On August 7, 1974, a trio of Capitol Hill’s Republican eminences, led by Senator Barry Goldwater, called on a beleaguered President Richard Nixon at the Old Executive Office Building on the White House flank. The Watergate scandal was in its end stages. Consequently, the meeting was not about presidential decorum, evidence of obstruction, or the finer points of high crimes and misdemeanors. The meeting was about math.
Goldwater, along with his fellow Arizonan John Rhodes and Pennsylvania’s Hugh Scott (respectively, the House and Senate minority leaders), explained to Nixon that his support among Senate Republicans had collapsed. It was already inevitable that the House would move forward with the articles of impeachment that had been adopted by its Judiciary Committee nearly two weeks earlier. Now, the only practical question was whether the president could count on more than a third of the Democrat-controlled Senate, where Republicans held just 41 seats. Goldwater, Scott, and Rhodes assessed that Nixon’s support had dwindled down to no more than 15 senators, and probably fewer.
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