The New Yorker:

On this day in 1974, President Richard Nixon announced his resignation. Jonathan Schell wrote that, at that moment, the President was finally “freed, like the rest of us, from the oppression of his rule.”

By Jonathan Schell 
August 11, 1974

On Thursday night, when President Nixon announced his resignation, his demeanor was hardly different from the demeanor we had grown accustomed to in the last five years. His face was a mask; his words were cold and unreal. But on Friday morning, when he appeared before his Cabinet and staff to bid them farewell, everything was changed. The mask was gone, and the man was before us. Human feeling played across his face: grief, regret, humor, anger, affection. He spoke of his parents. His father, he said, had failed at many things he had undertaken, but he “did his job” and had been “a great man.” His mother “was a saint,” he said simply. However, no books would be written about her, he said, weeping now. All at once, he was reading what Theodore Roosevelt had written when his first wife had died: “She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit. . . . Her life had always been in the sunshine. There had never come to her a single great sorrow. . . . Then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.” We hardly knew why President Nixon was telling us these things, and it seemed to us that he hardly knew, either. Yet there was more warmth and feeling in these chaotic, uncontrolled words than in all the other words of his Presidency put together. A few hours later, President Ford addressed the nation. He, too, spoke movingly and with feeling. Three times in his remarks he spoke of love. Hearing the word gave us a small start. Love was something we had not looked for in any of its shapes or forms in the public sphere for a very long time. The America of the last ten or twelve years was a loveless place. “Nobody is a friend of ours,” Richard Nixon had told his young legal counsel John Dean. Of the 1972 election, he had said, “This is a war.” 

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