A Stark Contrast

Fifty years ago tomorrow night, Richard Nixon delivered a televised address from the Oval Office. He would, he said, resign from office effective at noon the following day.

“America needs a full-time president, and a full-time Congress,” he said. He also admitted errors in the events that led to his decision. “If some of my judgments were wrong — and some were wrong — they were made in what I believed at the time to be in the best interests of the nation.”

Times change. The need for a full-time president no longer seems to exist, and the less time Congress spends on the job, as a general rule, the better.

It had been a hot summer in Missouri, where I was at the time a reporter for The Columbia Daily Tribune, an afternoon daily newspaper. The news was important in that era, real news as opposed to Taylor Swift’s current squeeze, and covering it was akin to a religion, a solemn responsibility, which is a sense that I have not been able to shake in the intervening half century. We were all excited about the news, all the time, and errors in coverage were the stuff of ridicule and derision. I know it sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.

National Public Radio, until then pretty much the hippies-and-their-rich-liberal-parents radio network, had made its bones that summer by providing continuous coverage of the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, better known as the Watergate committee. (Almost decade later, on my first day at WOR Radio, I found myself seated on a couch in the reception area. At the other end of the couch was Sen. Sam Ervin, who had presided over those hearings. I’m not in Missouri anymore, I thought to myself.)

“Watergate” had been in the news for awhile, even though its chief lasting effect would come to be the addition of “-gate” by what currently passes for the news media to any scandal large or small, real or imagined. The many events that made up that word (named after a hotel in Washington, D.C.) had mostly taken place during the 1972 presidential campaign. It was the first year that presidential primaries had any real effect. During that year the hapless presidential campaign of George McGovern, always an unlikely choice, had stumbled badly when it was discovered that Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, Democrat of Missouri, had had some of his brain fried away in electroshock treatments for depression. (I’ll note in passing that if you suffered from depression, the McGovern campaign would not have improved your condition.) McGovern said he was 1,000 percent behind Eagleton, who was gone a few days later.

He was replaced, after a scramble the likes of which we would not see again until last month, by R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy inlaw who during that administration had been given the job of starting the Peace Corps. I covered a small rally held by Shriver in Columbia. We were given “press passes” that were scraps torn from a piece of notebook paper, on which was scrawled the word “Watergate.” The word caught on but the campaign didn’t; McGovern and the replacement vice-presidential candidate carried only the District of Columbia and Massachusetts.

Various Watergate-related disclosures dribbled out over the next 18 months, and by the summer of 1974 there was actual talk of Nixon’s impeachment. No president had been impeached for 96 years. It was not the common political stunt it is today, and mere utterance of the word sent shivers through everyone, no matter their political views.

As July turned to August 1974, the idea of impeachment became more real. Fifty years ago today, Sen. Barry Goldwater, of Arizona, led a group of Republican senators and congressmen to meet with Nixon at the White House. He would be impeached, they told him, and convicted. He should resign.

Rumors that Nixon was likely to resign had been floating around for a few days, which made things awful for an afternoon newspaper. Beginning on Tuesday, August 7, we had dummy front pages ready to drop in, should Nixon have decided that morning to resign. The dummy that Tuesday had the top half of the front page filled with two words:

NIXON

RESIGNS

Wednesday’s dummy was modest by comparison:

NIXON RESIGNS

But Nixon waited until Wednesday evening to announce his resignation, effective Thursday. It wasn’t even the only story on the front page of the Thursday paper. “If he had waited another day,” laughed one editor, “he might not have made the front page at all.”

Nixon left office and Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. In a short “inaugural address,” Ford attempted optimism: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” The sentence became a joking catchphrase applied to everything down to and including soft chocolate ice cream cones being re-introduced at Dairy Queen.

Also, Ford, bless him, was as wrong as he could be. Our long national nightmare was just beginning, and it has grown since then.

It is now an absurd national fever dream, the kind that keeps you alarmed a while after you wake up and colors the rest of your day.

If you can look at any of the four major party candidates for president or vice president without a feeling of revulsion, there is something the matter with you, even if one of them is a close relative.

Let’s make some comparisons. Watch Nixon’s resignation speech, with its muted mea culpa. Compare it, now, with Joe “Bugout” Biden’s withdrawal speech from two weeks ago.

Americans aboard the container ship SS Mayaguez were taken hostage when the ship was seized by the Khmer Rouge on May 12, 1975. The still-new Ford administration acted promptly. On May 15, following an attack by the Marines, the Mayaguez and its crew had been released. It took three days.

When five Americans were seized and held as hostages by Hamas last October 7, the Biden administration (or whoever was running things there) did, effectively, nothing. The administration has held fast to that position. They hostages are not even mentioned. (One imagines that Kamala Harris, when and if she is informed of it, will say something like, “Hamas and eggas, [cackle cackle cackle].” Donald Trump, depending on his mood of the moment, might denounce the hostages as losers, or say they’re “very disloyal.” Their vice-presidential dimwits, who at best might be characterized as losing entries in “Robot Wars,” might mercifully remain silent on the subject.) Don’t want to anger the terrorist sympathizers in Dearborn, doncha know.

When in 1976 there was an outbreak of the deadly H1N1 “Swine” Flu, the Ford administration announced an emergency immunization plan. When the vaccine turned out to cause Guillain—Barre syndrome in one in 100,000 recipients, the plan was withdrawn.

When 35 years later the world faced an outbreak of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus, the government jumped into full panic. Vast quantities of what was called a vaccine were ordered. When the “vaccine” ended up killing a lot of people, many more than one in 100,000, the Trump and later the Biden administration continued to push it, as the current administration, run by Heaven knows who, does to this day.

Trump and Vance talk too much and when they do they say stupid things that almost seem designed to drive voters to the other side. Here’s Trump being a self-defeating ass, attacking a popular governor who could be easily elected president. There are too many stupidities and out-and-out dangerous remarks from Vance to choose just one.

Harris, perhaps under pressure from her handlers, has so far said nothing that wasn’t written by someone else for her to say. She has answered not one question. The adoring “news” media seem fine with that. Here is something that really happened. There is a term for her condition. She is a malevolent flibbertigibbet.

Portly Tim Walz, in keeping with candidates’ current (and former, if Spiro T. Agnew is any indication) proclivity to make sure the vice president is someone even worse, is a local socialist who as governor of Minnesota cheered on the burning of Minneapolis — something he has in common with Harris — following the death of street criminal George Floyd. He also claims to have been of higher rank than he was and hints that he was a combat soldier, which he wasn’t.

Compare the “leaders” of today with the leaders back then. Is there any of us who would reject Richard Nixon today, compared to what’s on offer?

Or, for that matter, George McGovern?

Hell, Tom Eagleton looks good, against the current crop of clowns.