CORRIGE British cartoon+ Nixon’s resignation speech

The two documents we have to comment on are a cartoon and an excerpt from President Nixon’s TV resignation speech on 8 August 1974. Both refer to the Watergate scandal. The term Watergate is generally used to describe the political scandals which occurred between 1972 and 1974 : everything started in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC where the Democrats had their headquarters.

Before we start analysing the cartoon, it seems necessary to explain the political and historical context in which these events occurred. ( voir cours I)[……..]

Let’s now turn our attention to what happened on June 17,1972 ( voir cours II)[……….]

That’s why the quill pen in the cartoon is bearing the name of the “Washington Post”, the newspaper where Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein worked. Indeed, they were the ones who discovered thanks to their informant Deep Throat that something untowards had happened in the Washington building on June 17, 1972. This pen symbolizes the power of the press: words can also kill, or in this case push a president to resignation.

It looks as if President Nixon has just been executed by the press and the public opinion; the sentence is lying at his feet “ lies” “ more lies”: of course it refers to Nixon’s repeated denegations when asked if he knew anything about what had happened at the Watergate hotel. Throughout the investigations he kept denying he was aware of anything. He even sacked all the people who tried to force him to hand over the famous White House tapes, revealing his secret conversations with his staff.

The second document ends up the Watergate affair with Nixon’s resignation which became unavoidable after the tapes were released.( voir cours “final phase”).[………..]

In this speech Nixon tries to justify himself by saying that everything he did was in the interest of his country and the American people: as they had chosen to re-elect him in 1972, he says he felt it was his duty to complete his term of office, emphasizing the fact he was not a quitter. Finally he pretends he has chosen the interest of the nation – “ peace abroad and prosperity at home”-, thus referring to the end of the war in Vietnam and to the difficult economic situation of the USA in the 70’s: as he can’t devote his time to his country because he has to defend himself in the Watergate affair, he prefers to resign. Of course it was better to resign than to be impeached ( the process of impeachment had already started).

To conclude , we might focus on the consequences of this Watergate affair ( voir cours: IV) [……………………..]