Watergate. I was probably six years old, and I learned about the events (and Tricky Dick) from the MAD magazines my older brother left lying around, and from my parents’ jokes. Therefore, for a long time I thought Presidents/politics were humorous as a rule.
…Oh, wait, I still think that!!
I remember the gas crisis of 1974 (I was about 4). Riding around with my parents, trying to find a gas station without a line or one of those flags denoting they were out of gas. Pretty much like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
1969, when I was six, waiting in line to view Eisenhower’s body lying in state in the Capitol’s rotunda.
I remember coming home and finding out the JFK had been shot. I was a little more than a month short of 6 years old.
We got our first TV when I was 6. I watched everything, including the Democratic and Republican conventions. I even got to stay up late on election night.
I was so disappointed. They kept calling it a race. Nobody ran anywhere! There wasn’t even a track!
I remember seeing the Kennedy-Nixon debates on television in 1960, when I was 5. I was so annoyed that we weren’t watching our regular programs.
Johnson’s " I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President" speech.
I also vividly recall my father saying to the TV, “That man’s a god damned liar,” about Nixon. My dad calls them like he sees them.
When I was 3 or 4, I was watching TV. Mom was asleep.
I woke her, & said “Mommy, Mr. Kennedy has been shot.”
Mom (sleepily), “Yes honey, but that was years ago.”
Later–“Mommy, the TV says it was the other Mr. Kennedy, his brother, who got shot. Today.”
She got up.
I remember trying to comfort her when she was crying.
Carter’s running for re-election…I’m about 6 years old…I decide that I’m going to draw and send to him my own ballot with a checked box beside his name. I believe I do it in crayon on a post-recycled brown piece of paper ( way back before we called anything post-recycled).
Some undisclosed amount of time later, I receive a Presidential Picture Book in the mail with a stamped form letter.
I also recall seeing on TV, a portrait of Carter made entirely of peanuts. It may very well have been this unique mosaic that prompted my six year old self to let him know he had my vote.
Heck…a guy with a face made of yummy snacks must be a pretty cool guy.
The earliest political opinion I recall forming on my own came from an anti-star-wars ad the Walter Mondale ran. It had all these scary nuclear war images superimposed with earnest children’s faces, and it said something along the lines of “Keep war out of the heavens.” That made up my nine-year-old mind, let me tell you!
I still blush when I recall being taken in by such a blatantly scare-mongering, overwrought emotional appeal.
Then I get a little depressed about our political process when I realize that nine-year-olds weren’t exactly the demographic the ad was aimed for, and that it was intended to influence the voting choices of grown-ups.
In November of 1976, I was 4 years old. The night before the election, I sat with my family at the dinner table and we went around the table with our predictions for the election. Dad: “Ford.” Mom: “Ford.” Brother David (8 years old): “Ford.” Me: “Ford.” Brother Steve (6 years old): “Carter!”
I remember the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis during the Carter years. I was seven years old. Each night on the news they would have a little rectangle above and to the side of the anchor’s head with a graphic: “Day 277,” “Day 310,” etc. I remember when Mad magazine made fun of the rescue attempt-- something like “too bad we don’t have a helicopter that can actually make it to Iran…” I remember my Dad getting up early to get in line to buy gas. And I remember a rhyme about Carter based on the old Oscar Meyer jingle: “'Cause Jimmy Carter has a way with messing up the U.S.A.”
My father was sitting at the kitchen table. The TV was in the basement. My brother and I were watching the election returns. He was seven; I was five.
Every so often, Joe would turn to me and say something like, “Go tell Dad that Ford took Indiana*” and I’d run up the stairs, open the door, and shout “Ford took Indiana!”
Then I’d run back down the stairs and wait for the next message. If I didn’t say anything for a while, Dad would open the door at the top of the stairs and holler down, “What’s happening now?” And we’d yell back something and he’d grumble and shut the door. He was for Ford.
*I have no idea if Ford took Indiana.
