> “Except that President Nixon engaged in the coverup. If he had not done that, he would have served out his second term.”
It’s really not that simple. The whole Watergate break-in had the fingerprints of the CIA all over it, and Nixon was misled by John Dean, his White House counsel.
An excellent book on the subject is “Silent Coup” by Len Colodny.
I don't recall if Colodny talks about it, but the gap in the tapes was right after Nixon said something about the break-in like “...and the whole Cuban thing.”
I wondered if that refers to the assassination of Kennedy (I think it was Haldeman that later thought that as well). Or perhaps the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Neither one of which had anything to do with Nixon. Nixon I believe was trying to protect our country by doing the coverup to protect a former President (Johnson/assasination, Kennedy/Bay of Pigs, or CIA/assasination, etc.)
Nixon also used the “plumbers” and his dirty tricks against the guy that released the Pentagon Papers. The Papers were a harsh and critical assessment made during (and of) Johnson's administration, and his poor execution of the Vietnam War. While it would have been perhaps good political fodder for Nixon to use - Nixon tried to suppress it as it put America in a bad light.
Hence Nixon's reason to resign - to save America from a drawn-out legal battle that would make his presidency ineffective - and probably future presidencies as well.
Notice also the similarity between the Nixon tapes and Trump's phone call leak. Nixon didn't want to release the tapes due to foreign leaders speaking with him with the expectation of privacy. It would be a terrible precedence if those leaders couldn't rely on that anymore.