Resignation
How many Senators were willing to vote for acquittal?
Watergate scandal
The release of the "smoking gun" tape destroyed Nixon politically. The 10 congressmen who voted against all three articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee announced they would all support impeachment when the vote was taken in the full House. On the night of August 7, 1974, Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Congressman John Jacob Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him that his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Rhodes told Nixon that he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. Goldwater and Scott told the president that there were not only enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 Senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Realizing that he had no chance of staying in office, Nixon decided to resign. In a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of August 8, 1974, the president said, in part:The morning that his resignation was to take effect, the President, with Mrs. Nixon and their family, said farewell to the White House staff in the East Room. A helicopter carried them from the White House to Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. Nixon later wrote that he thought, "As the helicopter moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but of the future. What could I do now?…" At Andrews, he and his family boarded Air Force One to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California, and then were transported to his home in San Clemente.