I was 18 when Nixon finally resigned. I thought it would all come apart as soon as I heard about the Watergate break-in, but that was just my already established anti-Nixon bias speaking, when it turned out to be true the whole thing thing turned out to be much worse.
The end was remarkably fast, Nixon had been stonewalling and maintaining support, and then when his private conversations in the White House were revealed people were aghast and suddenly seemed to realize that so many accusations that had been made about him were true. Many people were also shocked and appalled to find out the POTUS cursed like a sailor. Nixon was in hiding, the story was that he was given some heavy duty tranquilizers, and then suddenly he announced his retirement.
There was only a brief period of angst as Ford took over the position, his pardon of Nixon only a month later took over the news, and put Watergate to bed because Nixon wasn’t going to be prosecuted.
Please tell us something about what you recall from that time.
The local NYC ABC station had a 4 o’clock movie everyday after school. Every now and then they had Monster Movie Week. It was a big deal to me. I rushed home from school to watch Godzilla or Gamera and instead there were these old people talking to each other. All week. They ruined Monster Movie Week. It was a tragedy of immense proportions.
The elementary school teacher put the House hearings on a TV in front of the class and no one paid any attention to them. She called them “historic”; every student found it dreadfully boring.
At home, it was more interesting for some reason and I watched intently. I definitely remember this dude:
Everyone called him “Mr. Sandman.” Although I’m sure the proceedings were beyond my ken at the time, I could still tell that Mr. Sandman was a dickwad.
After the transcripts were released, one of the US networks had a reading session. I think it was one or two Saturday nights.
They had readers, one for each of the participant in the conversations: Nixon, Ehrlicman, Dean and so on, with a poster behind each of them, showing whose part they were reading. For each conversation, the posters of the individuals who were involved in the conversation were lit up and the others darkened, a good visual to explain who was in each conversation.
And what has stayed with me was that the readers just read the transcripts, without emotion or inflection. They were readers, not actors, and they read everything with the same dry tone, even (or maybe especially) the [expletive deleted] bits.
Overall, it was designed to let the tv audience hear what was said, who said it and to whom, but with as little added commentary as possible, to let people make up their own minds. It was tv as a public service at its best.
All of it. Being a basic hippy/yippy Nixon was the man I loved to hate and almost all of his fall is etched in my brain. I guess my favorites was seeing Spiro go under the bus and Martha Mitchell and her mouth. And David Frye; the Watergate Comedy Hour was one of my most favorite albums for about a 10 year span.
I was 9 at the time. While I remember it happening, I was too young to understand what was going on. I certainly didn’t understand the word “impeach”; I recall there was a cartoon that showed Nixon being shut up inside a giant peach and while I wasn’t little enough to take it that literally, I did try to connect the word somehow with peaches to make sense of it.
In August 1974, my family was vacationing near Washington DC. My mom and dad listened to the news on the car radio while we were driving. On the day Nixon resigned, they took us into the city. We sat with the crowd in the park across from the White House and watched the announcement of his resignation on a tiny portable TV.
I was in my 20s. The Watergate hearing were on the TV in any place that had one (we sold them, so they were on), and I watched them every day between customers. It was fascinating TV.
I saw less of the impeachment hearings because I was working, but I followed it in the papers and in the TV news every evening.
I was fifteen, and working in a newspaper office as a proofreader as a summer job. The radio in the paste-up room was already tuned to the hearings when I came in for work in the morning and was on all day. All summer. When I came home at night my parents were watching it on tv. I hadn’t really grasped how important it was at the beginning, but by the end of the summer all those names, faces, voices (I can still hear Sam Ervin) were as familiar to me as my classmates.
It felt solemn and terrible to me at the time; I was still at an age where I could not imagine myself as an adult (that took a loooong time), and had not yet encompassed the idea that real, important-looking men wearing suits could be rat fink liars. The sense that our country was basically sane and well-governed and that this was a terrible anomaly we were patiently fixing through proper channels pervaded the whole event. I doubt that feeling will ever recur.
