As economic prospects darkened in 1974, cries for leadership were heard on all sides, yet the leaders themselves were in a state of turbulence. Seldom had so much political power changed hands in so many nations, except in the aftermath of a major war.
TIME'S Man of the Year is the person who—for good or ill —has most shaped the news and influenced the course of history. In other circumstances, that man might well have been Richard Nixon. More than two years after the Watergate burglary, after months of scandal that left the nation divided and depressed, Nixon became the first American President to resign. Yet no matter how dramatic the denouement, Nixon's role was essentially passive and self-destructive; his Administration was at last overtaken by the slow, relentless working of the U.S. Constitution, the Congress and ultimately the public conscience. Nixon's departure was a strange and absorbing spectacle, but the great damage had been done by the months of accusation and uncertainty, not by the resignation itself. The end was greeted mostly with relief as the beginning of recovery.
Nixon gambled desperately on releasing his transcripts; it was not much of a gamble though, with the Supreme Court, 8 to 0, forcing the issue. The tapes, even in edited form, revealed an atmosphere of startling moral squalor in the White House, a spirit of callousness and contempt for law that repelled even Nixon's steadiest allies. The House Judiciary Committee's impeachment hearings showed to a nation skeptical about Congress a group of earnest men and women trying to achieve fairness in a historic and profoundly disagreeable job. At last Nixon was forced to yield up what became known as "the smoking gun"—a previously deleted passage of the transcripts in which the President flatly ordered an FBI-CIA cover-up of Watergate; it contradicted his repeated solemn assurances of his innocence and condemned him to at least a charge of obstruction of justice.
A few days later, on Aug. 9, faced with the arithmetic of votes against him, the certainty of his impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, Nixon withdrew; he admitted no real wrong but cited only his loss of a "political base" in Congress. In the wreckage of his Administration, 16 of his aides and other operatives went to jail; John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell and H.R. Haldeman, once three of the most powerful men in the nation, spent the fall shuttling to the Washington courtroom where they were on trial for conspiracy.
In
Nor was the Man of the Year Gerald Ford, the first President to comeunelected to the Oval Office. Though he began his stewardship buoyed by immense popular good will, Ford disillusioned many Americans with his sudden unconditional pardon of Nixon. For all his fall campaigning at home and his ventures abroad to Tokyo, Seoul and Vladivostok, Ford did not seem quick to assert the firm and imaginative leadership that the U.S. so badly needed. Still, at year's end, Ford had been in office only 144 days, and that was plainly too short a period to tell how effective his presidency might ultimately be.