John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr., attorney Clarence Darrow and President Richard Nixon, as well as a forthcoming book about Senator Ted Kennedy.

In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the hero is depicted in righteous fury at his aides’ admission that they could not secure the votes to push the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress.

“Buzzards’ guts, man! I am the president of the United States of America, clothed in immense power,” says actor Daniel Day-Lewis, with steely intent and determination. “You will procure me these votes!”


As we ponder the legal and political reverberations of Robert Mueller’s report, it is useful to remember that the office of the American presidency remains clothed in immense prestige and power. This is not to say that Donald Trump will join Lincoln on Mount Rushmore. But presidential brawn makes it likely that, should he choose, Trump will survive to face the voters at the polls in 2020.

Trump supporters can take solace when they consider two recent presidents—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—each of whom faced crippling scandals in their second terms but prevailed (albeit in their second terms) with their popularity intact. Even Richard Nixon, the only president to resign the office, buttresses the point. Nixon faced huge obstacles in the Watergate years—an opposition Congress, a rotten economy, a hostile press—but he might have survived, buoyed by a loyal base, had he not lost a battle in the U.S. Supreme Court and been forced to release a “smoking gun” tape.

There is plenty of evidence in the public domain suggesting that Trump obstructed justice, not least by firing Justice Department officials who were probing Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election. But unless the Mueller report contain a smoking gun—and we already know it does not recommend any further indictments—one can see why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently labeled calls for impeachment a distraction. The founders worked hard to give each branch of government the power to check the others. The hurdle for conviction is high: a two-thirds vote in the Senate. The task of removing a leader from office is primarily reserved for the voters.

We’re hosting a live chat on Reddit with former federal investigators who worked on some of the biggest cases since Watergate and our senior reporter, Darren Samuelsohn. Join us on Monday, March 25 at noon ET. Submit your questions in advance here.

But Nixon was driven from office, you say. Well, consider how arduous a task it was, how many miscalculations he made and how long it took. And even then, at the end, when he resigned the office in August 1974, 4 out of 10 Americans didn’t want him to go.

The break-ins at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building took place in May and June of 1972. Within hours of being caught red-handed at the scene, the burglars saw their ties to the White House and the Nixon reelection campaign exposed. Yet Nixon triumphed in November 1972 nonetheless, and it took more than two years for his support to erode. The country was polarized by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the culture wars, and Nixon’s “silent majority” of Republicans, Southerners and aggrieved blue-collar Democrats stood fast in his defense.

With amazing resilience, Nixon survived a series of blows in 1973: the testimony of aides that tied him to the scandal, the resignation of top White House officials as their cover-up unraveled and “the Watergate summer” of televised hearings—more than 300 hours of testimony all told—by a Senate select committee. In October, his vice president, Spiro Agnew, was forced from office in a bribery scandal.

Nixon had kept the economy roaring for the 1972 election, but the bill came due in 1973. The stock market crashed. Americans were confronted by double-digit inflation, soaring meat and oil prices, and lines of angry motorists at gasoline stations.

The voters responded to the pocketbook issues, with 42 percent telling Republican pollsters that inflation was the leading issue facing the country. But, amid the hearings, only 9 percent listed Watergate. Two-thirds of the public thought it was time to move on, and just 17 percent favored impeachment.

It was a different era, to be sure. The powers of the presidency had grown steadily in the 20th century, as chief executives grappled with the Great Depression, World War II and the threat of nuclear war. Communism was a unifying foe. Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower expanded the national security state and, with muscular claims of executive privilege, defied congressional attempts to check their powers. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon waged undeclared war in Southeast Asia.

In 1973, the Justice Department concluded that a sitting president could not face indictment. The only constitutional remedy for alleged presidential criminality, the department ruled, was impeachment. Yet that process had been tarnished by the Radical Republicans’ partisan assault on President Andrew Johnson in 1868 and was suspect among all but the most radical, liberal Democrats. The necessary votes for conviction seemed an insurmountable hurdle.

Nixon’s White House taping system was what did him in. There is no comparably damning evidence from the Trump administration scandals, as yet.

The existence of the tapes was disclosed in the Watergate hearings, and the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, quickly went to court to obtain them. Nixon then marshaled the prestige of the presidency.

