Video: 'CBS News vault: 1974 Nixon resignation'

(Thursday, August 8, 1974, 9:01 p.m. EDT; during the Watergate scandal) — Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, announced tonight that he had given up his long and arduous fight to remain in office and would resign, effective at noon tomorrow.

At that hour, Gerald Rudolph Ford, whom Nixon nominated for vice president on Oct. 12, 1973, will be sworn in as the 38th President to serve out the 895 days remaining in Nixon’s second term.

Video: 'CBS News: The Resignation of Richard Nixon (8 Aug 1974)'

Less than two years after his landslide re-election victory, Nixon, in a conciliatory address on national television, said he was leaving not with a sense of bitterness but with hope that his departure would start a “process of healing that is so desperately needed in America.”

He expressed regret for any “injuries” done “in the course of the events that led to this decision,” acknowledging that some of his judgments had been wrong.

In tone and content, the 15-minute address was in sharp contrast to his frequently combative language of the past, especially his first “farewell” appearance in 1962, when he announced he was retiring from politics after losing the California governorship race and declared that the news media would not have “Nixon to kick around” anymore.

Video: 'CBS Evening News (August 8th, 1974)'

Yet he spoke tonight of how painful it was for him to give up the office.

“I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so,” he said.

“I have never been a quitter,” he said. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.” But he said he had decided to put “the interests of America first.”

Video: 'NBC News 8 8 74 Nixon resignation'

Conceding that he did not have the votes in Congress to escape impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, Nixon said, “To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.”

“Therefore,” he continued, “I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.”

Then he turned again to his sorrow at leaving. Although he did not mention it in his speech, Nixon had looked forward to being President when the United States celebrates its 200th anniversary in 1976.

“I feel a great sadness,” he said.

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Nixon expressed confidence in Ford to assume the office, “to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us.”

“By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America,” he said. “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong — and some were wrong — they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation.”

Further, he said he was leaving “with no bitterness” toward those who had opposed him.

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“So let us all now join together in affirming that common commitment and in helping our new president succeed for the benefit of all Americans,” he said.

As he has many times in the past, Nixon listed what he considered his most notable accomplishments of his five and a half years in office—his initiatives in foreign policy, which he said had gone a long way toward establishing a basis for world peace.

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And, at the end, he expressed his own philosophy — that to succeed is to be involved in struggle. In this, he quoted Theodore Roosevelt about the value of being “the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and who “spends himself in a worthy cause.”

After spending himself in a long political career, Nixon was scheduled to fly to his home in San Clemente, California, and retire tomorrow while Ford is being sworn in in the Oval Office.

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A White House spokesman said tonight that Nixon and his family would bid farewell to Cabinet members and staff personnel at 9:30 a.m. EDT tomorrow in the East Room. Then they will board a helicopter at 10:00 a.m. for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, where they will emplane on the Spirit of ’76, a jet aircraft, for their flight to San Clemente.