Nixon Denies Corruption: I Am Not a Crook

Richard Nixon stood before 400 Associated Press managing editors at a televised press conference in Orlando, Florida, and delivered six words that would define his presidency more than any policy achievement or diplomatic triumph. "I am not a crook," the president declared, his voice strained and his jaw set, in response to a question about his personal finances. The phrase immediately entered the American political lexicon as an emblem of denial in the face of overwhelming evidence. The Watergate scandal had been grinding toward Nixon for seventeen months. The June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters had initially seemed like a minor campaign embarrassment, but dogged reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, combined with Senate investigations led by Sam Ervin, had steadily revealed a web of wiretapping, dirty tricks, hush money payments, and obstruction of justice that reached into the Oval Office. By November 1973, the crisis was accelerating. Nixon had fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in the "Saturday Night Massacre" on October 20, triggering a firestorm that forced him to accept a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski. The existence of the White House taping system, revealed by Alexander Butterfield the previous July, had created a battle over subpoenaed recordings that would ultimately reach the Supreme Court. Nixon's Orlando appearance was an attempt to regain the initiative by appealing directly to editors and, through them, the American public. The specific question that prompted his famous declaration was about his personal tax returns and a suspicious real estate deal, not the Watergate cover-up itself. Nixon insisted he had earned everything he had and that people "have got to know whether or not their president is a crook."