Richard Nixon resigned amid Watergate scandal 48 years ago on August 8, 1974. I was asleep and awakened by someone who summed up the day in one sentence.
What I experienced that day started in India in 1973 when I began writing as the officially accredited Special Correspondent (paid by the piece) for the now defunct Chicago Daily News and self-syndicating my stories to newspapers throughout the world.
In early 1974 I was in enormous pain and it was diagnosed as a pilonidal cyst, located on my butt. It was serious enough that an Indian family I knew took me to a doctor who was a surgeon/doctor for then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He diagnosed it and set me up to have it drained in a not-state-of-the-art hospital crammed with people, some of them in cots in the hallways. The family didn’t want me to recuperate there so they carried me to the car on a coffee table and took me to their house.
I recovered but the cyst had only been drained and it was important that it be removed. So it was decided I’d have it done when I returned to Connecticut for the summer. The operation was slated for August 8, 1974 in New Haven, CT.
After the operation to remove the cyst from my butt I was in a deep sleep when I felt someone gently but persistantly shaking me.
“Wake up! Wake up! You can’t miss this. This is HISTORY! Wake up!” The nurse was shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw Nixon on the TV screen about to give his resignation speech.
The speech was over. And the nurse said:
“There we go. Two assholes gone in one day…”
Read Kathy Gill’s post about Nixon’s resignation and where she was that day.
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.