then failed again in the 1999 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton.

In our history, the two thirds required Senate votes were within reach only once — curiously in a case that was not even an impeachment yet. In that non-impeachment case, Democrats effectively removed a U.S. President — the only time in our history.

Similar to our present case, in that case a witness recounted his personal conversations with a U.S. President, said witness was a former and fired employee of that president, said exposed conversations were contrary to that U.S. President’s public statements and defense position, said president categorically denied ever having those conversations with said witness, and, in spite of it all, said president resigned.

This is not a riddle. We all know this is the case of Richard Nixon and that the witness was John Dean. What we may not appreciate, and what Democrats may be forgetting now, is the long and bumpy road to Nixon’s resignation from the time of John Dean’s shattering testimony.

Richard Nixon, the 37th U.S. President, won reelection in 1972 with 60% of the popular vote, carrying every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia¹ and entering his second term with a 68% approval rating². His is one of the greatest electoral victories in American history. So how can such a popular president be effectively removed from office?

No, it’s not that he was a crook, a thing he vehemently denied in his “I am not a crook” speech in a televised press conference ten months before his resignation.³ It’s that months of investigation heaped evidence upon evidence, building an incriminating ramp from which bipartisan forces felled president’s friends and crumpled his defenses.

History informs us that it was the grinding gathering of evidence and the gradual turning of public opinion that drove Nixon out of office.

The Building of Evidence

Investigations into the Watergate incident were occurring in one form or another before President Nixon’s second inauguration. The Watergate burglars were arrested in June 1972. They and others potentially connected to the President were indicted by a federal grand jury in September 1972, and their trials began in early January 1973. Yet, nothing conspicuously linked the White House to the incident. And the President knew that.

On February 3, 1973, two weeks after his second inauguration, President Nixon commented about the Watergate incident to an advisor, Charles Colson: “I don’t think the country is all that stirred up.”

White House Special Counsel Chuck Colson. Wikimedia.org.

Colson replied, “No. Oh, God, no, the country is bored with it… The Watergate issue has never been a public issue. It’s a Washington issue. It’s a way to get at us. It’s the way Democrats think they can use to embarrass us.”² (Emphasis added.)

What Colson, and the President, were discounting was the persistent and pernicious gathering of Watergate evidence by Congressional Democrats. It was the simmering undercurrent that was about to boil the ocean of public opinion.

First: A Breach Into Nixon’s Defenses

The initial breach into Nixon’s defenses, the one that exposed a potential direct link between the White House and the Watergate incident, came to light indirectly. It’s almost comical that it did not even occur in a Watergate hearing.

It occurred during the late February to early April 1973 Senate Confirmation hearings of Acting FBI Director, Pat Gray, appointed by Richard Nixon to replace Edgar Hoover, who had died the previous May.

Gray had a big shoe to fill. As director of FBI’s predecessor and later the founding Director of FBI, Hoover had become an institution, subliminally and surreptitiously impacting American history like no other with his infamous files known as “twelve drawers full of political cancer”.⁴

Since Gray never did become the FBI Director, we’ll never know if he could indeed fill Edgar Hoover’s big shoes. But we can infer that he probably couldn’t, because he lacked an element integral to Hoover’s power and long tenure: discretion with damaging information, which Hoover held as a cudgel over eight presidents since 1924.

Patrick Gray, Acting Director of FBI from May 1972 to April 1973. Wikimedia.org

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate, Gray told Senators that he had shared raw FBI files on Watergate with White House Counsel John Dean, and offered to do the same with Congress. Additionally, he testified that Dean had “probably lied” to the FBI.

Nixon exclaimed, “What’s the matter with him? For Christ’s sake, I mean, he must be out of his mind.”²

Nixon had good reason to be livid. He had emphatically and repeatedly denied involvement of any White House staffer in Watergate. But now his own appointee for the FBI’s top job was suggesting otherwise.

And in so doing, he was dragging Dean, up to this point a person of no importance to anyone on Capitol Hill, into the middle of the scandal.

