President Richard M. Nixon

Richard Nixon’s presidency begins, in most people’s minds, with an ending: a man in a dark suit stepping onto a helicopter on an August morning in 1974, giving a stiff, awkward double V-sign, and flying away from the White House he had just resigned in disgrace. The rotor wash blows across the South Lawn; aides stand watching, some stunned, some grim. It is the first time in American history that a president has left office not because his term expired or because death claimed him, but because the machinery of law and politics has forced him out.

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