Still kicking Nixon around
Thirty-five years ago, Richard Nixon announced on national television that he was resigning as president. I lay on the living room floor to watch, my cherished black leatherette-encased black cassette tape record at my side and its mike placed as close to the television as possible because I wanted to record every word. I was 12 years old and I knew this was going to be important. My parents were quiet, although I knew my father’s feeling: that somehow Nixon was getting railroaded. Looking back, I wonder if they weren’t a little scared.
A year before, the Arab Oil Embargo had put my father out of business. He was 52. He went back into the union as a heavy-equipment operator, but I’m not sure that our family’s finances ever truly recovered. Now it looked like the presidency was going out of business, too, with a twice-elected president being replaced by one nobody had voted into executive office, someone who was plucked from obscurity to replace another scandal-plagued predecessor.
I just watched the resignation speech again. I remember keenly feeling that history was being made. It was. But I had no way of knowing that 35 years later I would feel that we were just coming out of an even darker time, one that would make the trespasses of Watergate seem quaint.