4 – Richard Nixon
Since the events which led to the end of his presidency in the 1960s, history has conferred on the 37th President of the United States a reputation for being, arguably, the most corrupt head of state the country has so far produced. Nixon was born in 1913 and, after a brief period as an attorney in California and serving in the US Naval Reserve during World War II, Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and the Senate in 1950. After a failed bid in the 1960 election, he was elected President in 1968.
Nixon is most infamous for the events known as the “Watergate” scandal. Most notoriously, these included the covert bugging of the Nixon Administration‘s political opponents. On June 17, 1972, five men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic Party at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. Probing further, The Washington Post newspaper communicated with an informant called “Deep Throat” – later revealed to be an associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt – to link the burglars of the building to President Nixon. The President dismissed the revelation by describing the news articles covering the scandal as misleading and politically biased. But it subsequently emerged that the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon and then the White House tried to sabotage the Democratic Party.
In July 1973, Alexander Butterfield, an aide at the White House, testified to Congress that President Nixon had a secret taping system that recorded his phone calls in the Oval Office. While the Watergate Special Counsel subpoenaed the tapes, Nixon delivered only transcripts of the conversations on the basis of “executive privilege”.
In November 1973, Nixon’s lawyers confirmed that a tape of conversations in the White House on June 20, 1972, contained a gap of 18 ½ minutes. Nixon’s personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed responsibility for the gap, explaining that she had accidentally wiped the minutes of the recording when transcribing. The noticeable gap in the transcript cast damaging doubt on Nixon’s claim that he had been unaware of the cover-up. Nixon vowed to remain in office and rejected accusations against him. On television on November 17, 1973, Nixon said: “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
On May 9, 1974, the House of Representatives commenced impeachment proceedings against him, which ended in votes backing impeachment. The US Supreme Court then ordered that the full tapes must be released. When one of the new tapes confirmed that the President had been informed of the burglaries’ connection with the White House shortly after they took place and also confirmed that Nixon had approved plans to obstruct the investigation, on August 5, 1974, Nixon accepted that his “loss of memory” was to blame for his lying to the country. He accordingly resigned from the Presidency on August 9, 1974.