The ways that our institutions prevented Richard Nixon, an odious and out-of-control president, from fully undermining the foundations of our democracy, is the focus today’s #stampoftheday, a 3-cent stamp, issued in 1938, commemorating the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
The stamp itself was issued on June 21, 1938, the 150th anniversary of the day that New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the constitution. This was significant because to take effect, 9 of the 13 original colonies had to ratify the proposed constitution. With its vote, New Hampshire joined Delaware, which had been the first to do so (on December 7, 1787), followed by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, and South Carolina.I’m offering the stamp up today because on August 8, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon went on national television to announce that even though “I have never been a quitter…I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”
Nixon’s exit, of course, came after more than two years of hearings, court cases, newspaper articles, and public battles, culminating in late July when the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against the president. At the time, I was running the trading post at a Boy Scout camp northern New Jersey, so I spent much of the summer listening to the amazingly compelling hearings and deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee, which debated and ultimately voted to approve three articles of impeachment against the president.
As a political and history junkie then (as now), I was mesmerized by the fact that committee members, including some Republicans, took their responsibilities seriously, a fact best illustrated by the fact that 7 of the 17 Republicans on the committee voted for at least one of those articles. Their words are striking, particularly in light of today’s hyper-partisanship. Hamilton Fish, a moderate Republican from New York, for example, said: “At the very least, the president is bound not to violate the law, not to order others to violate the law, and not to participate in the concealment of evidence respecting violations of the law of which he is made aware.” And William Cohen (a representative from Maine who went to be a senator and the Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration) said: “I have been faced with the terrible responsibility of assessing the conduct of a president that I voted for, believed to be the best man to lead this country. But [this] president…allowed the rule of law and the Constitution to slip under the boots of indifference and arrogance and abuse.”
And as the process unfolded, it seemed to me that for all its creaks and quirks, the U.S. constitutional structure was working. That sense was shared by many. In its lead editorial the day after Nixon’s speech, The New York Times observed, “the forced departure of Richard M. Nixon from the Presidency-for that is what it was even though his resignation is nominally an act of his own volition-is in a larger sense a reaffirmation of the strength of the United States and of the structure of American democracy.”
Similarly, in an NPR interview on the 40th anniversary of the resignation, Linda Wertheimer, who at the time was NPR’s political correspondent, recalled that she was “comforted” by what she heard from people who from around the country who called into one of NPR’s first national call-in shows after speech. Asked what “comforted” her about those calls, she responded: “I just can’t tell you how amazing they were. They were philosophical. The talked about how we – we’ve gone through difficult times before. We will get through this. It was basically saying we – we can handle it. And I was – I was so proud. And I remember feeling – OK, we’re going to be OK. And I really had not felt that for a long time.”
All of this, of course, is resonant today, because it feels like so many of our institutions, including our constitutional structure, are not holding up and are not protecting us from danger and dangerous people. And yet, I am something of an optimist. I believe that “we’ve gone through difficult times before” and if we continue to be diligent and commitment we not only “will get through this” but we also are “going to be ok.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace. We can handle this.