Watergate Nixon Quotes

#1. You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.

Richard M. Nixon

#2. Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

Helen Thomas

#3. Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.

Stephen Ambrose

#4. I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it. I appreciate anybody who wants to tape me openly and notoriously, and those who feel like they want to sneakily, and wear taping devices, I would remind them that it kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate.

Rod Blagojevich

#5. I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.

M. Stanton Evans

#6. I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'

Stephen Colbert

#7. Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.

Richard M. Nixon

#8. The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

Robert Redford

#9. Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

Robert Dallek

#10. Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.

Bob Woodward

#11. When President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for Watergate, he actually pardoned Alexander Haig for the JFK assassination.

Tegan Mathis

#12. Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses ... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.

Archibald Cox

#13. When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#14. You have a good judicial system in the U.S., as you have learned from the Nixon-Watergate period.

Sean MacBride

#15. Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

Rick Perlstein

#16. Americans like to give their President the benefit of the doubt. If you look at the poll numbers, people knew Nixon was deeply involved in Watergate and stayed with him for a long time. It's a natural tendency.

John Dean

#17. I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.

Tony Campolo

#18. The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

Thomas Frank

#19. Had the Senate or House, or both, censured or somehow warned Richard Nixon, the tragedy of Watergate might have been prevented. Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.

John Dean

#20. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

Conrad Black

#21. Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.

Tom Brokaw

#22. After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

Bob Woodward

#23. I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.

Bob Woodward

#24. I believe that without Watergate we would have had an extraordinary period of success with a strong Nixon and a still vital Brezhnev in power.

Henry A. Kissinger

#25. The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate.

Dexter Scott King

#26. After the 1970s, when President Nixon's illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.

Eric Schneiderman

#27. The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.

Bob Woodward

#28. It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.

Richard M. Nixon

#29. I can see clearly now ... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.

Richard M. Nixon

#30. Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon's involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.

Ronald Kessler

#31. No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency - a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.

Richard M. Nixon

#32. Mr. Ford's decision to pardon Richard M. Nixon for any crimes he might have been charged with because of Watergate is seen by many historians as the central event of his 896-day presidency.

Scott Shane

#33. The White House tapes, recording Nixon's nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.

Nigel Hamilton

#34. What was Watergate? A little bugging!

Richard M. Nixon