As Gray continued to fumble disastrously through his hearings, the President told Dean “I want all communication with Gray cut off. I know the type. He’s a nice guy, loyal in his own way. But he’s panting after the goddamn job and is sucking up.”³ The pithiness of John Ehrlichman, an influential Nixon advisor, entered national lexicon - Gray should be left to “twist, slowly, slowly in the wind.”²

Without the benefit of finding a conscious enemy, but perhaps with the recognition of his own inability to wade through the welter of Senate hearings, Gray struggled till he finally withdrew his nomination on April 5, to which the President “regretfully agreed.” (See NYT archives). He also resigned from the FBI on April 27.

It’s important to note that although Gray raised suspicions of the potential involvement of the White House with Watergate and its cover-up, the person of the President was not yet implicated.

Second: A Blast Into Nixon’s Fortress

It is of no surprise that the Watergate investigation intensified after Gray’s failed confirmation hearings.

After Gray’s disclosures to Congress, John Dean , an ambitious young attorney who had handled and orchestrated the fallout from Watergate, sensed that he may become Nixon’s Watergate scapegoat, particularly since Nixon refused his request for immunity for any potential crime he may have committed in his capacity as White House Counsel. Dean’s senses were correct .

The President fired Dean after he’d taken him on a trip to Camp David. But Dean wasn’t the only casualty. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s top advisors, were also at Camp David. And on Sunday, April 29, 1973, he met with them both to ask for their resignations, the weight of which seemed to crush him. Just before informing Ehrlichman and Haldeman that they must resign, Nixon confided to another advisor, “[l]ast night I went to sleep and hoped I’d never wake up.”⁵ According to Ehrlichman, Nixon “began crying uncontrollably” as he informed him there was no choice but for Ehrlichman to resign. “It’s like cutting off my arms,” the President sobbed.²

Ehrlichman (left) and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman on April 27, 1973, three days before they would be asked to resign. Wikimedia.org.

Despite Nixon’s mournful outpouring at Camp David, in a televised address the next evening he made it sound like he had discovered and exposed a cover-up.² And in his Checkers speech like style, he also told Americans that to blame those he had delegated with responsibility to run his campaign, “would be the cowardly thing to do.”² Regardless of his TV showmanship, the President was truly affected and subsequently withdrew into a deep depression.⁵

On May 25, independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox was appointed to oversee investigation into possible presidential impropriety, for which Dean proved instrumental.

On June 25, 1973, Dean testified before a Senate Watergate Committee that he had discussed the Watergate cover-up with President Nixon at least 35 times!

His testimony “held millions of TV viewers spellbound with a vision of life inside the White House that was dark and conspiratorial, paranoid, and vengeful against its enemies.”² President Nixon knew Dean’s testimony had been impactful. He, nevertheless, denied all accusations. And because Dean didn’t have any corroborating evidence, his statements merely built a he said/he said case.

Congressional Democrats needed and were searching for more than just Dean’s word against the word of the United States’ President.

Third: The Hook

Less than a month later, Alexander Butterfield, who had held the position of deputy assistant to President Nixon (appointment secretary) until March 1973, appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee. As tipped off by Dean, the Committee asked if conversations in the White House were recorded. Butterfield replied, “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that,” and then he made the stunning revelation about the Nixon tapes that hooked President.⁶

Alexander Butterfield. Oliver F. Atkins — White House Photo from the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library. Wikimedia.org.

Nixon had wanted his administration to be the best chronicled in history.¹ And in what turned out to be a great irony, he wanted the Oval Office and Cabinet Room meetings to be taped because, as he told Haldeman, “he needed a record of his decision making to protect himself in the eyes of history.”³ (Emphasis added.)

The President’s first reaction to Butterfield’s revelation was that it would make him a laughingstock. As one headline suggested, it did: “Nixon Bugs Himself.”²

The Turning Point

Despite all that was going on, and perhaps in spite of it, in August the New York Times reported that “many people are bored by the Senate hearings…. Others feel that dirty tricks are as much a part of politics as campaign promises, and that the Republicans ‘just happened to get caught.’ Moreover, a sizable group believes that the President has handled himself well, that his critics have failed to make their case, and that the country should move on to more important matters.” (See NYT archives.)

Indeed, by September 1973 there was a general sense that Nixon had regained some political strength, and that the American public was burned out by the Watergate hearings. But as conceded in the August New York Times report, that was mostly the minority view — and even that was about to change!

