On this Day: President Ford Pardons Richard Nixon

“I have come to a decision which I felt I should tell you and all of my fellow American citizens, as soon as I was certain in my own mind and in my own conscience that it is the right thing to do,” Ford began his speech on that Sunday morning.

President Nixon had resigned only one month earlier, after a failed break-in at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel. Five men were caught trying to bug the Democratic National Committee’s office on the night of June 17, 1972. They were later found to have large amounts of cash and connections to the Nixon campaign.

Ford said that he made his decision partly due to pure compassion, Time magazine reported on Sept. 16, 1974. But most importantly, “Ford hoped that the pardon would help heal the nation.”

Bringing Nixon to trial could have taken months or years, and in that time, “ugly passions would again be aroused, our people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our free institutions of Government would again be challenged at home and abroad,” Ford said.

The Watergate scandal gripped the nation when it erupted in 1972. Following the incident at the hotel, two Washington Post writers, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, began reporting on the FBI’s investigation of the event. With the help of a secret source—“Deep Throat,” who in 2005 was finally revealed to be FBI agent W. Mark Felt in 2005—the two reported that the Nixon administration had orchestrated the break-in.

In February 1973, the Senate formed a committee to investigate the events at the Watergate Hotel; hearings began in May and lasted for almost three months, during which former White House counsel John Dean revealed many key details of Nixon’s cover-up.

But even more damaging evidence was to come. In August, a tape recording from June 1972 surfaced, which revealed that Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman had conspired to hinder the FBI investigation by having the CIA shut it down. With so much evidence stacked against him, Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974.

In October 1974, President Ford submitted himself to a congressional committee hearing for questions regarding his pardoning of Nixon. Many believed he’d made a deal with Nixon to pardon him if he would resign.

“The session left troubling questions unanswered, doubts unresolved, and Ford still struggling to find a way of exorcising the wraith of Nixon that haunts his presidency,” Time magazine reported following the event.

During questioning, Ford did admit that he’d known about the contents of the infamous “smoking gun” tape that implicated Nixon and Haldeman, but said that he continued to believe that Nixon was innocent. Ford also admitted that he had discussed a pardon with President Nixon while he was still vice president.

But, as Time reported, despite these admissions, Ford fervently insisted that “there was no deal, period,” between him and Nixon, and that he issued the pardon thinking it was best for the country: “I wanted to do all I could to change our attentions from the pursuit of a fallen president to the pursuit of the urgent needs of a rising nation."

No matter how many of those involved in the Watergate scandal deny that there was a deal between Nixon and Ford, however, doubts persist.

On Dec. 31, 2006, shortly after Ford’s death, Al Haig, who had been Nixon’s chief of staff, appeared on CBS news show “Face the Nation” as part of a panel of speakers remembering President Ford. When asked about the rumored deal, Haig replied, “Why would a rational man who had just heard that he's about to be president risk everything by doing something like that? Doing a conditional deal? He was going to be president no matter what. That was a simple fact. And he was smart enough to know it.”