The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Peter Rodino, began televised hearings to consider articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon following revelations from the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The proceedings, which stretched through the summer, culminated in Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, before a formal impeachment vote could occur. It remains the most serious constitutional crisis triggered by presidential misconduct in modern American history.
By the spring of 1974, the drip of Watergate revelations, wiretapped conversations, hush money, an enemies list, had become a flood. The House Judiciary Committee's decision to open formal hearings signaled that impeachment was no longer a fringe possibility but the plausible endpoint of the scandal that had consumed Nixon's second term.
Committee chairman Peter Rodino, a low-key New Jersey Democrat, presided over weeks of often dry, procedural hearings that nonetheless carried enormous stakes, as the White House fought subpoenas for Nixon's Oval Office tape recordings all the way to the Supreme Court. The eventual release of the "smoking gun" tape in early August, revealing Nixon's direct involvement in the cover-up just days after the break-in, destroyed his remaining support even among Republicans.
Rather than face a near-certain impeachment vote and conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, the only American president ever to do so. The Judiciary Committee's hearings had transformed impeachment from an obscure constitutional mechanism into a live national drama, setting precedents for televised congressional oversight of the presidency that echoed in later impeachment proceedings decades later.