SPOKANE — One of the most consequential political figures of the 20th century ate the same meal for lunch almost every day: Crackers, a tall glass of milk, and a ring of canned pineapple topped with a dollop of cottage cheese.
This same meal would also be the last one Richard Milhous Nixon ate on Aug. 8, 1974, in the White House, just moments before going on national television to announce his resignation from the presidency of the United States.
“I have never been a quitter,” Nixon told the nation that day. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.”
During his life, the 37th president of the United States appeared on the cover of TIME magazine a total of 55 times, more than any other person in history. Today, dozens of those magazines are immortalized in frames that line walls of the basement of a museum built next to the house where Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California.
In recognition of the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, The Spokesman-Review paid a visit to the Orange County town where he was born and that is now home to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Nixon was the first baby born in then-new-to-the-map Yorba Linda on Jan. 9, 1913. The doctor traveled by horse-and-buggy to a home in the hills outside of Los Angeles to deliver Nixon. The Irish Quaker from a humble upbringing grew up to travel the world in a Boeing 707 jet and made history in the oval office as he watched Americans walk on the moon in 1969. Today, space suits hang from the ceiling of the museum built next to the home Nixon was born in and buried outside of in 1994.
Nixon is buried outside his elaborate presidential library alongside First Lady Patricia Nixon. The graves are nestled in a courtyard of palm trees, pink and white flowers, rows of boxwood and a large rectangular fountain. Just yards away sits the small farmhouse where Nixon was born in a small citrus grove.
He grew up to serve as a U.S. senator, helping to fuel the Red Scare in the 1950s before becoming vice president and then ultimately spending five years as president before he resigned.
The 37th president is of course best known for Watergate, a scandal that changed American politics and shattered public trust in the United States government. The Watergate scandal makes little-to-no appearance at Nixon’s namesake museum in California. Instead, the focus is on his more popular accomplishments such as his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act.
A lesser-known chapter in Nixon’s presidency featured the City of Spokane .
The spring before he resigned, Nixon paid a visit to Spokane to give opening remarks on May 4 at Expo ‘74. That spring and summer marked history in many ways for Spokane, and it marked United States history as the only world’s fair that was not opened and closed by the same president.
‘Deeply wounded’
Chuck Helm was a senior studying at Gonzaga University during the spring of Nixon’s visit to Spokane. He originally had enrolled in college to dodge the draft for the Vietnam War, he said, after trying and failing to lose 20 pounds in a month to drop below the healthy weight minimum.
“I weighed about 125 pounds, and I was trying to get down to 100,” Helm said in an interview. “I pretty much only drank water for a month. It didn’t work. My draft number was 37. I knew I’d get drafted if I didn’t figure something out. So I went to college.”
The draft and the state of national politics at the time meant Helm was no fan of Nixon. Despite living a stone’s throw away from Riverfront Park, Helm wanted no part of Nixon’s opening remarks at Expo ‘74.
“I thought he was an (expletive),” Helm said. “I think I spent that day smoking weed, working on my thesis down by the river.”
Helm was not alone in his disapproval of Nixon’s visit that day. The president was met with protesters marching, chanting and carrying signs that read “IMPEACH the (expletive).”
When the White House sent word to Expo ‘74 leadership that Nixon had decided to show up for opening day that year, a group of Spokane Democrats adopted a resolution calling for the president to stay away from Expo unless he turned over the presidential tapes.
The group asked the city for a parade permit to protest and were denied that request. They were given permission to hold a rally in front of the federal building.
Helm said at least half of his class at Gonzaga took part in the protests that day.
“Of course we would protest that crook,” Helm laughed. “We were hippie college students in the 1970s.”
In light of the controversy, Rod Lindsay, Chairman of Expo ‘74, defended the president’s plan to visit, wrote J. William T. Young in his book, The Fair and the Falls: Spokane’s Expo ‘74:
“The fact that the president of the United States will open the fair is the important thing,” Lindsay said. “It’s the office, not the man.”
Lindsay added, “Some people think that if a person is accused or indicted of something that he’s automatically guilty. Under the American system of justice, guilt has to be proven.”
