Watergate Was No Quick Affair
Overheard in a coffee shop this week: “I wish this Trump impeachment thing was as fast and clean as they did with Nixon!”
This from a guy old enough to have been through the months and months of turmoil surrounding the aftermath of the Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972.
Journalists, such as Glenn Kessler, have been trying to jog America’s collective memory about the long chapter in the nation’s history when he did as good a job as any in the Washington Post late in October.
Who can forget the dogged reporting of Woodward and Bernstein of the Post for months before any official action was even started? Or, for that matter, that Nixon was re-elected five months after Watergate by a whopping majority?
Kessler chronicles the United States Senate’s select committee getting down to work, but that was 11 months after the break-in by the White House Plumbers. And the Senate started the Irvin Committee’s work about the same time that Archibald Cox was named special prosecutor in the matter: mid-May, 1973.
The testimony of John Dean was in June of 1973 and he revealed that he suspected there was a secret White House taping mechanism. His suspicions were confirmed by Alexander Butterfield, a civil servant working for the Office of the President, a month later.
The House Judiciary Committee started making way for evidence to be collected via subpoena only at the end of October of 1973 (now 16 months after Watergate) and H.R. 803 – authorizing action – was ready to be voted on only on January 31, 1974!
In the meantime, President Richard Nixon, under tremendous pressure, held a news conference on November 17, declaring, “I am not a crook.”
Formal procedures were adopted by the House in early May, 1974 and Congress was in high gear on the question of impeachment by July. The Judiciary Committee submitted three articles (charges), but before the full House ever voted on them, the President resigned on August 9.
Nixon, clearly, was never formally impeached much less convicted by the Senate. The Watergate nightmare lasted more than two years!
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