I remember sitting on the green couch in the basement rec room, flanked by my parents, forty years ago tonight. I was twenty, and the three of us rarely watched TV together anymore, but that night, we watched as President Richard Nixon told us and the rest of the world that he would resign the presidency.
(As to why Nixon resigned, folks my age and nearby will likely remember very well the crimes, the cover-ups, the dirty tricks and the secret tapes; if, by chance, you’re younger than that or have amnesia, two books would provide a good start: All The President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and To Set the Record Straight: The Break-In, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon by Judge John J. Sirica.)
I don’t know how my folks felt about the president’s resignation. I’m pretty sure my mom was a Republican at the time and happily voted for Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. I think my dad was generally a Democrat, and almost certainly voted for Minnesotan Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. I think that the ultra-liberal leanings of Democratic candidate George McGovern troubled Dad in 1972, but I’m not sure if that resulted in a vote for Nixon or not.
Me? I happily cast my first presidential vote for George McGovern in 1972, wrongly thinking that he might have a chance at winning the election but rightly thinking even as the electoral votes were totaled that night that the iceberg that was Watergate would eventually sink the S.S. Nixon, an opinion that my folks tended to greet with skepticism.
In many other cases, it would have been pleasant to sit on that green couch forty years ago tonight and know that I had been proven right (and would continue to be proven right for the next few years as trials went by and books and then more books came out). But the moment seemed too serious that night forty years ago to indulge in any kind of satisfaction about having been prescient. Instead, there was relief that the saga was coming to an end, there was some disgust at the repetition of old tired justifications for unacceptable actions, and there was an odd sense of sorrow.
I disagreed with almost everything Richard Nixon said and did, and his crimes and those committed by his people in his name were too serious for him to remain in office. I felt no sympathy for the man. But I felt that odd sorrow. Why? I’m still not sure.
Maybe it was for those who were duped by the president and his men for so long, which was most of us in the U.S. Maybe it was for the country having been so preoccupied for two years when other issues remained unattended and unresolved. Maybe it was because there was a thought that it didn’t have to turn out the way it did, that one bad choice in the Nixon camp led to another bad choice and then another and another. (If that thought lingered, it wasn’t for long, as I soon came to the conclusion that very little – for good or ill – happened by accident or without forethought in the Nixon White House.)
Whatever its genesis, there was that small sorrow as I watched the president announce his plans to resign. And when the speech was over, Mom and Dad and I went upstairs and went about whatever we did to fill the remainder of an August evening in 1974, me with that bit of sorrow hanging around for some time.
In retrospect, that evening’s address and the actual resignation of the president the next day was the first of three events in a little more than a year’s time that I think closed the door on the era that we call the Sixties. The other two? At the end of April 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and the Vietnam War was over. In September 1975, Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress who might have been turned into a radical, was arrested in San Francisco. And we moved on.
And what music from early August 1974 fits the mood that I find myself in while writing this piece? Well, there’s “Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City” by Bobby “Blue” Bland. Ostensibly written about the absence of a woman, it can be heard as being about the absence of any cherished thing. As I look back to that evening forty years ago tonight, I think the sorrow I felt was because we’d lost something, even if I couldn’t – and still can’t – put a name on it. And even if the words aren’t quite right, Bland’s record sounds like I remember feeling that night.
In the Billboard Hot 100 released two days after my folks and I watched the president announce his resignation, Bland’s plaint was sitting at No. 100. It would move up to No. 91 and to No. 9 on the R&B chart.