by Richard Betts
Richard Nixon relinquished the office of President of the United States on 9 August 1974. Though 4 presidents before this had died of natural causes while in office, and 4 had been assassinated, no other president had resigned. Why should Nixon resign? There were notable achievements, not least significant détente both with China and the Soviet Union, the latter despite tensions during the Yom Kippur War. And though, like Lyndon Johnson before him, he was heavily criticised for protracted American involvement in Vietnam, Nixon did finally bring home the last US troops based there. But reputation or not, his margin of victory in the 1968 presidential election had been very slim, and in that year he became the first president in 120 years to take up office at a time when both houses of Congress, ie the Senate and the House of Representatives, were controlled by the opposition; in this instance, the Democrats. So Nixon feared defeat in 1972. But he won the election very comfortably. It wasn’t the electorate who brought him down. It was Watergate. Having won in 1972, he was then on a tortuous slippery slope from which there was no escape. Though he hung on tenaciously until 1974, Watergate dragged him slowly into a pit from which there was no escape.
