Richard Nixon's Assassination

Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, he became the only American President to ever resign from office on August 9th, 1974. The factors that led to his resignation cannot be boiled down to a single event, instead his somewhat cruel personality and unorthodox viewpoints led to the end of his political career. The Watergate scandal, a key event in the downfall of Richard Nixon, can be associated to his paranoia and his belief that some of his political rivals were bad people. To overcome them, he felt that he needed use any and every political weapon at his disposal to secure his place as president, even if that meant breaking the law. Nixon also believed that as president of the United States he was allowed to break certain …show more content…
However, rather than give up the trickery that brought him to power in the first place, he continued the practice throughout his years in office. Nixon saw the Presidency as a vehicle for a permanent political campaign, and corruption as the propellant. Although he was by no means the first president to make a political decision based on how the public would perceive him, he was the first president to completely do away with national interests in favor of approval ratings in order to keep his foothold on the …show more content…
As Theodore White notes "The clumsy break-in at Democratic headquarters in 1972 by Nixon men was technically criminal but of no uglier morality than the spying at Barry Goldwater's headquarters which Howard Hunt of the CIA had supervised for Lyndon Johnson in 1964" (White 325). What made Nixon's activity lead to his resignation was the fact that did not fear any repercussions from engaging in such illegalities. He believed so fiercely in the secrecy of the Presidency that he never feared the repercussions of having machines recording self-incriminating evidence in the White House. After being accused of seeing himself as "above the law" by Dan Rather, Nixon stated the