Richard Nixon Resignation: Watergate Is the Scandal Never Ends

On the morning of August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon boarded Army One on the South Lawn of the White House, his family and a few selected aides in tow, and flashed his V-for-victory wave, most Americans thought they were witnessing the end of Watergate.

The unprecedented resignation of an American president seemed like a fitting final chapter in what the new chief executive, Gerald Ford — freshly sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the only man to sit in the Oval Office who was never elected to the presidency or vice presidency — would call, in televised remarks that afternoon, “our long national nightmare.”

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James Rosen

James Rosen is the chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author of Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986–2001.

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Richard Nixon

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On the morning of August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon boarded Army One on the South Lawn of the White House, his family and a few selected aides in tow, and flashed his V-for-victory wave, most Americans thought they were witnessing the end of Watergate.

The unprecedented resignation of an American president seemed like a fitting final chapter in what the new chief executive, Gerald Ford — freshly sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the only man to sit in the Oval Office who was never elected to the presidency or vice presidency — would call, in televised remarks that afternoon, “our long national nightmare.”