The disgraced president was out of a job, and the Minnesota Republican Party was faced with a choice.
They could side with the president. They could swallow his lies. They could hold tight to the party line and let everything else unravel.
Instead, they let Richard Nixon board that helicopter and fly away. After Watergate, Minnesota Republicans looked ahead.
"We started looking to the future," said Chuck Slocum, who was 28 years old when he took over as chairman of the state GOP in 1975.
Internal polls at the time found that just 10% of Minnesota Republicans were proud to call themselves such after Watergate, it being an era when lying was almost as shameful a political pastime as hiring burglars to steal information from opposing campaigns.
So Minnesota Republicans set to work. They reached out to young voters, to labor groups. They started a GOP feminist caucus. They never spoke of Nixon. They gave the Minnesota GOP a new name.
"We decided to become the Independent Republicans of Minnesota," Slocum said. "It was a powerful way to independently redefine ourselves."
By 1978, Independent Republicans occupied the Minnesota governorship, both U.S. Senate seats and exactly half the seats in the state House.