Our failure to separate personalities and institutions

In the 1970s, during the presidential administration of Richard Nixon, American democracy was tested by the criminal and corrupt acts that became known as Watergate. The cover-up of the scandal reached the White House, and a defiant Nixon was eventually threatened with impeachment. With evidence mounting and under bipartisan pressure, Nixon resigned from the Presidency in August 1974. It became the most significant constitutional crisis in American democracy to date. 

Our system of checks and balances survived the chaos. Impeachment, unlike its commonplace use in recent times, was a relatively unused mechanism in the United States. At the time of the Watergate crisis, impeachment had last been used more than a century earlier during an unsuccessful attempt to remove President Andrew Johnson in 1868. He was impeached by the House and acquitted by one vote in the Senate. No President has been constitutionally removed from office in U.S. history. Nixon remains the only President to resign the office amid pending charges.