July 27, 1974 – U.S. House Judiciary Committee Adopts the First of Three Articles of Impeachment Against President Richard Nixon

On June 17, 1972, five men, including a salaried security coordinator for President Nixon’s reelection committee, were arrested for breaking into and illegally wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Washington, D.C., Watergate complex. The Nixon administration denied any involvement. But later that year, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of “The Washington Post” discovered a high-level conspiracy surrounding the incident.

In May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began televised proceedings on what was now known as “the Watergate Affair.”

The Watergate Complex from the air

In July, the existence of what were to be called the Watergate tapes – official recordings of White House conversations between Nixon and his staff – was revealed during the Senate hearings. It turned out that between February 1971 and July 1973, President Nixon secretly recorded 3,700 hours of his phone calls and meetings across the executive offices.

Archibald Cox, sworn in as special Watergate prosecutor, subpoenaed these tapes, and after three months of delay President Nixon agreed to send summaries of the recordings. When Cox said summaries were unacceptable, Nixon fired him. His successor as special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, leveled indictments against several high-ranking administration officials, including White House legal counsel John Dean, who provided damning testimony against Nixon.

John Dean testifying before Congress during the Watergate hearings

On this day in history the House Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 27-11, with 6 of the committee’s 17 Republicans joining all 21 Democrats, adopted the first of three articles of impeachment against President Nixon. (The three articles pertained to obstruction of justice, abuse of presidential powers, and hindrance of the impeachment process.) The remaining two articles were approved on July 29 and 30.

The impeachment article specified nine categories of unlawful activities that were allegedly part of the cover-up of the original crime, and concluded:

In all this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

On July 30, under coercion from the Supreme Court, Nixon finally released the Watergate tapes. On August 5, transcripts of the recordings were released, including a segment in which the president was heard instructing Haldeman to order the FBI to halt the Watergate investigation. Three days later, on this day in history, Nixon announced his resignation, and the next day, he left the White House.

U.S. President Richard M. Nixon as he announces his resignation on television, Washington, D.C. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) (Photo: Hulton Archive)

Shortly after Nixon and his family departed, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States in the East Room of the White House. After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He later pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal.

Gerald Ford announcing his pardon of Nixon

Nixontapes.org is a website dedicated to the production and dissemination of digitized audiotapes and transcripts from recordings secretly made by President Nixon between February 1971 and July 1973. Approximately 3,000 hours of his tapes have been declassified, released, and made available to the public. This website claims to be “the only website dedicated solely to the scholarly production and dissemination of digitized Nixon tape audio and transcripts.”

(The website explains that there is currently no plan to release the final 700 hours of Nixon tapes, which have been deemed to be classified or private.)

You can search the tapes by primary participant (other than Nixon), theme, or date. Another section of the website features additional materials, such as analyses of the content of the tapes.