[Editor’s Note: Kathy Olmsted, awesome as ever, joins us to talk about Nixon. Perhaps you all could lean on her to just suck it up and join the blog? Here’s an argument to use: she wouldn’t have to post any more often than she already does.]

On this day in 1974, White House chief of staff Alexander Haig walked into President Richard Nixon’s study in his compound in San Clemente and gave him the decision just handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States. The president scanned the text and then exploded, snarling epithets about his three appointees who had joined the rest of the court in the 8-0 decision. The court had ruled that the president must surrender the audiotapes of several oval office conversations to the Watergate special prosecutor. Thus began two of the most dramatic weeks in U.S. presidential history, with rumors of coups, nuclear attacks, and drunken Nixonian fits, culminating with the nation’s sigh of relief as the voice of the Silent Majority left the White House for the last time.

The decision itself was a victory for the presidency, if not for the individual president named in the case. Apparently as a means to convince the conservatives on the court to support the unanimous decision, the court enshrined the general concept of executive privilege in the nation’s supreme law. But in this particular case, the court continued, executive privilege did not apply. The tapes contained evidence relevant to criminal trials, and the president must give them up.

The president knew how catastrophic this decision was for him. For years, he had directed his aides to use the government’s powers to spy on and harass his political enemies; when one of the espionage teams was caught breaking into the Democratic National headquarters in the Watergate building on June 17, 1972, he had personally directed an immense cover-up of that burglary and many other associated crimes. As the Supreme Court delivered its decision, the House Judiciary Committee was considering articles of impeachment against him for these crimes. Yet despite the sworn testimony of several of his former aides against him, Nixon had thought he had a good chance of holding onto his office. The Congress was filled with men like Congressman Charles Wiggins and Senate Barry Goldwater who regarded the Watergate scandal as a liberal conspiracy to get a Republican president.

But one particular tape subpoenaed by the special prosecutor worried the president. On the morning of the Supreme Court decision, Nixon called his lawyer in Washington, Fred Buzhardt, to warn him about some possible difficulties ahead. “There may be some problems with the June 23 tape, Fred,” the president said.

Buzhardt went immediately to the tightly guarded White House vault containing the tapes, put some earphones on his head, and listened with growing horror to the president’s conversation with his top aide, Bob Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, six days after the Watergate break-in. The tape answered Senator Howard Baker’s famous question, which Baker had actually designed to exonerate Nixon: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Plenty, it turned out. On the tape, the president could be heard ordering the Watergate cover-up. He instructed aides to tell the CIA to intervene in the FBI investigation of the burglary, on the specious grounds that the break-in was actually a top-secret CIA operation to protect the nation’s security, instead of a White-House sponsored plot to destroy the president’s domestic political opponents. The tape was the piece of evidence the president’s opponents had been seeking, Buzhardt realized; it was the smoking gun.

The news of the tape rippled through Washington as Haig, after hearing the tape himself, began to alert Nixon’s top supporters that their president might not have been completely honest with them. Vice President Gerald Ford announced that he had concluded “the public interest is no longer served by repetition of my previously expressed belief that on the basis of all the evidence known to me and to the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.” In plain English, the vice president was saying the president should leave office. Representative Wiggins, the president’s biggest defender on the House Judiciary Committee, read the transcript and announced bitterly that he and others had been “led down the garden path” by Nixon. Goldwater was even pithier. “Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today!” he told his Senate colleagues when he learned of the tape. The Arizona senator, then viewed as the dean of Washington conservatives, visited the president, warning him that if it came to a trial only ten senators might support him, with six of those, including himself, still undecided. The Republicans were closing ranks. Nixon was bad for the party, and he had to go.

Nixon’s supporters were jumping ship, but what would the president do? His aides feared the worst. Haig, after hearing a cryptic Nixon comment about soldiers being left alone in a room with a gun, ordered the White House doctors to seize Nixon’s pills. Some aides worried that the president was frequently drunk, irrational, and out of control. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had even bigger concerns. He met with the joint chiefs and extracted a promise from them that they would not accept any presidential orders that did not come through Schlesinger. In other words, if the president tried to start a coup, Schlesinger was determined to stop it. Anthony Summers even argues that Schlesinger took away Nixon’s ability to launch a nuclear war.

In the end, with every other option closed to him, the president went quietly. He released the transcript of the smoking gun tape on August 5, and four days later resigned. He chose to let the television cameras record his last speech in the White House (“Oh, Dick, you can’t have it televised!” Pat Nixon warned, and one can see her point). The film of that moment contains the perfect epitaph for the Nixon presidency: