On November 17, 1973, during a televised press conference, President Richard M. Nixon said one of his most famous lines: “I’m not a crook.”
He said it at a time when he was still trying to stonewall the world on his connection to the Watergate break-in.
In his remarks that day, Nixon tried to make it sound like he welcomed the Watergate investigation. He said:
“I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I’ve earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President’s a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”
The welcoming part was especially hard to believe, for a number of reasons.
One glaring one was that, just a few weeks earlier, Nixon had fired the Special Prosecutor assigned to investigate him, Archibald Cox, and abolished the Office of the Special Prosecutor, in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.”
After that, the dominoes kept falling for Nixon, eventually leading him to become the first U.S. president to resign, in August of 1974.
In retrospect, it’s ironic to note that one of the slogans used in Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign was:
“The ‘I’ in Nixon stands for integrity.”
Today, the more remembered slogan is the one used against him during the 1972 presidential election, which is usually attributed to comedian Mort Sahl
“Would you buy a used car from this man?”
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