Note to the reader: While the "I" in the following piece lived through and experienced the times described, some of his personal circumstances were altered.
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Events like 9/11, and the War on Terror which it has spawned, have assumed such importance in our imaginations that we find it difficult to believe how we could ever have got so excited about the many other happenings which had consumed us over the previous years – like Watergate. And it is difficult to believe that thirty years has passed since Richard Nixon, as a result of Watergate, resigned in disgrace as president on August 9th 1974.
The Nixon resignation was an event - like the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11 - whose enormity was such, that we all of us, above a certain age, remember where we were and what we were doing when, on that fateful day, Tricky Dick - sweat pouring from upper lip, jowls heaving with suppressed sobs, with ashen-faced family hovering behind - bid a rambling farewell to his small band of noisily weeping staff and supporters gathered in the White House press room.
I was then a young newspaper reporter in Yuma, Arizona. I had watched, transfixed, almost every minute of the senate Watergate hearings shown live on TV. The cast of characters - senators Howard Baker ("what did the President know, and when did he know it?") and courtly Sam Ervine; silver-tongued prosecuting attorney Arthur Leiman; burglars J Gordon Liddy and E Howard Hunt; Nixon cohorts John Dean ("there is a cancer on the presidency"), Jeb Stuart Magruder, Alexander Butterfield, John Mitchell et al, as well as faithful gate-keepers Haldemann and Ehrlichmann (or was it Ehrlichmann and Haldemann?) - had become as dear to me as my own family. And over them all lurked the presence of the-man-who-wasn't-there, the Godfather, Richard Nixon himself.
Please, come with me now, back to that August summer day in 1974 – a day burnished irreparably in my soul – as I - together with my fellow reporters in the main room of the newspaper for which we ply our journalistic trade - watch the TV newscasts of Dick who, together with Pat, is waving a final farewell before boarding the plane which will fly him to exile in California. I am so overcome by the magnitude of what has happened over the past few hours that I can no longer work this day. I have to be alone with my churning emotions.
I get in my car, to drive to a restaurant on the outskirts of Yuma to eat enchiladas for supper. While I listen to my car’s tires scrunching over the pebbled side road as I drive on to the highway, I squint at the slanting rays of the late-afternoon desert sun setting off in shadowy relief the rocks and stones scattered as far as I can see over the red-brown terrain. But I don't take it in. In the restaurant I eat my enchiladas. But I don't taste them, for I have gone elsewhere, down a time-tunnel to the Eisenhower 'fifties when, as a boy, I saw at the movies one Saturday afternoon, a newsreel of Vice President Nixon crossing swords with the feared Nikita Khrushchev in the famed "Kitchen Debate".
At this juncture I’m unable to go further back down the tunnel because I’m at a place in it where I’m not old enough to remember much of what has happened before this point. So I must rely on the printed word and the recollections of others about the years 1946 to 1952, when, following war-time service in the Pacific, and then practising as a lawyer in small town California, Nixon went to Washington to become a commie-hunting congressman and spear-carrier for "Tail Gunner" Joe McCarthy. Then came Nixon’s ascent to the senate where he was brought to the notice of Ike who, aspiring to be president, was persuaded that Nixon should be his running mate. So it came to pass that Senator Nixon became Vice President Nixon, but only after having convinced the nation in the "Checkers" speech that he wasn't the crook everyone thought he was.
Now, in the time-tunnel, I change direction, forwards to 1960 where I watch Nixon, now candidate for president, matching wits with John F Kennedy in the first ever televised presidential debate, a debate which buried Nixon - his unshaven jowls and patent unease a poor contrast to the cool and poise of Classy Jack. Now forward again to 1962 when, at a news-conference, defeated California gubernatorial candidate Nixon declares to assembled reporters that they "........won't have Nixon to kick around any more for, gentlemen, this is my last press conference".
On again along the tunnel, and on, but............nothing. Ah yes, now I see. Nixon has exited the public stage, has gone back to being the lawyer he once was, but this time he is working out of corporate offices in New York City. However it is merely an interlude, albeit a six year one, during which Dick continues to shake hands and schmooze with cigar-chomping Republican king-makers hiding out in smoke-filled rooms in all the gin-joints throughout our land.
I arrive at the dawn of 1968 when Nixon, the New Nixon - who has wrestled with the inner demons of his youth and early adulthood, and sent them packing - is seeking once again to be president. This is his moment, for the America of Mother, Home, and Apple Pie, is no more, is in agony. Thousands of our boys are returning from Vietnam in bodybags, ghetto residents are burning down the inner-cities, students on campuses are tearing up their draft cards, tuning in, dropping out, and otherwise fuelling the flames of nation-wide dissent. Nixon promises to "bring us together", and is elected.
I continue forward along the tunnel through Nixon's presidential years, seeing him triumphantly visiting Russia and China, signing epoch-shaping treaties with their leaders and, at home, finally abolishing the military draft. It appears that Nixon, the erstwhile gun-toting commie basher, is escaping his political past.
But it seems Nixon can't escape himself, for the demons in his psyche, which he thought he'd banished for ever, show signs of having merely been in hiding. In the dead of night they creep out of their closets as the pressures of presidential office grow, to manifest themselves in paranoia, causing Nixon to see all his opponents as enemies, ready to plunge their knives into his back and twist them with relish. He compiles a list of enemies whose telephone lines are tapped, and their homes watched by black-hatted, shade-wearing spooks. He hires burglars to break into the offices of others he doesn't like. A guard catches them in the act one night in the Watergate Complex in downtown Washington DC, and Nixon's carefully wrought world collapses..............
Suddenly I'm back in the Now, August 9th 1974, in the restaurant outside Yuma. While in the time-tunnel I had, unbeknownst to me, finished my enchiladas, and the waiter had brought me coffee. Through the window adjoining my table I see the sun has gone down. I can hear coming softly from somewhere in the restaurant - probably from its piped music system - Linda Ronstadt singing "Heart Like a Wheel". Otherwise all has become quiet as if, throughout America, the people are still too stunned to speak of what has happened this day.........................
Could the young man I was then, ever have imagined that Nixon, seemingly banished for ever in obloquy would, a few years later, rise from the ashes to write critically acclaimed books, be listened to respectfully by a younger generation, be received reverently by world leaders and, at his funeral, be eulogized by all the prominent former and present leaders of our land?
It is ten years now since Richard Nixon left us for ever in April 1994. Since then, I have never ceased to feel that a part of me is missing. For a long time I couldn't figure out why. Then I understood. It is because for almost fifty years of my life, Richard Nixon was there, in public life in some way or other. He had become a part of me, and when he died, that part of me died too.
Richard Nixon lies buried in the grounds of his presidential library, next to the house where he was born, in Yorba Linda, California. He is indeed gone, but a part of him will always live on in the hearts and minds of those of us who were shaped by the times in which he held sway.
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