Leadership Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon’s line lands like a legal brief disguised as a confession: not apology, but maneuver. “Impeached myself” reframes resignation as an act of agency and moral accounting, as if he’s performed the system’s judgment on his own body. It’s the passive voice’s tougher cousin: he’s not saying I broke the public trust; he’s saying I carried out the remedy. The brilliance (and brazenness) is in the verb choice. Impeachment is a constitutional process done to a president, not by one. By claiming it, Nixon tries to convert enforced exit into voluntary discipline, swapping humiliation for a kind of stern self-governance.

The subtext is pure damage control. In August 1974, the Watergate dam had already burst: the smoking-gun tape erased plausible deniability, Republican support evaporated, and impeachment in the House was imminent with conviction in the Senate increasingly likely. Resignation didn’t “impeach” him; it preempted the public spectacle of being impeached and convicted, and it preserved what mattered most to Nixon’s post-presidency: narrative control, political dignity, and legal exposure. (No impeachment also meant no Senate trial, no formal verdict, and a cleaner runway for Ford’s later pardon.)

It also reveals Nixon’s lifelong fixation on legitimacy and procedure. Even cornered, he reaches for institutional language to sanitize personal wrongdoing. The line is less self-indictment than self-authored verdict: he wants history to remember a man who submitted to constitutional order, not one dragged out by it.