August 9 · This Day in America
At 11:35 a.m., an aide hands Henry Kissinger a single sentence: "I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States." Richard Nixon is the first president ever to quit. By noon he is gone, lifting off the South Lawn with a final, jarring wave. At 12:05, in the East Room, Gerald Ford takes the oath and tells the country, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Watergate had been two years of break-ins, tapes, lies, and subpoenas climbing toward the Oval Office. No tanks moved. No general spoke. A free press dug, courts ruled, Congress prepared its articles, and a president, cornered by the law, simply went home. The republic did not need a hero that day. It needed only its rules, followed all the way to the end. They were. That is the whole point of them.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1945
At 11:02 a.m. a second atomic bomb, "Fat Man," detonates above Nagasaki. Tens of thousands die in a flash, tens of thousands more in the months after. Within days Japan surrenders and the deadliest war in history ends. The weapon that closed it had no precedent and no easy conscience. America had crossed into an age it could not step back out of, and the world has lived under that knowledge ever since.
Source: www.trumanlibrary.gov
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”Gerald R. Ford, 1974