Nixon drama aside, Expo ‘74 was great for Spokane, in Helm’s eyes. Nearly 6 million people over six months visited the smallest city to host a world’s fair .
“It was exciting,” Helm said. “They spent a lot of money. But the proof of it is a lot of that stuff they built still exists.”
Helm spent a lot of days that summer floating the Spokane river with his friends, he said, alongside a keg of beer.
“We’d get in up by Post Falls and float all the way home,” Helm said.
At Expo, Nixon centered his remarks around what he thought the crowd of 55,000 attendees that afternoon would want to hear, steering clear of any mention of his looming impeachment inquiries, or the economy, or the Vietnam War.
Back in Washington D.C., the Watergate Hearings were heating up with the discovery that the president had secretly taped all his conversations in the Oval Office.
“Today, we speak of the environment in terms, as we should, of cleaning up the air and water, of a legacy of parks, of all of those other things that have to do with making our cities and our towns and our countryside more beautiful for our children and those that follow us,” Nixon said in Riverfront Park on that sunny afternoon.
Behind the scenes, Nixon’s political position was on very thin ice, said Gregory Cumming, an archivist and staff historian at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. More and more political leaders were calling for him to resign every week.
As Vietnam calmed down, the Watergate scandal began to pick up steam in 1973, “dominating the news vacuum” in a time where information in the country was driven by daily print newspaper deadlines and the clattering of typewriter keys.
“Watergate and the economy dominated his agenda that summer,” Cumming said. “Now when he goes to Spokane, what he’s talking about is the environment, because that’s what he’s assuming everybody is going to want to hear in that part of the United States.”
High unemployment rates coupled with high inflation added insult to Nixon’s injured reputation.
Cumming added, “Is he in trouble politically at the time? Yes, he is — he’s deeply wounded. He doesn’t have a lot of strength in Congress. The impeachment votes haven’t occurred yet, but it’s moving in that direction.”
‘Follow the money’
About 1,200 journalists showed up to the opening day of Expo, according to The Fair and the Falls: Spokane’s Expo ‘74. Full-page newspaper fronts from that week were filled with photos of hot air balloons and pigeons flying through the sky, of the president, and of protesters.
Every morning, one of Nixon’s White House aides prepared and delivered a “morning news summary” to Nixon’s office, full of newspaper clippings that mentioned him. It was the first thing that the president read each morning.
The week of Expo’s opening, Nixon’s news summary was filled with copies of The Spokesman-Review, the Oregonian and the Eugene Register-Guard. Hard copies of those newspapers are tucked away in Nixon’s presidential library archives in Yorba Linda.
Stories about the president’s visit to Spokane sat side-by-side in newspapers next to stories about his tanking approval ratings in the wake of Watergate and protesters who showed up everywhere he went.
The 1970s was arguably the most influential decade for modern print journalism in the United States, and the tireless work of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and dozens of other reporters inspired a generation of journalists who sought to hold power to account.
Bernstein and Woodward’s work even gave birth to the glitzy 1976 box office smash “All the President’s Men.” The film was so influential that it coined a famous phrase associated with Watergate that was actually never spoken by Mark Felt, the associate director of the FBI in the 1970s known as “Deep Throat,” the anonymous informant central to the scandal: “Follow the money.”
Today, as print newspapers continuously shutter across the country, as trust in the government looks bleak, as politicians grow increasingly divisive, many people reflect on Watergate and think the actions of Richard Nixon and his cabinet wouldn’t seem so outrageous in the 21st century.
But the thing about the many journalists who cracked the Watergate case is that they uncovered the truth about how things actually happen in Washington D.C. In doing so, they woke up a nation to use scrutiny when dealing with powerful people.
To quote investigative reporter Jack Anderson, “power is Washington’s main Marketable product. Power is the driving force that brings together people of different philosophies and varying interests in the constantly evolving battle for control.”
As voters gear up to choose who will sit in thousands of local, statewide and national seats of power this November, journalists across the country have spent their summer researching many of those people seeking power and following the money.
The news looks a lot different than it did 50 years ago. Journalists have traded their typewriters for computers and now get to share their work via the internet. Yet the goal of the free press remains the same, and it owes a lot of its legacy to the events that spurred Nixon’s resignation 50 years ago.
