The nation must show presidents, Schlesinger wrote, that “when their closest associates place themselves above the law and the Constitution, such transgressions will be not forgiven or forgotten for the sake of the presidency, but exposed and punished for the sake of the presidency.”

Letters in response to Schlesinger’s Atlantic article trickled in over the course of a few months, as Congress continued to arbitrate Nixon and his aides’ lawlessness. R.P. Shirah from Monroe, Louisiana, advocated for Nixon; he suggested that the present “crisis” was attributable to Nixon’s “avowed enemies—blatantly attempting to remove him from office by whatever means.”

Schlesinger’s article was “lousy yellow journalism,” wrote G.L. Frederic from Scio, Oregon. He felt that Nixon was doing an “ultra-fine job of running the country,” and that more articles should be reporting on that:

You as a member of the press are totally enslaved to the obligation of protecting and defending him in his duty. The constitution keeps you free to do this—so do it.

The Atlantic did not follow Frederic’s instruction. For the magazine’s March 1974 issue, L.E. Sissman wrote a scathing critique of the president entitled “Sick of Dick.” He began:

Though he may have abdicated his regal seat by the time you read this, the resignation of Richard Nixon will not invalidate the force of this confession—the first, I believe, to be made by a plain citizen who is simply satiated with the continuing bungled nonfeasance of a man who was perfectly clearly not cut out to be president of anything larger than a used-car lot.

On February 6, 1974, the House of Representatives had authorized the Judiciary Committee to investigate impeachment of the President. Sissman’s piece was published roughly around the time several former Nixon aides were indicted, on March 1, 1974. Although Nixon escaped incrimination (for the time being) because the special prosecutor felt a sitting president could not be charged until leaving office, he had been secretly designated a co-conspirator.

Sissman, who was “fed up to here, and possibly beyond” with carrying around the “knowledge (and fear) of [Nixon’s] ineptness,” railed on the president. His ideas, Sissman wrote, were antiquated:

From the beginning, Nixon was a flat-earther, a proponent of ideas and interests the nation at large had thought to be outworn. He was a spokesman, in a sense, for the previous generation—or maybe the generation before that. His subsequent career proved, if it proved nothing else, that there were (and are) still large pockets of people who cleave to the old ideas, and whom progress has passed by.

But his reign was almost over:

Richard M. Nixon, at the very height of his semi-imperial majesty, was struck from the dais at one blow and left struggling on the ground, entangled in the voluminous folds of his cohorts’ sly intrigues. And perhaps—but will we ever know?—his own.

Nixon would, Sissman concluded, “surely be known to fame as our worst and most inept President.”