Carroll Kilpatrick
The Washington Post
Page A01
8/9/1974
Richard Milhous Nixon announced last night that he will resign as the 37th President of the United States at noon today.
Vice President Gerald R. Ford of Michigan will take the oath as the new President at noon to complete the remaining 2 1/2 years of Mr. Nixon’s term.
After two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, President Nixon bowed to pressures from the public and leaders of his party to become the first President in American history to resign.
“By taking this action,” he said in a subdued yet dramatic television address from the Oval Office, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
Vice President Ford, who spoke a short time later in front of his Alexandria home, announced that Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger will remain in his Cabinet.
The President-to-be praised Mr. Nixon’s sacrifice for the country and called it “one of the vary saddest incidents that I’ve every witnessed.”
Mr. Nixon said he decided he must resign when he concluded that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress” to make it possible for him to complete his term of office.
Declaring that he has never been a quitter, Mr. Nixon said that to leave office before the end of his term ” is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.”
But “as President, I must put the interests of America first,” he said…
The article continues at The Washington Post.
Thursday, 8 August 1974:
