March 19, 1974:
Conservatives took Jim Buckley's 1970 Senate slogan and adapted it in the wake of their displeasure over Nixon.
In a major blow to the political viability of President Nixon, who is under siege for his role in the Watergate scandal, Sen. James Buckley of New York calls for his resignation. Buckley says Nixon's resignation is necessary because Watergate has "plunged our country into what historians call a 'crisis of the regime.' A crisis of the regime is a disorder, a trauma, involving every tissue of the nation, conspicuously including its moral and spiritual dimensions."
Buckley, first elected in 1970 as the candidate of New York's Conservative Party, is the first conservative Republican in Congress to call for Nixon to quit.
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