Patriotic Republicans helped save the country 49 years ago. Will any step up in 2023?

On Aug. 7, 1974—49 years ago this week—three powerful Republican lawmakers met with then-President Richard Nixon and told him he wasn’t going to find a reprieve through them: He was going to be impeached. Within two days, Nixon resigned.

That intervention by Sen. Barry Goldwater, House Minority Leader John Rhodes, and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott earned an almost-mythological status that all three legislators downplayed in later years. They were loyal Republicans, they knew the jig was up for Nixon, and they knew that the right thing for the country—and their political party—was to end the “long national nightmare.”

No Republicans were actual heroes during the Watergate scandal: They were just patriotic civil servants. Sen. Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, started out as something of an ally to Nixon. He even secretly met with Nixon at the outset of the hearings to let him know the committee’s strategy. He drew the line, however, at working with Nixon to subvert that strategy.

Baker asked the famous question, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” He thought he was going to get a very different answer, that it was Nixon’s underlings who engineered the plot without Nixon’s involvement. Oops. To Baker’s credit, however, when he got the answer he wasn’t expecting from White House counsel John Dean, he followed the path it opened and the nation was spared the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.