Nancy, I know what you're doing. But so do Republicans.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

28. The House impeachment hearings of 1974 were not televised.

The 1973 hearings many remember as impeachment hearings weren't that at all - they were the hearings of a Senate select committee that was formed to investigate who was behind the Watergate break-in. Nixon's approval ratings were already starting to slide even before these hearings because of media reports (Woodward and Bernstein, but others as well) that the break-in was ordered by someone associated with the WH, if not Nixon himself, and the burglars themselves had already been tried and convicted. The Senate hearings included Dean's testimony and Alexander Butterfield's revelation that there was a secret taping system. The special counsel, Cox, demanded the tapes; Nixon wouldn't give them up and fired Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus in October of 1973 (the Saturday Night Massacre). In February of 1974, in large part because the Saturday Night Massacre was such an obvious obstruction of justice, the House voted to start impeachment hearings, which were not public except for an opening statement and the final vote. When the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes and the HJC voted to send three articles of impeachment to the full House, Nixon knew his goose was cooked and he resigned.

It was the slow drip, drip, drip of bad news about Watergate, beginning in the second half of 1972, that started bringing Nixon's approval ratings down, followed by the televised Senate hearings, but not the closed-door impeachment hearings.