John F. Kennedy may have won the heart of mid-century America but no U.S. president of that period cast a longer shadow than his former rival, Richard Milhous Nixon. Facing impeachment and almost certain removal from office for his role in the Watergate scandal -- a string of transgressions bunched under the name of the site where the infamous break-in of the Democratic Party's national headquarters took place -- Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office when he stepped down a quarter century ago on Aug. 9, 1974. Flying home to California, Nixon spent the next two decades scrambling to piece together his shattered reputation.

It would be difficult to overestimate the effect of the Watergate scandal on the United States With the traumatic Vietnam War just behind them, Americans were suddenly faced with a president embroiled in scandal. Few at first could believe that the president could have been directly involved in the coverup of the break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters. Using a manner that President Bill Clinton would later appropriate when he told the American people that he "never slept with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," Nixon bluntly assured the nation that he "was not a crook." In the end, however, Nixon sealed his own fate. Tapes that the president had made of conversations in the Oval Office provided prosecutors with incontrovertible evidence of his role in the scandal.

The political fallout from Watergate was swift. To ensure presidential abuses of power would never happen again, over the next few years a Democratic-controlled Congress passed new federal election laws and established the position of special prosecutor to fight future political wrongdoing. However, it is arguable whether these laws achieved their intended purpose. Politicians, being as they are, found ways to get around some of the campaign finance restrictions. And, ironically, it was another scandal that would bring the position of special prosecutor to an end. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr's conduct of his investigation of Mr. Clinton helped convince Congress not to extend the law when it came up for renewal this summer.