Chapter 34: What is your favorite Watergate memory?
Originally written August 9, 2021
Yesterday, Aug. 8, 2021, was the 47th anniversary of the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon, who was facing almost certain impeachment for his crimes that were uncovered following the arrests of several campaign henchmen who were caught burglarizing the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel.
After more than two years of terrible revelation after terrible revelation, the embattled Nixon went on TV and basically told the nation, “You can’t fire me. I quit.”
As I’ve alluded to in earlier chapters, I had what you might call a “complicated relationship” with Richard Nixon. He’s been a looming psychic, shadowy archetype in my life.
According to family lore — specifically from my grandmother — on the very day I was born my grandfather was cursing Nixon in my mom’s hospital room. I’m not sure what Nixon had done or said to piss off Papa. At the time, Tricky Dick had been Vice President for about nine months.
But I don’t doubt this story. I have memories of Papa — who was a Republican — telling me as a young child that he knew Nixon was a crook because he had “criminal ears.” (I guess besides being a lawyer, my grandfather was something of an amateur phrenologist.)
Meanwhile, my mom took a perverse pride in telling people that she shared her birthday with Nixon as well as peace activist/folksinger Joan Baez.
Suck on that astrology freaks!
I previously described here how I’d been a Teen Age Republican (New Mexico State president of that fine organization during my senior year in high school) and even though I worked in his Santa Fe campaign office on Saturdays during his 1968 campaign (shortly after the family moved here in 1968).
But by the time I got to college I hated Nixon. This was mainly for his handling of the Vietnam war — which I still believe he could have ended years earlier.
I’ve told how I voted for Nixon’s anti-war opponent Pete McCloskey in the 1972 Republican primary so I could boast that I was “the first kid on my block to vote against Nixon.”
When Nixon came to Albuquerque for a quick stop at the airport during the 1972 campaign, I was there, with dozens or maybe hundreds of other protestors, to greet him. I booed so loudly I was hoarse for a couple of days.
We were vastly outnumbered by Nixon supporters there, but we were louder. I have no regrets about protesting the president.
But I did feel a little sheepish when a sweet little old lady wearing a Nixon button told me, “I wish you wouldn’t do this. We don’t go boo McGovern.”
And actually, considering the ugly state of contemporary political “dialogue,” I wish more people these days were like that lady.
But in addition to how weird and crooked as he was, there was a part of Nixon that was awkward, shy and vulnerable. As Neil Young sang, “Even Richard Nixon has a soul.”
(But I like this Tom T. Hall song more…)
One day, while hitchhiking through central California -- less than a year before Nixon resigned and just weeks before his even more crooked vice president Spiro Agnew resigned in the midst of a kickback scandal -- I started having this strange revery in which Nixon was driving a pickup truck and stopped when he saw my thumb.
During our “ride” together, “Nixon” never introduced himself or gave any indication that he was the president of these United States. And I’m not sure where the Secret Service was. But how could you not recognize the face of Richard Nixon? He seemed to be desperately trying to find common ground with me, telling me that he’d hitchhiked a few times when he was young. I have no idea if, in real life this was true.
Even then I realized that my bizarre Nixon fantasy probably was sparked by an incident a few years before, when during a huge protest against the Kent State and Jackson State killings of anti-war demonstrators.
Nixon, during the wee hours and went to the Lincoln Memorial to talk with protesters there. According to press accounts, the president awkwardly made small talk with the young demonstrators, trying to talk to them about football and surfing.
I remember reading, a couple of years later, a book by “Yippie” activist and Chicago 7 defendant Jerry Rubin. In describing the Lincoln Memorial incident, Rubin wrote something to the effect of “by not spitting in [Nixon’s] face, they betrayed their generation.”
Even then I thought, “No, Jerry …”
I’m not trying to whitewash Nixon here.
I realize that even after his grand Lincoln Memorial gesture, Nixon began pushing the Huston Plan, which called for illegal electronic surveillance, opening the mail of domestic radicals, domestic burglaries to spy on dissidents and creating detention camps in Western states to lock up anti-war protesters.
The unlikely hero who stopped this was none other than J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI! (Check out page 7 of this document.) I seriously doubt that the motives of renown racist red-baiter Hoover were pure. He probably thought the plan intruded on his turf.
However, despite Hoover’s objections, the White House quietly adopted some of the Huston Plan’s recommendations. And eventually those led to his impeachment proceedings.
On the night he announced his resignation, was working at the Master Adult Theater in Albuquerque.
Yes, that was what you think it was. I’ve had some interesting jobs …
As usual I was watching an old black and white TV in the projection room, stirring only when there was a customer coming in or to change the reels. Immediately after Nixon’s announcement I decided that the customers in the auditorium deserved to know about this historic moment.
So I stopped the projector, walked into the auditorium and said, in a portentous voice just somewhere to the south of Walter Cronkite, “Ladies and gentlemen [actually, as usual, there were no women present that night] Richard Nixon just announced his resignation as the 37th president of the United States.”
To my shock, my important historical announcement was met with nothing but jeers and catcalls.
“BOOO!”
“FUCK YOU!”
“TURN THE MOVIE BACK ON!”
“WHO GIVES A SHIT?”
“BOOOOO!”
Turns out the crowd that had paid good money to see Lube Job III or whatever was playing at the Master Adult Theater that night was not really that much into current events. I quietly slumped back into the projection room and turned the movie back on.
This had to be my personal favorite Watergate moment.
About 20 years, I took my son, who was 4 or 5, to the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.
It was a kind of a deal I made with Anton. We went Disneyland in nearby Anaheim the day before and to the Nixon library the next day.
I felt bad because the night before at our hotel I tried to make the Nixon Library a little more exciting for him by spontaneously making up a ghost story — how on full moon nights people at the Nixon library often heard a mysterious voice calling (in my best attempt at a ghostly Nixon imitation) “Heeeeeere, Checkers … Heeeeeere, Checkers …”
That scared the crap out of Anton and probably warped him for life.
Still, I don’t think the specter of Richard Nixon has haunted his life like the disgraced old crook has haunted mine.
Here’s a little song to remind us all about this bizarre chapter of American history:
My personal notable moment came during the Watergate hearings, which I was riveted to. Mine will surely be no one else's, but former NM Senator Joe Montoya, a quiet but sincere member of the panel, asked young Haldeman aide Gordon Straughan what he would say to the young people of America. Caught off guard, Straughan nearly broke down and warned all away from Washington and the corrupt ways he'd seen and fallen into. 2/4
Thanks for the Tom T. Hall! Didn't know it
Been thinking about Dick lately. This week because he did impoundments & price controls, which Trump is talking about. But
while neither worried too much about how many they killed, I think people would have a hard time believing two things: just how sleazy and corrupt Nixon was, and how much WORSE Trump is.