nm - double post
I was just out of the service, Living in a group house with a bunch of other grad students but I also worked. I came home from work to find all my roomies glued to the TV watching the hearings. I was pissed that I couldn’t watch all of it.
A much younger friend remembers the Clinton impeachment as how he learned about sex. Feels sorry that kids today will just get to learn about Ukraine.
One weekend, my Scoutmaster pulled up and announced “Mr. Nixon is finished.” He had just fired the Special Prosecutor. I remember the two-hour news/chat show on the DC station, Panorama. Maury Povich was a host, but he was on vacation. He showed up saying there was no way he was going to miss reporting on the resignation.
My parents were lifelong Republicans, they had voted for Nixon in 1960, and my dad was a Greek immigrant, so of course they supported the Nixon-Agnew ticket. And I was a tween when Nixon got re-elected, so I was still reflecting their beliefs.
Nixon was always pretty unpopular in heavily Democratic West Virginia. In my peer group, political discussions were mostly just tribal shouting, like arguing over sports teams or popular songs. Most of us didn’t know much about the issues, we just knew our side was right about them. 
I remember thinking at the time that Agnew’s resigning was related to Watergate (which of course it wasn’t). The day he stepped down, a friend of my father’s called, and they talked for hours in Greek. We couldn’t understand any of it of course, but my older brother and I joked that they were lamenting that the old Greek guys’ plot to take over the world had been foiled – “They got our number-one guy!”
I remember seeing Nixon on TV announcing that he had appointed Gerald Ford vice president. A commentator said it was important, because Ford could quite possibly become president.
I gradually began to understand the basic elements of the Watergate case, although the details and procedures were beyond me. I understood what impeachment was – a grade school teacher had taught us that only one president had ever been impeached, and that he had not been removed from office. I remember hippies in front of the courthouse with signs reading “Honk for impeachment”, to a lot of honking. There were also bumper stickers reading “Impeachment with honor”, which mocked Nixon’s promise to end the Vietnam War (‘peace with honor’).
I had a newspaper route that summer, and in the days leading up to Nixon’s resignation, I sold all my extras.
Ron Zeigler’s announcement that (indirectly) said all his previous statements on Watergate were “inoperative”. I.e., there were so many lies that it was pointless to say which ones they were so just ignore all of them.
An amazing admission by the standards we used to have.
I was 16 when he resigned. I remember hearing, “I am not a crook” and thinking, OMG, that’s what crooks say.
I’m embarrassed to admit that thru those years, I just wasn’t interested in politics or news. I lived in MD, so Agnew’s departure seemed to hit close to home, tho I didn’t really understand or care what went on. Anything I know about Watergate I learned years later.
I was working at a store then. I walked to work right after Nixon resigned, and the streets were totally deserted. No people and very few cars. The mall I worked at had very few customers, and all they were talking about was Nixon.
It was very eerie.
I recall betting my staunch Republican History teacher/P.E. teacher a full grade that Nixon was going down.
I aced the course and told him he owed me.
As I was not born until 1977 obviously I have zero memories of the actual event, but I do remember the “elder statesman” Nixon who was very active in his older years and by the 1990s had largely rehabilitated his image (to the extent that it could be). I mean, he damn well knew he was never going to make anyone forget what he’d done, but ultimately he was as effective in repairing his image and reputation as anyone in his unique position ever could have been.
I think I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. Mostly, I remember coming home from school and getting pissed off because Gilligan’s Island and my cartoons were preempted by the Watergate hearings almost every day forever…or so it seemed at the time.
Also, I had a rescued pet rabbit. It died one day while I was in school. I learned when I got home, and was horrified that the stupid Watergate thing was still going on when my rabbit had just died. Yeah…maybe I was a little self involved.
In 1987 or '88, there was, as I remember it, some not-quite-idle speculation that Nixon might consider running for president again. Recyling what I think had been a quote from a newspaper columnist during the 1968 campaign, the slogan “Tanned, Rested, and Ready” got thrown around – probably jokingly, but who knows for sure?
Link to an archived Chicago Tribune article from 1988: THE 1988 NIXON: TANNED AND RESTED BUT NOT QUITE READY – Chicago Tribune
I was 6-8 years old when all the coverage started to when he resigned in disgrace. Other then preempting shows I wanted to watch at the time, the only thing I really remember well was his resignation.
It was the summer between high school and college for me. I remember “expletive deleted” being a big thing. I don’t think I ever heard the word expletive before but it sure got a lot of play that summer. I didn’t watch much of the hearings on television, my mother worked the night shift and slept through them, my dad worked the day shift and wasn’t around, and I spent most of my time savoring my last summer of playing sandlot baseball with the neighborhood kids. The night before he left I was playing poker at a friend’s house and we sort of half watched it while playing cards.
I feel your pain. When JFK was assassinated there were no cartoons on TV for a week.
I was 11 years old, and living in the highly Republican enclave of North Dallas. I didn’t really follow the details at the time, though I read the front page of the newspaper every morning, but I was absolutely convinced that Nixon had gotten a raw deal. And I continue believing that until a couple of years later, when I read Hunter S Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail“.
I also remember the song “Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean,” and I think there was another one about Rose Mary Woods and the mysterious gap on the tape recording. But I can’t call it to mind just now.
I was about 13, and pretty plugged in for a kid that age, though baseball was definitely more important. I recall riffing on the Saturday Night Massacre by drawing a political cartoon for our school newspaper (the cartoon was poorly drawn and not at all clever, and no one got it anyway, but it was the thought that counted).
I remember the hearings–Tom Railsback and Bob Michel of my own home state, Peter Rodino, Liz Holtzman, a few others. Barbara Jordan was involved. And of course Sam Ervin.
I remember “[expletive deleted],” like a lot of other people, and threw it into my own writing when I thought I could get away with it. I also recall “at this point in time,” which likewise became a catchphrase, if a less enduring one.
My parents were never at all fond of Nixon and came to despise him as the president and his presidency unraveled. The night he resigned another couple came over and the four of them went out and quite literally danced in the streets–even my staid and largely undemonstrative father. Busy residential/commercial neighborhood too. I was extremely embarrassed.
I first heard “Tanned, Rested, and Ready” in a SNL sketch around the tiime of the 1977 David Frost interviews. It jokingly implied that Nixon was planning to run for president again. Nixon (Dan Ackroyd) is shown in his office describing over the phone two bumper stickers he’s printed up. The first says “TR&R”. The second says, “Is it really a free country if a man can only be elected president twice?”
That’s interesting that “TR&R” may date to the 1968 campaign, at which time it would have made literal sense, since he was coming back after the 1960 election.