Richard M. Nixon: Smoking Gun Tape

Impact

The public release of the Smoking Gun Tape following the unanimous Supreme Court decision in United States v. Nixon on July 24, 1974, was the beginning of the end of the Watergate saga. For more than two years after the break-in on June 17, 1972, Nixon had doggedly denied any involvement in the crime. As evidence of illicit White House activities mounted, however, the nation divided over the famous question posed by Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Many believed that the president was complicit at least to some degree in Watergate. But others continued to believe in Nixon's innocence out of respect for the office of the presidency or because it seemed improbable that the president, whose reelection was all but certain, would spy on his opponent. The Smoking Gun Tape erased all doubts about Nixon's guilt by demonstrating that within six days of the Watergate break-in, the president had initiated a plan to cover up White House involvement, thereby obstructing justice. Release of the tape forged a national consensus that the president was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and, to avoid certain impeachment and trial in the U.S. Senate, Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974.

The Smoking Gun Tape, by providing irrefutable evidence that Nixon, notwithstanding his repeated denials, had lied to the American people, did much to tarnish the presidency and contributed to the long-term erosion of presidential power. Throughout the twentieth century and especially during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, the presidency was transformed from an office designed primarily to execute the laws enacted by Congress into one that initiated legislation and that dominated the national government. The Watergate scandal helped to end this trend, however. After the mid-1970s Congress reasserted its power in a number of areas, and although the office of the presidency did not revert to a primarily administrative post, it was by the early twenty-first century a less powerful branch of government than it had been in the mid-twentieth century.

By demonstrating conclusively that the president had lied and had abused his power, the Smoking Gun Tape also damaged the nation's self-image in the late twentieth century. Because such heroic figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln had once been president, generations of Americans had developed a reverence for the office. That reverence was burnished considerably by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who guided the nation successfully through the Great Depression and World War II. But the Smoking Gun Tape and other White House tapes that revealed a president who abused his power and who frequently used coarse language and occasional racial and ethnic epithets made it difficult for many Americans to maintain reverence for the office. As the nation grappled with the ignominious end of the Vietnam War and the decline of the economy in the 1970s, the Watergate scandal added considerably to a pervasive cynicism and pessimism that continued to affect the nation in the twenty-first century.