Rhetorical Analysis Of Richard Nixon's Resignation

The feeling of wariness for those in politics was not always existent; although only three presidents have faced impeachment charger, only one president has left office. Richard Nixon was the thirty seventh president of the United States, a man in the public eye for many years as both a U.S. representative and Senator (“Richard”), well educated and around sixty when he resigned from the position as president. On the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon delivered his resignation speech over a public broadcast from his Oval Office to the people of the United States. The former president gave this speech to inform the nation of the upcoming changing president; he also voiced his hopes for the country in future affairs, especially the foreign policies

The thirty seventh president’s tone throughout the speech was genuine and anguished. He stated frequently his regret towards his resignation; when this passage is read aloud, it is stressed heavily on pathos and that Nixon defended his decision with the selflessness of his own emotions and did what is better for the country (“American”). In his speech, Richard Nixon establishes his credibility and then goes on to show the logic of why he is resigning along with sparking the reader’s emotions in defense of him through the use of frequent fallacies and rhetorical devices. Nixon goes on to speak of his accomplishments and the tasks he hopes the American people will achieve with a new president, but those ideas are shadowed by the steady reminders by Nixon himself of the circumstances that are causing him to resign the Presidency that overall make Nixon’s arguments to logic and his credibility seem

The men arrested would not speak of who sent them there but they were later traced back to Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President members. Nixon seemed to be in enough trouble, being moderately involved with this scandal, it was then known that the crooks had also been wiretapping the office and stole copies of top secret files. Although even to this day it is unknown if Nixon knew of the break-ins in the Watergate while it happened, it is fact that the President had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in “hush-money” to the burglars to keep it out of the public eye. Nixon and his affiliates then began attempting to create the CIA to stop any further investigations of the FBI’s on the Watergate scandal (Staff). The former president continuously denied he was involved in the scandal, until the court ordered he handed over recordings that proved he attempted to redirect the fact-finding (“Richard”). All of this deceit only made Nixon viewed as dishonest and shady to the American people, making his impeachment seem almost predictable. But something that was not predicted was Richard Nixon’s