President Nixon addressing members of the Cabinet and the White House staff during his farewell in the East Room of the White House on the morning of August 9, 1974.

In a twenty-minute epitaph the President had written himself, he poured out his heart, with emotional echoes of his "Checkers" speech twenty years earlier, memories of his mother, and a quotation from a man he greatly admired - Theodore Roosevelt. Despite the somber occasion, Nixon attempted a determinedly upbeat delivery: "Greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, and you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain."
-FJM