t speech, “Our long national nightmare is over.” (Westerfeld 57) In September of that same year, President Gerald Ford granted Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon.”Undoubtedly, Nixon’s downfall was his cover-up scheme in the Watergate scandal. Prior to the scandal, Nixon was a popular president, despite his foreign policies in Vietnam. Nixon, himself, has thought about how different his presidency could have been if he were elected in 1960. He would have followed Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had an 8-year scandal-free administration. Instead, he followed in Lyndon B. Johnson’s steps of corruption, spying, recordings, extended illegal use of the FBI, and exploited access to TV. (Nixon 624-25) This fed into his insecurities and habitual paranoia, which facilitated his downfall. ...