I vaguely remember going to vote with my parents (well, they were going to vote, but I was going to be there), and I know I was under 5, and it wasn’t a presidential election.
I have a picture in my head of the presidential debates in 1980. I wasn’t paying too much attention, but it’s there. And I remember the other kids in my class (their parents were Republicans) making fun of Carter after he lost the election when I was six.
I remember a lot of “You can’t hug a kid with Nuclear Arms” bumper stickers in the early 80s.
The earliest thing I have crystal clear memories of were the conventions in 1984. We watched all convention coverage, both conventions in my family - (and I remember them seeming familiar at the time, so we must have done the same thing in 1980). I remember the Tale of Two Cities speech. It got to a 10 year old - and probably permanently shaped her thinking. (According to my little sister, it did the same for her.)
I am considerably younger than almost everyone here… so don’t laugh!
My first political memory, though hazy, is watching on TV the Berlin Wall fall in '89. I was about 5 years old. I had no idea what was going on, and I only barely remember different parts of it.
For me it was the 1972 US Presidential election, followed closely by the revelation of the Watergate scandal. The actual break in at the Watergate Hotel happened prior to the election, but did not become common knowledge until after Tricky Dick got re-elected.
My parents and most of my other relatives were for McGovern in '72.
I remember being pissed off when the Watergate hearings were on TV instead of Detroit Tiger baseball. I was really not that interested in politics at age nine, and much preferred to see Al Kaline and company instead of some boring hearing.
I recall Gerry Ford as the bumbling “accidental president” who only got to be president because Nixon resigned. At the time, I kind of liked him because he played football for the Michigan Wolverines. Like I say, my understanding of and interest in politics was not very well developed at the time.
The Vietnam war was pretty much winding down by the early seventies, but I do recall hearing little bits and pieces about it and related subjects. For example, I recall my grandpa asking my uncle what he thought about what was going on with Cambodia (I assume he meant the extention of the US war from Vietnam to Cambodia).
I remember hearing a lot about “women’s liberation,” or what would later be called feminism (people were probably calling it feminism then as well, but it seems that the former term was more common in the 70s). Once again, one of my most vivid memories of this subject comes from the world of sports, specifically the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
The oil crises, yes I remember those. Gasoline prices kept going up, and many gas stations closed. Also, a number of oil companies merged with others around this time, and so certain brands (Sinclair and Pure were a couple in Michigan) disappeared from the market.
1963, JFK’s assassination. I was in 1st grade, and it was announced over the school PA. The teacher started crying, and we all had to pray (it was a Catholic school).
I distinctly remember Nixon’s resignation speech. I was nine or ten at the time. I vaguely remember hearing about all the hearings and stuff before that, but the first thing I distinctly remember is that speech and thinking, “it’s about time!”
Gee, Eva, this sounds familiar . . . 
But for the benefit of the rest of you who WEREN’T at our place for dinner on Friday: my earliest political memory is also my only memory of not being able to read. Maybe I was 3 or 4?
My mom was voting and they had a ‘kids’ table’ with little laptop voting machines to entertain ourselves. (NJ has levers, not dimpled chads, FYI.) So my mom was behind her little curtain and I was waiting for her at the table, playing with the machines. My mom comes out and waits for me to finish. I am about to pull a lever and my mom says, “No, jeevwoman, not that one.” I scream out, “Why, Mommy? Was that The Crook?” (See, Nixon resigned when I wasn’t quite 2 and it was the happiest day of my parents’ lives. He was referred to ONLY as The Crook in our household.) My mom says very quitely, “Oh, no, honey. That one is broken.”
Side note: for many years, my dad had a little sideline business selling lithograph copies of Nixon’s resignation letter out of the gift shop at the Watergate Hotel. (Yes, he is truly a geek.) He’s probably still got a couple of boxes of them in his basement somewhere. He even tried to get me to sell them to my classmates on the 8th-grade trip to Washington; I refused to have anything to do with it.