Richard Nixon resigned as president 47 years today at 9:01 EST. I not only remember the speech, but where I was and the memorable words of someone who was at my side when he resigned.
A bit of background. I followed the Watergate scandal extremely closely from the outset. Early in the Watergate scandal I wrote a letter to my often reviled Connecticut Republican Senator Lowell Weicker expressing my support for him breaking with the White House and seeking answers. The first Watergate story broke in June 1972, a month after I finished a special January-May 1972 senior year independent study in India. I interned on The Hindustan Times in New Delhi. I then attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and graduated with my masters in 1973.
One of my professors at Medill was Adlai Stevenson biographer and prominent Democrat John Bartlo Martin, who’d fly in from Washington to teach his classes. He told me before reporting brought it to light that the Nixon White House was going through a prominent Democrat’s tax returns and he feared much more and worse was going on behind the scenes. Wikipedia notes that Martin was “was an American diplomat, author of 15 books, ambassador, and speechwriter and confidant to many Democratic politicians including Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey.”
Ater Medill I returned to India as the official “Special Correspondent” (stringer) for the Chicago Daily News, writing news, long features, even an occasional analysis column where they ran my photo. I followed Watergate in India via the BBC, Indian newspapers and the International Herald Tribune. When Nixon’s Saturday night massacre took place on October 20, 1973 I was extremely upset and pessimistic about American democracy — so upset that I went to see The Hindustan Times’ legendary editor George Verghese to see how he saw it.
Verghese had approved my Hindustan Times internship a year before. I told him of my enormous concern and asked him what he thought. “Let’s just see how this sorts itself out,” he said quietly, giving me a good lesson in how to not get totally sucked into the drama of a breaking story where it’s easy to mentally project the worst case scenarios before a worst case scenario happens.
Two months later I developed an extremely painful pilonidal cyst on my butt (the same thing that the late Rush Limbaugh claimed had kept him from military service during the Vietnam war). Due to the intense pain and textbook list of other symptoms, the cyst was drained at a New Delhi hospital and final surgery was slated for August when I’d be back home in Woodbridge, CT.
Fast forward to August 9. I was in the hospital in New Haven. Surgery was done in the afternoon to remove the cyst from my butt. I was still asleep from anesthetic when I woke up after feeling a gentle nudge.
“Wake up, come on wake up. You can’t miss this!” a nurse at my bedside said. “Look.” She pointed to the TV screen.
Nixon was resigning. He finished his speech and she said:
“There it is: two assholes gone in one day.”
Top photo: by Oliver Atkins – This is a larger version of an image found in <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nixon_Contact_Sheet_WHPO-E3397.jpg" title="File:Nixon Contact Sheet WHPO-E3397.jpg">File:Nixon Contact Sheet WHPO-E3397.jpg</a> (located on top-left corner), Public Domain, Link
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.