Since Butterfield’s testimony in July, special prosecutor Cox and the Senate committee were working furiously to obtain the White House tapes in addition to the transcripts, which were heavily redacted. “Thousands of passages of indeterminable length are Marked only by the notations ‘(unintelligible),’ ‘(inaudible),’ ‘(expletive deleted)’ or ‘(materials unrelated to Presidential actions deleted)’.” (See NYT Archives, May 12, 1974).

The President refused to produce the tapes, all the while privately lamenting “[t]he cover-up is what hurts you, not the issue. It’s the cover-up that hurts.”¹ (Emphasis in original.)

The blow to Nixon was delivered on October 12, when a Court of Appeals upheld the subpoenas for production of the tapes. Faced with this setback, Nixon’s team reached for a clever compromise. They proposed that instead of producing the tapes, Senator John C. Stennis, a Democrat and a former judge, would listen to the tapes and make a comparison between the produced transcripts and the tapes, and release an authenticated version to the court. The White House stated logic was that as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Stennis would be sensitive to matters of national security.⁵ Aside from his relevant credentials, surely the well-known fact that Senator Stennis was hard-of-hearing and on heavy doses of medication, since he was mugged and shot earlier that year, was not lost to the White House either!

Archibald Cox, Special Prosecutor for the U.S. Dept. of Justice — May 18, 193 to Oct. 20, 1973. Warren K. Lefflerm, Wikimedia.org.

Cox rejected Nixon’s compromise offer and held a news conference stating he would go to court to get the tapes. In response, on October 20 Nixon ordered his Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also refused and resigned. Finally, the Solicitor General Robert Bork signed the order that fired Cox.³

“Hundreds of thousands of phone calls and telegrams bombarded Washington in protest” of came to be called the “Saturday Night Massacre.”⁶ It was the turning point!

Democrats were outraged, and even Republicans criticized Nixon. Within days, the office of special prosecutor was reestablished and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was appointed.

On October 30, the House Judiciary Committee established an “impeachment inquiry” staff that eventually ballooned to 43 lawyers, including a recent Yale Law School graduate named Hillary Rodham, and an Iowa Democrat Ed Mezvinsky, who 37 years later would become Chelsea Clinton’s father-in-law.⁶

In November 1973, two other dramatically memorable events occurred. Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican, publicly urged President Nixon to resign. And as pressure mounted, Nixon’s team embarked on a campaign to regain credibility.

A news conference held in Orlando, Florida, was part of that campaign. But it went badly. “The President, agitated and combative, confused his syntax several times,” referring to himself as “he”. Where previously he had lauded Haldeman and Ehrlichman as “the finest public servants”, he did not have the courage now to pay homage to the men who had fallen on their swords for him, stating they “are guilty until we have evidence that they are not guilty.”⁵ (Emphasis in original).

When probed regarding the controversy around his personal taxes, he pointed his finger at the cameras, “and I want to say this to the television audience,” he gently hammered the podium with his fist, “I’ve made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life,” he now moved his point finger up and down as he uttered the words, “never profited, never profited from public service. I’ve earned every cent.”

He continued, now looking earnest, “And in all my years of public life, I’ve never obstructed justice.” (Voice emphasis in original). Then he looked down, perhaps contemplating his next pronouncement, “And I think too, that I can say, that in my years of public life,” he suddenly grew excited, his voice rising as he threw his arms open wide, “that I welcome this kind of examination, because people gotta a know whether or not their president is a crook… well I am not a crook!” (Voice emphasis in original). With his head moving from side to side, he concluded “I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” (Voice emphasis in original). He then stepped back from the podium, tightly crossed his arms and took the next question.

The Precipitous Decline

Diminished yet defiant, in the January 30, 1974, State of the Union Address Nixon declared to Congress and the American people “one year of Watergate is enough,” and that he had no intention of resigning.

Just seven days later, on February 6, the House voted to formally authorize the Judiciary Committee to investigate the propriety of impeaching him. The vote, which also granted the Committee subpoena power, was overwhelmingly bipartisan: 410–4.⁶

House Judiciary Committee members and staff, 1974. Wikimedia.org.

With a 33–3 vote, the Committee authorized the subpoena of transcripts of taped White House conversations relevant to the Watergate cover-up, which special prosecutor Jaworski issued, requesting 64 White House tapes. White House released edited transcripts of the tapes, but the Committee would settle for no less than the whole tapes.

