'I Am Not A Crook ...'

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"[I]n all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I've welcomed this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. Well, I'm not a crook! I've earned everything I've got."

Richard Nixon
Nov. 17, 1973

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Time really does fly.

It seems like only yesterday that I was watching Richard Nixon tell a packed press conference (and the millions of Americans who were watching on TV) that he wasn't a "crook."

Actually, it was 35 years ago today.

If you weren't alive at that time, I can't tell you what an astonishing moment that was. Never before had an American president felt it necessary to proclaim that he wasn't dishonest.

In our history, there have been plenty of presidents who were accused of dishonesty by members of Congress, political activists and ordinary citizens. But no other president, as far as I know, ever felt it was essential to publicly assure everyone the charges weren't true.

But the noose in the Watergate scandal was tightening around Richard Nixon's throat in November 1973, slightly more than a year after his 49-state landslide re-election victory.

The Senate Watergate hearings had exposed the existence of the taping system that had recorded his Oval Office and telephone conversations. Those tapes, the public realized, could resolve whether Nixon or his primary accuser, former White House counsel John Dean, had been telling the truth.

The "Saturday Night Massacre" occurred in October of 1973, when Nixon acted to dismiss the special prosecutor in the case, Archibald Cox.

Cox had asked for copies of some of the White House tapes.

Nixon offered a compromise — he would permit Mississippi Sen. John Stennis to review the tapes and summarize them for Cox.

Cox found the compromise unacceptable and refused it. Nixon then took steps to remove Cox from office.

Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor, and Solicitor General Robert Bork, as the acting head of the Justice Department, was required to do the president's bidding.

By the time Nixon made his famous "I am not a crook" declaration nearly a month later, there had been several bills of impeachment introduced in Congress.

His declaration did not end the matter.

Nor did the release of the heavily edited White House transcripts (pictured at left) the following spring.

By August of 1974, the so-called "smoking gun," a tape of a conversation only a few days after the Watergate break-in, demonstrated that Nixon had attempted to obstruct justice by ordering the CIA to tell the FBI not to investigate, falsely claiming that national security was involved.

The "smoking gun" cost Nixon his support base in Congress, and he resigned and flew back to his native California.

Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn in as president and, a month later, pardoned Nixon in an effort to put an end to the Watergate affair.

In October 1974, in response to accusations that a "secret deal" had led to the pardon, Ford (pictured at right) volunteered to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about it.

It remains the only time a president has ever testified before a congressional committee.