I was in middle school. I followed Woodward and Bernstein and commentary in the Washington Post. I listened to his resignation on a little radio with my parents, sister, and grandmother, and recorded it on a cassette tape. I was completely fascinated.
Also, it’s how I learned what “deep throat” meant.
The slimebag was my congresscritter when I was born; he haunted me long after. His departure made me feel safe to enlist in the US Army. I could not have served under him. “Pull out, Dick, like your father should have!” was a timely slogan.
I later easily resisted the temptation to urinate on his grave. Not worth the effort.
First, I remember Agnew resigning. When my Mom got me up for school she said, “Agnew resigned; they got the goods on him.” I remember following the Watergate scandal as well as a nine year old could. I knew he was toast. Nixon was the first and last Republican my Dad ever voted for (I suspect Mom voted McGovern). I also remember being aware that Ford became president without being elected President or Veep.
I was on my way to college one October morning when I heard about the Saturday Night Massacre and was so astonished, I almost went off the road.
I remember the poring over transcripts of Nixon’s tapes printed in the newspaper. Remember how “expletive deleted” became a catchphrase?
The next summer, I worked as a hotel maid, and the TV was always on the hearings in whatever room I was cleaning.
My father, who’d voted for Nixon in three presidential elections, was appalled by Watergate and Nixon’s role in it. I wish Trump supporters today had Dad’s grace, wisdom, and integrity.
And I remember the 20th Century US History class I had the night Nixon resigned. We expected the prof to have a TV in the classroom so we could watch the resignation speech. He said we could watch highlights on the news. The class arose en masse and walked out.
I was 7 in the summer of '72, when the scandal first came to light. I was a nerdy kid, who read way above my age level, and watched the news every night, so I was likely more aware of Watergate than most of my classmates.
At first, I didn’t understand what “Watergate” referred to – in one of the first newscasts where I had heard the term, there had also been a news story about a flood, and there was footage of floodwaters running through a chain-link fence. So, for a little while, I though that “Watergate” had something to do with some sort of flood-control thing.
I definitely remember it being all over the news in '72 through '74. I remember hearing a parody song, “Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean,” on the radio in '73. I remember my mother watching the hearings, on days that I was home from school. My parents were (and are) both liberals, and they had hated Nixon even before the scandal, so they were following the proceedings closely. When the transcripts of Nixon’s secret tapes were released, our newspaper (the Chicago Tribune) printed them, in their entirety, in a special section, which I kept as a souvenir.
We were visiting the neighbors on the night that Nixon resigned, and watched the TV coverage with them. I remember my dad saying something along the lines of “good riddance.”
During the midst of the Watergate scandal, I did my 11th grade history report on the Teapot Dome scandal, and read one historian’s conclusion about Teapot Dome to the class. The historian said such a scandal involving the president and high government officials could never happen again due to press and public scrutiny and enlightened voters.
I think that’s when I became cynical about politics. And about historians. History doesn’t repeat itself, historians merely repeat each other.
I was 20 and in college at the time. I had voted for Nixon in 1972 but was not a politically minded citizen after that. When Nixon resigned I was disgusted with the allegations against him – which I believed.
I have, in the entrance foyer of my home, a framed original front page from the Los Angeles Times announcing Nixon’s resignation. I have it there because I want to be reminded, and I want visitors to be reminded, the even a President is not above the law, and can be brought down by due diligence of the media (newspapers back then).
I was a student at the University of Missouri school of Journalism, the world’s oldest (and dammit, BEST) school devoted to that subset of communications/history/public affairs. Watergate was literally a living laboratory for us. The Saturday Night Massacre, the Court cases, the ways different media covered the story, we were like a bunch of medical students in the middle of the Black Plague.
Katherine Graham (the publisher of the Washington Post) and Sen. Sam Ervin (“I’m just a country lawyer”) both spoke at our school.
