Loyal Nixon speechwriter proved more loyal to his country

Did you know that the only Nixon staffer to resign in protest of Watergate was a speechwriter? If I ever knew, I’d forgotten, and so I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post story about John Andrews. He wrote for Nixon from 1970 until1973, when he quit, despite believing deeply “in most of what [Nixon] wanted to do for America and the world.” But he’d become convinced that, “in moral terms the revered leadership position is quite vacant.” And on Feb. 2, 1974, Andrews wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, in which he lauded Nixon for giving voice to the “silent majority,” but charged that Nixon’s White House had now “undertaken to cow that majority back into silence by making them doubt their own decent instincts on an even more basic issue—executive responsibility and the role of law in our democracy.”