“I’m not a crook.” – Richard Nixon, November 17, 1973

In 1931, Richard Nixon had just completed what had been a very busy first year at California’s Whittier College.  He was the president of his approximately 100-member freshman class, a featured performer in two plays, a reporter for the campus newspaper, a letter-winner in football, and the co-founder of a men’s club.

Nixon was also a member of the debate team.  His engaging combativeness and keen intellect combined to make him a very skilled debater and Nixon would remain enormously proud of these qualities throughout his later political career, applying them famously as a young vice-president in the famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.  These qualities–as well as other distinctly Nixonian traits of awkwardness, resentment, and rank dishonesty–were on full display 37 years ago this week, in a Saturday press conference from Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando that has become known for the president’s use of the phrase “I am not a crook.”

Nixon came to Orlando from his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida.  The press conference occurred at almost the exact midpoint of the approximately two-year Watergate scandal that would lead to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency. This give-and-take with assembled reporters ended up lasting over an hour, but is now almost exclusively remembered for its most famous line, which would launch countless Nixon impressions.  Returning to an earlier question about his remarkably low income tax payments in 1971 and 1972 of less than $2,000 (Nixon was granted a $500,000 deduction based on the appraised value of his vice presidential papers, which he donated to the U.S. government), Nixon said:

I want to say this to the television audience. I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.

Nixon’s critics immediately seized this quotation as a reflection of Nixon’s corruption.  Over the course next nearly nine months, the heat of Watergate intensified.  Though Watergate featured many memorable and consequential words, none carried the cutting power of “I am not a crook.”  It dogged Nixon until he resigned on August 5, 1974 and until his death twenty years later.  Even after his death the words have had an uniquely enduring strength.  Two years ago, Time published a list of the “Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners.” At number one–ahead of such quotes as “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, “We still seek no wider war”, and “The fundamentals of our economy are strong”–is Nixon’s self-inflicted and tragically ironic epitaph: “I am not a crook.”

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