Goodbye Nixon: August 9, 1974

The hot days of August in 1974 ushered in the most traumatic transition of presidential power ever -- if assassinations are not counted -- and maybe even if they are.  Nearly 800 days after the Watergate break-in, 289 days after the Saturday Night Massacre, 97 days after the White House transcripts were released, twelve days after the Supreme Court voted unanimously that the President must surrender 64 more tapes, five days after the House Judiciary Committee voted out articles of impeachment -- after all that, the defenses of President Richard Nixon had finally vanished.  He resigned on August 9, 1974 and President Gerald Ford was sworn in.

The Healing Begins
Time / August 19, 1974

Of interest here is that the newsmagazines prefer to be forward looking and give the covers to the man taking office -- so Ford gets the cover, not the disgraced Nixon.  Newsweek, back in 1963, issued its reporting on the Kennedy assassination with President Johnson on the cover, not JFK.

Time started its coverage with a pretty mundane description of how Ford was taking office in the East Room of the White House while Nixon was on a plane to California.  Then they got to the heart of the matter.

It was the first time in American history that a President had resigned his office.  The precedent was melancholy, but it was hardly traumatic.  All fo the damage had been done before in the seemingly interminable specatcle of high officials marched through courtrooms, in the recitation of burglaries, crooked campaign contributions and bribes, enemies lists, powers abused, subpoenas ignored -- above all, in the ugly but mesmerizing suspense as the investigations drew closer and closer to the Oval Office.  Now the dominant emotion was one of sheer relief.

It's worth remembering exactly what Gerald Ford said when he put his hand on his oldest son's bible that day and then spoke to the nation:  "Our long national nightmare is over."  Time noted the essential irony of his succession to power:

In a curious way, Gerald Ford comes to the presidency under a kind of grace precisely becuase he was not elected to office... But Ford promises a new and welcome style in the White House, an openness and candor harking back perhaps to Truman or to the more amiable qualities of Eisenhower.

Of course, Ford would blow that opportunity to be elected in his own right less than a month later when he pardoned Richard Nixon for all crimes.  The public still wasn't ready for that.  He lost the election to Jimmy Carter in 1976 and was gone from the White House just over two years after moving in.