OOPS! Title should be: **Would Nixon have been convicted? **
I took a Political Science class in about 1990. The professor was a flaming liberal, and could hardly stand to hear a conservative politician’s name without going ballistic. A minor exaggeration, but…
So-he said that there was strong evidence that had Tricky Dick chosen to ride out the impeachment, a la Clinton and Andrew Johnson, that he would have been able to survive without a conviction, and resigned a bit too hastily.
Well? Did ol’ Dick screw the pooch, or was the prof just thrilling himself by fantasizing that Nixon made a foolish blunder to his own hurt?
In favor of his conviction was the fact that 1. Goldwater (??) told him the evidence against him was overwhelming, and he was going down. 2. Nixon was just too much of a political liability for even conservatives, and they just didn’t have the heart to take on the media just to save him. I’m seeing this a a sort of fait accompli: the evidence and the people who will try you are already counting you as gone.
Against his conviction was the fact that, well, I’m not trying to rehash the whole thing. I don’t really care what evidence there was that could have got him convicted, or off. I am asking if anybody knows of evidence, e.g. statements from Senators, staffers, who gave indications that Nixon wouldn’t have been convicted.
I also am not asking for any kind of opinions on whether he did properly in resigning, or if the nation was better or worse for what he did, I just want to know if there is some kind of basis for the professor to say what he did
At the time Nixon resigned, his strongest supporter on the Watergate committee – Edward Gurney – had said that he would vote in favor of convicting Nixon. Gurney spent the entire time of the hearings defending Nixon and trying to find ways to prove the President had done nothing wrong.
In addition, the “smoking gun” tape – released in August 1974 – showed Nixon had lied to the public and Congress about his involvement. Impeachment was going to pass the House overwhelmingly (the Congressmen who had voted against it in committee announced they would vote for it when it came to a vote), and since Gurney was going to vote for conviction, you can bet Nixon had no support in the Senate.
Even Nixon’s lawyers agreed that the tape showed Nixon had lied and obstructed justice. An impeachment and conviction was inevitable.
I agree. Nixon would happily have fought impeachment to the bitter end if he thought he had even the slightest chance. He could count heads in Congress as well as anybody. After the smoking gun he had no support left.
It would be nice to hear what evidence your professor gave to evaluate this in some sort of context.
While I don’t think there was a quid pro quo made with Ford, resigning was probably what saved Nixon from a criminal conviction. He lost the Presidency and a lot of people thought that was enough and were willing to end the matter rather than keep going after him.
But if there had been a full impeachment hearing, all of the evidence of how Nixon broke the law and repeatedly lied to his supporters would have been presented before Congress in national hearings. At the end, Nixon would have been forced out of office and there would have been calls for a follow-up arrest.
You have to realize how much the “smoking gun” hurt Nixon. His enemies had believed he was guilty all along so it didn’t change anything with them. But Nixon had had his supporters, who had been staking their own reputations on defending him. The June 23 tape showed the Nixon had been lying to them all along. His supporters felt betrayed and probably became more hostile to Nixon than his long-term enemies were.
Didn’t Goldwater and a handful of other Republican Senators go to the White House and tell Nixon that they had done head counts and that he would be lucky to get 10 votes? I remember hearing that in a documentary at one point.
The mood of the country was so against him, he would’ve been impeached and removed with a 99.99% certainty. Mr Ford’s pardon of Nixon was still an issue a few years later when Mr Ford ran for president again.
I recall even staunchly Republican papers like the “Chicago Tribune” (pre Sam Zell) saying the Republicans were in it so deep with Nixon it’d be decades before they could ever recover. Of course that only took about half a decade, so they were wrong in that aspect.
A highly partisan, but nevertheless entertaining and informative, book on Watergate is Jimmy Breslin’s How the Good Guys Finally Won. In it, Breslin describes a meeting of some of Nixon’s high-level staffers shortly after the June 23, 1972 tape (the “smoking gun” tape) was released. At the end of the meeting, one of them comments, “the old man has been shitting us.”
The fact that Nixon had his supporters — and his family — fighting tooth and nail for him based on what he knew to be false information pretty much says it all when it comes to his attitude toward impeachment. When someone like that throws in the towel, the game is truly up.
(jtgain, Goldwater did pay a special visit to Nixon on August 7th, two days after the “smoking gun” tape came out. He was accompanied by Hugh Scott and John Rhodes [Senate and House Minority Leaders]. I’ve never come across any details of the meeting, but its intent was clear: to convince Nixon that impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate were inevitable.)
