August 9, 1974: PRESIDENT RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON RESIGNS

Sophists and snollygosters working for DONALD JOHN TRUMP have written on social media that August 9, 1974 was a sad day in American history, emitting paranoid illogic about the Deep State.

They are wrong. 

I watched corrupt President RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON resign on the black and white television my Mother and I brought to her office that day.  

It was a great day in American history.

I later was privileged to meet and compete with the understated Oak Ridge, Tennessee daily print journalist who famously asked the mild question that led NIXON to say, "I'm not a crook."

His name was RICHARD D. SMYSER, longtime Editor of the Oak Ridge newspaper.  Although we were rivals when I was Editor of the Appalachian Observer, I respected his intellect, and he mine.  He wrote a lovely editorial about me in 1983 after we won Department of Energy declassification of the world's largest mercury pollution event (Union Carbide Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, 4.2 million pounds, 1950-1966). From this blog:

Friday, September 26, 2025

Dick Smyser, 81; His Query Prompted ‘I Am Not a Crook’ Response. (Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2025)

Richard D. Smyser was the longtime editor of The Oak Ridger, who published a gracious editorial before he retired in 1983, praising our Appalachian Obxerver tabloid weekly newspaper in 1983, after we won declassification of the largest mercury pollution event in world history (Union Carbide Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant).  From Los Angeles Times:

Dick Smyser, 81; His Query Prompted ‘I Am Not a Crook’ Response

L.A. Times Archives

March 16, 2005 12 AM PT 

FROM TIMES STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS 

Dick Smyser, 81, who posed the question that led President Nixon to say “I am not a crook” at the height of the Watergate scandal, died Monday of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Oak Ridge, Tenn., according to the Oak Ridger, the newspaper he led for 45 years.

Smyser was president of the Associated Press Managing Editors Assn. in 1973 and 1974 and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1984 and 1985. During the managing editors group convention in Orlando, Fla., Smyser asked Nixon about the huge demands on the presidency.

“To what extent do you think this explains possibly how something like Watergate can occur?” he asked.

Nixon described his busy schedule, concluding with: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

Nixon resigned Aug. 9, 1974, facing likely impeachment over the cover-up of the break-in of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel in Washington.

Smyser, who retired in 1983, was hired as managing editor before the Oak Ridger printed its first edition on Jan. 20, 1949. It was the first newspaper for the “secret city” the federal government created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.