The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute invites you to a lecture by Dr. Jeffrey Engel, Director, SMU Center for Presidential History, marking the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation. This is the fourth event in the 2024 Godbey Anniversary Lecture Series.

It has been fifty years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. Congressional power rode high in 1974, followed by a rejuvenated judiciary and invigorated media heady with the accomplishment of felling the most powerful man in the world—the president of the United States—with the mere audacity of facts and truth. Reports of the death of the imperial presidency proved premature, however. Presidential power has only increased since, bureaucratically, militarily, and especially, politically, as the White House has become the focal point of American voters in a way few if any at the Constitutional Convention of 1789 would have forseen, or condoned. Checks on presidential power, consequently, remain few and far between. The past three presidential impeachments, the first since the 1860s, resulted in zero convictions. Zero was also the conviction they left among the American people that anything more than partisan politics explains those verdicts, which recent Supreme Court rulings appear to vindicate with wide ranging claims of executive immunity no one present in Philadelphia in 1789 would possibly have condoned. We are told no person is above the law. Recent history says: don't believe it. We were told in 1789 that ours was a republic, but only if we could keep it. The history of presidential power and presidential impeachments over the past five decades in particular suggests we are failing that basic test.