Goldwater told Nixon that if it came to a Senate vote, “there’s not more than 15 Senators for you”, and Scott said he estimated Nixon would have “12 to 15, I think.” There were also leaked comments from the weekly lunch of the Senate Republican Policy Committee before the meeting, where Goldwater said “Nixon should get his ass out of the White House, today!”, and that if there were a vote that day, Nixon would be lucky to get 9 senators, and the only two he could count on were Thurmond and Curtis.
The writer James Michener told an interesting story in his autobiography “The World is my Home”. I do not have the book at hand at the moment to reference, so may not have some details correct…
In the final few weeks of the Nixon administration Michener, who was highly influential in Democratic circles cooperated with someone equally high-up in the Republican world - ISTR it was publisher Hobart Lewis - to prepare a bi-partisan plan by which Nixon could escape from under the dead weight of the Watergate affair and remain in office. Presumably it had been prepared with the approval of leaders of both parties.
Michener did not go into detail about the plan, but apparently it involved Nixon taking his case directly to the American public, some sort of “mistakes were made” statement, a mea culpa and a plea of good intentions, and the firing of several of the principals. Interestingly, it was almost exactly the means that Ronald Reagan used years later to extricate himself from the Iran-Contra scandal.
It might have worked, but Nixon was no Ronald Reagan. He had lost faith in the public and in his own closest advisors. Such was Nixon’s paranoia and depression that at the last minute he refused to even see the two emmisaries. He was, wrote Michener “in terrible isolation, see[ing] no one but Bebe Rebozo.” Michener said that when they left the White House that day, both knew there was no way out for the administration.
There was a BIG! difference between Nixon and Clinton. Nixon would have been tried for impeachment after the 1974 elections whereby Congress was overwelmingly **Democrat. ** The House had 291 Democrats and 144 Republicans. The Senate had 61 Democrats and only 38 Republicans. Nixon would have had no chance since the impeachment and conviction votes would have been along party lines.
Clinton just barely avoided conviction with a 50-50 vote, with all all 45 Democrats voting not guilty, plus 5 liberal Rino’s voting along with the Democrats. ** (If the Senate in 1998 had been reversed, i.e., with 61 Republicans and only 38 Democrats then clinton would have been the first U.S. President to have been impeached, convicted, and sent to prison.) **
Nixon’s problem back in 1974/1975, and likliehood of conviction, was because Congress back then was overwelmingly Democrat.
Just like the clinton trial, in the final analysis for Nixon, it all came down to Democrat vs Republican, and the Democrats were in the majority.
Remember, you need a 2/3 vote for impeachment and Senate conviction, so if all the Republicans had stood with President Nixon, he would have survived it. The problem for Nixon was that the Republican Senators had lost confidence in him, and he could no longer count on them. The Republicans wanted Nixon to go for the good of the party, and it was them turning on him that convinced him he couldn’t survive.
I suspect your prof was wallowing in the paranoia of his biases and convinced that the Republicans would place political support ahead of legality, dencency, and support for the constitution. We forget today that back then party loyalty did not override some principles for many of the players; they took their duty seriously.
Originally Posted by Susanann
The Senate had** 61 Democrats** and only 38 Republicans. Nixon would have had no chance since the impeachment and conviction votes would have been along party lines.
61 Democrats plus the 6 liberal RINO’s, Republicans In Name Only, (e.g. a la today’s Scott Brown, Olympia Snow, Murkowski, etc) would get the 67 votes to convict. The deck was stacked against Nixon, and most of the playing cards/Senators were Democrat or liberals.
Not true. Way back in 1998 all 45 Democrat senators voted not guilty ignoring Democat clinton’s crimes. Democrats typically vote unanimously along party lines, and they vote liberal.
While there always are liberal RINO’s Republicans in name only, OTOH there is no such thing as a “conservative”, pro-gun, pro-family, anti government, tax lowering, spend lowering, pro-individual freedom loving Democrat - they dont exist. There was NO WAY!! that the Democrat senators would have voted against clinton…and they didnt.
Read the thread. Even by the reports of conservative Nixon supporters who were around at the time, Nixon would’ve been lucky to have a third of his own party vote against conviction.
Doesnt matter. When it comes time to actually vote, all the 61 Democrats plus the 6 RINO would have been enough. Nixon’s Conviction, by the Democrats in 1975, would have been inevitable, so other Republicans could have said anything to the newspapers for “appearances” sake.
Along the same lines -but with the opposite effect, clinton never had anything to fear conviction as long as all 45 Democrat senators would never ever vote to convict a fellow Democrat even if clinton had personally murdered someone back in 1998.
Whether or not clinton or Nixon were actually guilty is/was beside the point. It is the vote that counts, not what politicians “say”. Just like today when lots and lots of Democrats “say” they want to cut spending and balance the budget, but they ALWAYS vote to increase spending and ALWAYS vote to make the government bigger.