Think fast: what did President Richard Nixon say when the first man walked on the moon? When he became the first president to visit China? Or when he signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law?
If you don’t remember, don’t feel bad. I don’t either.
But mention Nixon’s name and five short, simple words leap to mind. “I am not a crook.” Though not nearly as eloquent, they are as indelibly linked to him as “Ask not what your country can do for you” are to JFK and “a date which will live in infamy” are to FDR.
Nixon (who referred to himself as RN) was known for a brilliant mind, not melodious prose. Yet the words most associated with him were blurted out in a moment of high drama.
He was navigating increasingly rough political waters as 1973 drew to a close. More than 17 months had passed since a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters slipped a new name into the nation’s vocabulary. Watergate was no longer a place; it was a thing, one-word shorthand describing a presidency (and a president) that some Americans felt was out of control.
Accusations kept mounting. Claims of conduct inconsistent with the moral responsibility resting on the president of the United States kept growing. Some said he was trying to silence the investigation into a cover-up of the break-in. (Weeks earlier the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than obey Nixon’s order to fire a special prosecutor during the Saturday Night Massacre). Others alleged he had secretly financially profited in office.
By November, Nixon knew he needed to address the mounting claims of wrongdoing. On the 17th he held a news conference during a meeting of Associated Press news editors in Miami. The New York Times reported the next day, “The president seemed composed and on top of the subject throughout the session, faltering perceptibly only during the discussion of his taxes.”
You’ll recall that when Nixon first ran for vice president in 1952, his candidacy (and career) came dangerously close to imploding when stories surfaced that he lived beyond his means thanks to a slush fund provided by supporters. Nixon successfully deflected that crisis with his famous Checkers Speech. But the allegations stung; 21 years later they still smarted.
At this junction in the news conference Nixon, the most self-controlled of men, let his emotions take over. He said in an astonishing combination of self-pitying defiance, “I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”
Then he uttered those five fatal words “Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”
I am not a crook. The man who debated Khrushchev in a kitchen display in Moscow and Kennedy on television, the man who lost the closest presidential election in U.S. history and brilliantly plotted a seemingly impossible comeback, said five words that were hung around him like an old-fashioned sandwich board. He had branded himself an innocent man; let his accusers prove him otherwise.
In the end, Nixon’s own secretly recorded words did him in. When every last avenue of escape was closed, he fell on his sword and resigned. Climbing aboard the Marine One helicopter and flying away from the White House for the final time, those five fatal words mocked him as he went.
The president who withdrew American troops from a divisive war, the president who engineered the greatest geopolitical shakeup since World War II, the president who helped the superpowers limit their nuclear arsenals, was boiled down to five words that haunted him to his grave.
And beyond. Because nearly 25 years after his passing, he’s still remembered for them today.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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