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.
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.