The matter was settled on July 24, when the U.S. Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, unanimously ordered Nixon to produce the actual tapes.⁶ The House Judiciary Committee commenced impeachment hearings that same evening.

The Fall

In the first quarter of 1974, it seemed like everyone around Nixon was falling. His campaign aid pleaded guilty to perjury in January. His personal counsel pleaded guilty to two charges of illegal campaign activities in February. And in March, seven of his advisors, “the Watergate Seven”, which included Ehrlichman and Haldeman, were formally indicted.

Nixon was virtually alone, alone in the White House.

On August 5, Nixon released transcripts of additional White House Tapes. Transcript of the June 23, 1972, conversation, mere six days after the Watergate burglary arrests, proved Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate incident, by then a raging scandal. The transcript was the smoking gun.¹

The President went on television, once again, in part imploring “I am firmly convinced that the record, in its entirety, does not justify the extreme step of the impeachment and removal of a President.”¹ He could not persuade.

Nixon’s farewell speech to the White House staff, August 9, 1974. His daughter, Tricia, dolefully watches him. By Ollie Atkins, White House Photographer, at Wikimedia.org.

That same day, all 10 members of the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment announced they would support Impeachment Article I — Obstruction of Justice.⁶ On the evening of that fateful day, Republican Congressional leaders met Nixon at the White House, illuminating for him the doom that lurked in his own shadow — his conviction. They impressed on him the specter of truth that his impeachment and removal were inevitable.

Nixon delivered his resignation speech in front of a nationally televised audience on August 8, and left the White House the next day.

The NBC Nightly News anchor at the time, John Chancellor, had this to say about the President’s resignation: “Well, one hardly knows what to say.”³

Imprints of past on our present circumstance:

If Mr. Bolton testifies that President Trump did in fact engage in a quid pro quo with Ukraine, what we have then is a case of he said/he said, because President Trump is vigorously denying Bolton’s account. This is exactly where Congress was with John Dean’s testimony in June 1973 — more than 13 months away from finding the “smoking gun” that finally forced President Nixon’s resignation.

It is highly improbable that Nixon would have resigned without the discovery of tapes that directly corroborated Dean’s account. And their production absolutely would not have happened without resolute judicial orders.

The comparison of Dean’s 1973 testimony, however, doesn’t necessarily imply that the 2020 Democrats’ quest to remove President Trump can continue for another thirteen grueling months.

For one thing, unless quaking evidence is unearthed, the Nation won’t take much more of this. And without corroborating evidence unequivocally proving President Trump’s malintent vis-a-vis Ukraine, Mr. Bolton’s words alone won’t tremble Republicans.

For another thing, we are already in the impeachment trial. How much longer can an impeachment trial be continued in order to discover a smoking gun? Democrats will have to concede defeat in this trial phase and commence another process — anew!

There are other analogies to be derived from the events that led to Nixon’s resignation. Has Mr. Trump’s impeachment reached the point of overwhelming bipartisan support? In the full House? In the House Judiciary Committee? In the Senate?

Have any Republican Senators suggested the resignation of President Trump? Can you imagine Republican Congressional leaders, for example, Senator Mitch McConnell, visiting Mr. Trump at the White House to urge his resignation?

A Reminder:

As a reminder, our mission here at HistoryBehindNews is not to provide a plenary or complete account and analysis of history. Rather, it’s to highlight issues and incidents in history that may prod and persuade your discerning minds to look deeper into our news and current events. And if you disagree with our take on history, well, we think that’s wonderful, because it means we’ve done our job in provoking you to examine the HistoryBehindNews.

Sources:

Unless specifically linked to a source, the contents of this post were gleaned from the sources below. Please note that the author of this post has no affiliation with the authors and/or publishers of the cited works, and does not have any financial incentives in citing them.

¹ “Abuse of Power — The New Nixon Tapes,” by Stanley I. Kutler, 1997.

² “Being Nixon — A Man Divided,” by Evan Thomas, 2015.

³ “President Nixon — Alone In The White House,” by Richard Reeves, 2001.

⁴ “J. Edgar Hoover — The Man and The Secrets,” by Curt Gentry, 1991.

⁵ “The Final Days”, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, 1976.

⁶ “Impeaching the President — Past, Present, and Future”, by Alan Hirsch, 2018.