Today (August 9, 2024, if you read this some other day) is the 50th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in disgrace as the 37th president of the United States. Back then, believe it or not, a president being caught in a lie — not to mention covering up a crime! — was sufficient grounds for his being impeached and removed from office and never being heard from again. Impeachment was viewed as such a humiliation that Nixon resigned rather than subject himself and his party to that degradation.
The day Nixon announced his resignation, we were living in our first apartment, about a mile from my seventh-floor desk in Kodak Park’s engineering hub. Knowing that Nixon would make his resignation speech that evening, I set up my tape recorder in front of the RCA TV in our apartment, and when Walter Cronkite appeared, I flipped the lever to REC. Nixon’s first words that night were, “Good Evening.” Yes, it was.
I recorded the entire speech, including Nixon’s self-serving “Man in the Arena” rant where he equated his scheming to remain in office to an imagined valiant struggle against mortal enemies. This is how narcissists like Nixon view their world.
Most of us thought that Nixon was the worst president ever and were happy he was gone. We celebrated the machinery of our democracy, and the power of the press, in a subdued, chastened way — we had a close shave but somehow survived.
How quaint it was, that restoring our faith in democracy relied on the offender’s feelings of remorse and responsibility!
Fifty years post-Nixon, Americans still harbor a fantasy that every presidential candidate is George Washington until proven otherwise. Somehow we can’t get our heads around the idea that a politician would dare put their own interests ahead of the people he or she promises to serve. How can we still be so naïve?
Demagogues promise everything but deliver nothing. If we have learned anything about liars and demagogues in the past fifty years, now is the time for us to show it.
Indeed!
Well said!
Mr. Spock said to Captain Kirk: ” only Nixon could go to China”
I was in St. Marys. I had gone there for my sister’s wedding and my mother told me there was a job opening for a reporter at The Bradford Era. I applied, interviewed, and got the job. Nixon’s resignation came on Friday. The following Monday I was to start at the Era. As Nixon started talking, my mother and I were in my parents’ living room. I could not restrain my jubilation. She, a Nixon fan, was crestfallen. The post-Nixon years were good ones for me. They kicked off that same day when Gerald Ford, in accepting the office, said, “Our long national nightmare is over.” If only he knew. But my years at the Era were great ones. This was the time of Saturday Night Live, the end of the Vietnam war, the heyday of Ali and the Steelers, Jaws and Star Wars. It was on to Rochester in 1978.
What a great memory this triggers! I forget exactly where I was when I saw this. Maybe I was already in, or on my way out to Bloomington to begin grad school? But I surely remember Walter Cronkite’s trusted and sonorous voice, and then Gerald Ford’s gracious address. And, dang, but didn’t Biden do something similar by opting out? What’s the buzz word these days? Is it maybe “Country Before Party”?
I have not given up hope that Americans will make the right decision in November. Please, America, don’t let me down.
For sure! I actually think the tide is turning in terms of DJT’s negativity — after 9 solid years of whiny name-calling victimhood, people are thinking, “This series should have ended at Season 7.”