He claimed executive privilege—a legal doctrine that protects deliberations in the executive branch from undue scrutiny. He had watched it used to great effect, from both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, during his career. Truman had wielded it against Nixon and Congress in the Alger Hiss spy case in 1948, and Eisenhower had employed the privilege against Congress during the McCarthy Era, when Nixon was Ike’s vice president.

“National security” was another ace in the hole. The courts and Congress had conceded that the Cold War’s unique dangers required not just an expansion in presidential war-making authority and extended domestic surveillance, but a need to keep such actions secret. Nixon and his aides can be heard on the tapes, repeatedly, assuring each other that their misdeeds could be cloaked by the claim of “national security.”

And so Nixon was caught off guard, in the fall of 1973, when the courts rejected his claim of executive privilege. It brought on the first of three crises that, over time, eroded his popular support. To keep Cox from the tapes, Nixon fired the prosecutor, igniting a political conflagration that raised the possibility of impeachment. It became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. And it led to a reassertion of congressional authority, as 33 Republicans joined the Democrats to override his veto of the War Powers Act, which limited a president’s power to deploy American troops without congressional approval.

But even after the Saturday Night Massacre, only a third of respondents in a Gallup Poll thought the president should be forced from office. “Despite the increasingly negative views of Nixon at that time, most Americans continued to reject the notion that Nixon should leave,” wrote the late Pew pollster Andrew Kohut in a 2014 analysis. The number of Americans who thought impeachment was warranted didn’t approach 50 percent until Nixon’s next self-imposed crisis the following spring.

The president—increasingly desperate—appeared on national television on April 29, 1974, with a stack of bound volumes that contained edited versions of the tapes. Even in their expurgated form (the phrase “expletive deleted” entered the American political lexicon) the transcripts put damning words in Nixon’s mouth. “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else,” he was heard to say.

Like his firing of Cox, Nixon’s release of the transcripts backfired. Americans were fascinated by this opportunity to eavesdrop on a president. Two paperback editions sold 3 million copies in a week. What readers found was the cynical, profane exchanges of politics at work, not the majesty of the Oval Office. “Sheer flesh-crawling repulsion. The back room of a second-rate advertising agency in a suburb of hell,” wrote columnist Joseph Alsop. “Deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral” said the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. “The political foundation of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency seemed to split apart beneath him,” Congressional Quarterly reported.

Yet, despite the pounding, and with Nixon’s overall approval rating down to 25 percent, the public support for his removal was still stuck at 44 percent. Then came the smoking gun, one of a group of tapes that was not included in the transcripts.

The now-famous smoking gun tape was recorded the week after Nixon’s men were caught burglarizing and bugging the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in June 1972. It is hard to minimize its impact, legally or politically: It explicitly captured the president ordering a cover-up.

On June 23, 1972, Nixon’s chief of staff—H.R. Haldeman—suggested that they use the CIA to halt the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. Nixon approved: “Call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

An equivalent bit of evidence today would show Trump ordering aides to offer foreign policy concessions to Vladimir Putin in a deal for Russia’s help destroying the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled, in United States v. Nixon, that while the doctrine of executive privilege was valid, it was limited in criminal cases. The decision was unanimous, with Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, writing the opinion.

The release of the tape ended Nixon’s presidency. “The magnificent public career of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily,” said an emotional Rep. Charles Wiggins, a Republican from California who had argued in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings that without such a smoking gun the president must survive.

Within days Republican leaders—House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona, Scott and 1964 standard bearer Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona—met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him that he would be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. Even then, however, 43 percent of those surveyed in a Gallup Poll declined to endorse his impeachment.

And this came at a time when there was no Fox News or social media to rally Nixon’s base. “If I had to depend on my information on the Washington Post, the New York Times and CBS, I’d hate the son of a bitch too,” Nixon speechwriter Ray Price told a friend.

There is a reason no president has been impeached and convicted. Had Nixon burned his tapes, he probably would have made it to the end of his term and been revered as a statesman today.

As for Trump, we’ll see if Mueller has anything comparable to the smoking gun tape. The important thing to remember is that ousting Nixon was no certain thing. As it would undoubtedly be for Trump today.