"Had Richard Nixon not resigned, he would certainly have been impeached by the House and most likely convicted by the Senate. Peter Rodino and John Doar had been essentially right about the preconditions for a successful presidential impeachment: There had to be a commonly accepted baseline of facts, an atmosphere of trust among the members of the House Judiciary Committee, and a disciplined commitment by the committee chair and the inquiry staff to bipartisanship. But those were only the preconditions. Even still, Richard Nixon very nearly finished his second term. His impeachment holds worrisome lessons for future Congresses. Law enforcement and the judiciary had evidence of Nixon’s criminal behavior eight months before he left office, and yet there was no predictable way to ensure his removal. Impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, and by hampering access to information while encouraging his defenders to demand a very high level of proof of direct presidential misconduct, Nixon almost stymied that process. But Nixon had made tapes, and the public and Congress learned about those tapes before he could destroy them. Fortunately for the nation, Richard Nixon could never figure out how to untangle himself from those tapes. Equally fortunate for the nation was the fact that in 1974 a group of elected officials, from both parties, were prepared to take political, and even personal, risks to follow that evidence wherever it led for the sake of a Constitution they all revered."