“I Am Not a Crook”

President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate era.

(NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

Thirty-two years ago today, in a nationally televised press conference, Richard Nixon looked Americans in the eye and affirmed that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” It was a defining moment of his career and, some historians believe, the moment when his presidency became unhinged. Simply put, it was an incredible claim.

Consider that by November 1973 the Watergate scandal was nearing its climax. Over the previous seven months virtually all of Nixon’s top White House aides had been forced to resign over the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the ensuing cover-up.

John Ehrlichman, the President’s top domestic-policy adviser, and H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, resigned in April. John Dean, the White House counsel, was fired that same month. In October, when Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor in charge of investigating the Watergate scandal, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned in protest.

By the time Nixon took to the airwaves to proclaim his innocence, former presidential appointments secretary Alexander Butterfield had already dropped a bombshell in his testimony before Congress. He had admitted under oath that Nixon had taped Oval Office phone calls and meetings. The White House had thus gotten embroiled in a charged and highly public debate with Senate over access to the tapes.

It was a remarkable downward spiral for a President who only a year before had been reelected in a landslide victory. Nixon won 520 electoral votes to his opponent’s 17. He carried 60 percent of the popular vote. Little wonder that he thought the public would believe him.

In his speech of November 1973, which was intended to defuse not only the Watergate controversy but also lingering questions about his personal finances and tax returns, the President outlined in scrupulous detail his assets, his earnings, and his real estate holdings. It was a maneuver taken straight from his own playbook.

More than 20 years before, Dwight Eisenhower had tapped a much younger Richard Nixon, who was then a U.S. senator from California, as his vicepresidential running mate. Days after the ticket was announced, the New York Post broke a story charging that a group of businessmen had created an $18,000 slush fund to help the senator live beyond his modest congressional salary. Specifically, rumor had it that Pat Nixon, the senator’s wife, had bought new drapes with the money in question.

In response, Nixon persuaded the Republican National Committee to spend an unprecedented sum, $75,000, to buy him a half hour on national prime-time television. Before taking to the air he told his wife that he intended to lay out for the entire country his family’s meager finances. “Why do you have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” she pleaded. (She really should have known the answer to that question: Her husband had always been willing to do what it took to win, even if cost him a bit of pride and dignity.)

Nixon’s broadcast, known thereafter as the “Checkers speech,” was a study in self-abasement. “Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours,” he told viewers. “I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” Nixon admitted that he had accepted one personal gift from a wealthy contributor, “a little cocker spaniel dog … black and white, spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the six-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, like all kids, the kids love the dog, and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.”

It was far from dignified, but the speech proved an success. So much so that in 1973 Nixon thought he’d try it again. The problem, of course, was that much had changed in the two intervening decades.

Surveys conducted in the 1950s showed that roughly three-quarters of Americans “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” either “most of the time” or “just about always.” These were the heady days following World War II, the “good war” against global fascism, when public officials enjoyed tremendous credibility for their triumph over totalitarianism and their victory over the Depression.

This public faith in government could be constructive; it allowed policymakers to strengthen the safety net and promote economic and scientific advancements. But it also could be downright credulous. In the 1950s few reporters at first thought to challenge Sen. Joseph McCarthy when he issued wild, unsubstantiated claims about Soviet incursions into the executive branch. A sitting U.S. senator simply wouldn’t lie about that sort of thing—or so the logic went. And when a U.S. senator and vicepresidential candidate looked the country square in the eye and denied financial wrongdoing, most people were willing to accept his statement without question.

By 1973 the Vietnam War and the emerging Watergate scandal had changed the way Americans thought about politics and politicians. The credibility gap over the war—a gap that resulted from years’ worth of official pronouncements that America was turning the corner in Vietnam, pronouncements that simply didn’t look right in light of nightly television news reports to the contrary—and the knowledge that top White House officials had conspired to cover up a criminal operation made the public suspicious of elected officials. And mainstream journalists, chastened by having let two unknown Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, scoop them on the story of the century, became a lot more aggressive in their questions and tactics.

By the mid-1970s, only 33 percent of Americans still voiced that kind of faith in their government.

For better or worse, Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech announced a new era in American politics. It also signaled the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency.

You can hear audio of the speech at http://www.historychannel.com/speeches/ra_archive/speech_209.ram

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made Modern America, to be published in April 2006.