Resistance and Resignation
The quest for political accountability, 1774-2024
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
“Although he did not mention it in his [resignation] speech, Mr. Nixon had looked forward to being President when the United States celebrates its 200th anniversary in 1976.”
—New York Times, August 9, 1974
On August 8, 1774, a group of residents from Rowan County, North Carolina, met in the county seat of Salisbury. (Attendees included William Davidson, founder of the town and college that bears his name.) Like so many other towns in the thirteen colonies during the summer of 1774—I wrote about a similar gathering in Orangeburg, New York on July 4 of that year—participants at this North Carolina meeting issued a proclamation protesting the British government’s recent actions in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party. The Rowan Resolves included a now familiar litany of statements: that the colonies had the sole right to tax themselves; that British imports would be boycotted, and an announcement of the county’s intention to participate in a pending Continental Congress to discuss colonial grievances with the imperial government. “The cause of the town of Boston is the common cause of the American Colonies,” read one resolution. In its flat simplicity, this was a forceful assertion coming from a town 800 miles away—a little like saying New England Lives Matter—and a testament to the unity now being exhibited across the Atlantic seaboard.
There was a refrain running through the seventeen Rowan Resolutions: an assertion of “rights and liberties”—the phrase comes up five times—that were an essential check on the “arbitrary exertion of power.” In making such repeated assertions, the residents of Rowan County were laying claim to their patrimony as British subjects, and a kind of British exceptionalism: unlike subjects of other kingdoms, European or otherwise, the British had a living tradition of rights and liberties that came down to them through the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This unwritten but collectively understood Constitution was—and is—a living instrument of accountability in Great Britain. Figures in authority, whether a king, prime minister, member of Parliament, or other government official, served the people. And when they failed to do that, those subjects had a right not only to petition the government, but to change it. As indeed the Stuart kings who ruled in the early days of colonial settlement had learned to their chagrin when they were overthrown (to the glee of the people of Massachusetts, who those Stuarts had planned to bring to heel). Viewed in this light, the American Revolution was really an American Restoration.
Exactly two hundred years after the Rowan Resolutions, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon went before the American people and announced his resignation on live television. The reasons for this—and the larger issues surrounding Nixon in the set of events collectively known as Watergate—were far different than those of the colonists in 1774. But in both cases, the underlying principle was one of accountability.
For those who were not alive at the time, it may be difficult to appreciate just how dominant a political figure Nixon was in the 25 years before that fateful Thursday in August. A World War II vet who had been elected to Congress in 1946 (where he befriended young Jack Kennedy) Nixon enjoyed a sharp political rise, fueled by his staunch anticommunism, that vaulted him into the Senate and then the vice-presidency under Dwight Eisenhower. He lost that race to Kennedy in 1960—very likely through electoral fraud in Chicago—and then a 1962 gubernatorial contest in California that led him to swear off politics altogether. But Nixon opponents plotted a return that won him the presidency in 1968 and then an absolutely crushing landslide in 1972. (Nixon took 49 of 50 states in the electoral college; given that we’re looking at this in the context of the American Revolution, it’s worth pointing out that the only state he lost was the ever-onery Massachusetts.)
It was initially hard to believe that Nixon had anything to do with what his press secretary called a “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate Hotel on June 18, 1972, because there seemed to be no point in trying to break into the Democratic party headquarters given the certainty of Nixon’s re-election over hopelessly liberal Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. That’s why the story about the break-in was assigned to a pair of twentysomething reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who were working the police beat that night. They subsequently found a series of loose ends to pull, thanks in part to a disaffected FBI official nicknamed “Deep Throat” after the lead character in a pornographic movie of the time. In fact, Nixon didn’t know anything about Watergate before it happened. But the break-in was part of a vast web of secret illegal activity the Nixon administration had been conducting for years that included wiretapping, IRS harassment, disinformation, and other acts. When Nixon did learn about Watergate five days later, he ordered a coverup that included taking control over the investigation by moving it from the FBI to the CIA on the basis of a fake foreign connection. For the next two years, he denied any involvement in the Watergate affair.
Nixon was lying. The reason why we know this is that Nixon recorded every conversation he had in the White House. When this became public knowledge as part of what had otherwise been sleepy government hearings in the summer of 1973, it lit a fuse that ended up in the Supreme Court. Whose justices, three of whom had been named by Nixon himself, ruled unanimously in late July of 1974 that Nixon had to turn those recordings over. Once he did, everyone heard the so-called Smoking Gun that proved Nixon knew of the crime and took active steps to avoid accountability for it.
Articles of Impeachment had already passed when Nixon went before the cameras on the evening of August 8. “Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me,” Nixon said in his prime-time speech at 9 p.m. “In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort.” Nixon, in effect, was being called to account for lying to the American people, among them his supporters. Indeed, it was Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the founder of modern conservatism, who had journeyed to the White House on August 7 to explain that his cause was hopeless (perhaps, as we may soon learn, Nancy Pelosi told Joe Biden that he was going to be held accountable for the illusion he was fit for presidency fifty summers later). And so it was that Nixon resigned from an office he would have certainly lost had he stayed on. A Constitution—the American written one—had been affirmed (this time, anyway). Nixon, who dubbed Air Force One “the Spirit of ’76,” would not be president when the nation celebrated its Bicentennial two years later.
In the summer of 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court showed far more solicitude for presidential power than it did in United States v. Nixon fifty years earlier, ruling that some executive behavior could be held above the law. The former president, twice impeached, was running for that office for a third time, and may well win.
Unlike the case of Richard Nixon, the machinery of government itself has not held Donald Trump accountable for his documented role in trying to subvert the U.S. government on January 6, 2021—among other occasions. It’s clear now, as it was to the people of Rowan County, North Carolina 250 years ago, that only the people can do that. The pending question is whether they will choose to do so.