Tom Brokaw - The Fall of Richard Nixon: A Reporter Remembers Watergate

This is how the presidential world of Richard Nixon ends.

On July 24, 1974, the president is holed up in San Clemente, California, at La Casa Pacifica, his grand seaside mansion. It is less than an hour south of the presidents very modest childhood home in Yorba Linda, the working-class community where he grew up as a bright, awkward, and ambitious child in a Quaker household largely bereft of familial affection.

On this sunny day in late July, the White House press corps is housed in the commodious Surf & Sand, a pricey oceanfront hotel in Laguna Beach. The bucolic setting and sybaritic life in the bar and on the beach make for an unlikely setting in which to deal with the serious issues that brought us here.

As a member of that White House appendage, I am hanging out with my colleagues in a makeshift communications office attached to the hotel. We are awaiting a routine daily briefing from the White House press office on the presidents schedule, but our attention is focused on a stately building two miles east of the White House in the nations capital.

The U.S. Supreme Court.

Eight justices are preparing to announce their decision on one of the most momentous cases in American history. A ninth, Justice William Rehnquist, has recused himself because he was an assistant attorney general during Nixons first term. The essential question is, Does a president have the right to withhold from Congress tape recordings and other relevant material in a case involving suspected illegal behavior in the Oval Office? It is the pivotal issue in the long, complex, and historic case known as Watergate. Simply put, it asks whether the president was an active participant in the cover-up of a burglary that unraveled into a massive conspiracy in which senior White House aides, members of the presidents cabinet, higher-ups in the Justice Department, officials of the FBI, and senior members of the presidents 1972 campaign for reelection all had a role.

Suddenly the word arrives: eight justices of the high court have voted against the president. He must turn over all relevant material to the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, including tape recordings in which he described what actions he wanted taken. Finally Congress and, just as important, the American people will hear, in his own voice, just what the president wanted. Despite the presidential resistance to the long line of testimony, leaks, and circumstantial evidence leading to this moment, it appears that Mr. Nixon has hit the wall.