Lessons from the Nixon Era: Where Were You in 1972?
Nixon snooped on his political rivals, hired the Watergate burglars, directed the break-in at the DNC and the cover-up and was pardoned for his crimes. Will history repeat itself?
As former President Donald Trump faces a variety of criminal charges in different legal cases in multiple states, it is valuable to look back on our country’s last presidential crisis — the fall of President Richard M. Nixon, 50 years ago.
In a recent Substack article, Robert Reich provided a valuable history lesson in his detailed account and time line of Nixon’s crimes related to the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters (DNC) at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972.
Nixon was the mastermind behind the break-in and the plan to wiretap the DNC. He chose the “plumbers” which included former CIA officers like the infamous G. Gordon Liddy. Nixon offered the hush money bribes and directed the cover-up when the hapless burglars in business suits and rubber gloves were caught with bags of wiretapping equipment at the Watergate Hotel.
Bob Woodward, a young Washington Post police reporter in 1972, said in an interview with Tom Brokaw that he knew from the business suits and the unusual equipment that these were not regular burglars. This is when he first reached out to his old friend in high places for information. Woodward’s lifelong friend became known as “Deep Throat,” his anonymous source for many Washington Post articles on the Watergate break-in and ties to the White House. Brokaw’s Deep Throat — The Full Story of Watergate (NBC 2006) was released after Deep Throat revealed himself to be a former top-tier FBI agent. That documentary fills in many blanks in Nixon’s story because Woodward, no longer protecting his source, was able to give more details to Brokaw.
Besides Watergate and the related cover-up, Nixon harassed rivals with wiretapping and unnecessary Internal Revenue Service tax audits, tried to discredit the press and denied all of his misdeeds as long as he could. (Does this sound familiar?)
Nixon also had microphones and tape recorders in the Oval Office. The tapes were Nixon’s downfall when they were finally released in April 1974, only after “indictments were handed down for the ‘Watergate Seven,’ including John Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The grand jury named Nixon as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator,’” according to History.com. Nixon’s crimes were impeachable, but he chose to resign in August 1974 and was pardoned by his Vice President, then President Gerald Ford in September 1974. (Here’s a timeline of events.)
Why look back 50 years to the end of the Nixon Era?
Because our country is currently facing another Constitutional crisis with a past president who has been charged with multiple crimes. There are many parallels between what Nixon did and what Trump is accused of.
Reich writes …
America’s failure to hold Richard Nixon accountable for his attacks on democracy when he was president undermined the common good and paved the way for Donald Trump to mount even worse attacks ...
The Watergate scandal began the modern era of “whatever-it-takes-to-win” politics — blatant disregard of any and all norms and laws that interfered with gaining or keeping power. Trump is the logical and inevitable consequence.
Nixon's cronies brushed aside his crimes and pardoned him. This allowed him to lie in the future and make light of what he did as if it were a mistake. Nixon was dubbed “Tricky Dick” and his crimes — like wiretapping and the break-in — were “dirty tricks.” Calling illegal wiretapping or harassing rivals with unnecessary IRS audits “dirty tricks” makes light of Nixon’s crimes.
Our lesson from the Nixon Era is: don’t brush aside Trump's criminal charges. Trump, the insurrectionists, the fake electors and those who pedaled the election lies should be charged, tried and held accountable for any crimes if found guilty. Nixon didn’t go to jail, but many of his co-conspirators did. If the US doesn’t hold the insurrectionists and all of their leaders accountable, the next narcissist authoritarian presidential candidate will be worse than Trump or Nixon.
Where were you in 1972?
I have vivid memories of the Nixon presidency and his fall from grace. My childhood was steeped in Eisenhower-Nixon lore. My parents were long-time Nixon boosters and voted for him every time he ran. By 1972, even my WWII vet parents1 were sick of the Vietnam War, but they stuck with Nixon during that election year.
In 1972, I was a journalism student at the Ohio State University, a reporter for the student-run newspaper The Lantern2 and the booth babe who sold tickets to the Midnight Movies at The World Theater. Selling tickets from a classic movie ticket booth on High Street in Columbus was the perfect job for a people watcher like me. Also, working only one day a week for five hours and getting to see free art movies at the end of my shift was my kind of job. Writing for The Lantern kept me busy otherwise.
Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump
‘Deep Throat,’ the Rainbow Girls & Me
The primary reason I worked only five hours a week at the The World Theater was that — except for the Midnight Movies — The World was a XXX rated theater. It was part of Larry Flynt’s empire of strip clubs and porn theaters in the Midwest before he started Hustler Magazine. During the day, The World played porn — like Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door. On Saturdays for the Midnight Movies, The World catered to college students and played “art” films — like Pink Flamingos with Divine, Andy Warhol’s Dracula and the classics like Reefer Madness. Not only did I sell tickets, stale popcorn, odd-tasting soda and odd-smelling coffee at the Midnight Movies, 20-year-old me (pictured above) handled the money for the theater, under the watchful eye of the manager and two Sopranos-style Flynt transporters.
Just three years earlier, I was treasurer for the Rainbow Girls in Amherst, Ohio. The Mother Advisor taught me how to properly organize lots of cash and coins for the bank and watched me do that after every meeting — just like Flynt’s guys did in 1972. I was never intimidated by the stoic, polite and very serious transporters. I took hundreds of dollars in cash from the box office and candy counter to the business office upstairs, by the projection room. I sat at the desk in a dimly lit green velvet room, sorted all of the money, counted it out verbally in front of the three men, filled out the bank forms, signed them and handed it all to Flynt’s guys in a bank pouch with a lock.
After the handoff, I skipped downstairs to retrieve my purse, grab free popcorn and see the Midnight Movies with my friends. Although the guys watched my every move, I couldn’t hide anything because I had nothing on me — no purse and no pockets in my flowy peasant dresses.
Did Larry Flynt look at my signature on the deposit slips and think to himself, “If that little Rainbow Girl from Amherst, Ohio signed off on $432.68, it must be right”?
When The World manager moved over to Flynt’s east side theater, he suggested that I replace him as manager, since I could be trusted with the cash. He later told me that I wasn’t hired for the job because the Flynt organization said it wouldn’t look right if I got arrested by the Columbus police for showing The Stewardesses. (No matter that I didn’t apply for or want the job.)
I moved out of the dorm and in with my boyfriend after Spring Quarter 1972. I left The World for a fulltime summer job as one of the first three women ever hired to work on the Ohio State University Landscape Crew. I had written a story for The Lantern about the recent Equal Opportunity Employment Act and the landscape crew being forced to hire women. Three female student employees — out of a crew of ~60 male state workers and students — was a drop in the bucket considering most women have some experience doing yard work! I didn’t last long on the landscape crew. Women couldn’t be trusted with the lawn mowers, hedge clippers or hoses, I guess. Weeding giant flowerbeds by hand was the only job the boss gave the women landscapers. After a few weeks of fulltime weeding with no gloves, my skin allergies went nuts. I left the landscape crew and began working the night shift at the Ohio State Laundry, where my boyfriend and a lot of really cool people worked. (If you’re keeping track, that’s two employers who discriminated against me because I am a woman.)
The Campus Scene
Thanks to The World Theater, everybody at Ohio State got the joke about Woodward’s informant “Deep Throat.” Brokaw’s documentary talks about the movie, which debuted in the spring of 1972 and shows the movie marquee, just as it appeared in Columbus.
In 1972, many Ohio State students were bitter and angry about the continuing Vietnam War, the military draft, the Controlled Substances Act3 and the killing of antiwar protesters at Kent State University two years earlier. Antiwar hippie college students (like me) hated Nixon as much as he hated us. The Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, were as popular as The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda and The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil in my little corner of Ohio State.
Friends of mine had been teargassed during antiwar protests at Ohio State in the spring of 1970 after Kent State. Many guys were feverishly trying to keep their grades up to avoid the draft by staying in school. Some disappeared and went to Vietnam. Others disappeared and went to Canada. Women dropped out of college because they were pregnant, and abortion was illegal.
These were heady times for budding young reporters like me. There were a multitude of avant garde ideas and interesting stories swirling around a campus with 60,000 students. The Lantern had a large daily audience. Sometimes journalism students were just sent out to tromp around campus, find a story and write it up. This random access journalism produced a variety of stories like the landscape crew jobs for women.
Covering the McGovern-Shriver Campaign
During Fall Quarter 1972, I was one of about a dozen journalism students taking Public Affairs Reporting. The Watergate break-in had occurred only three months earlier. Thanks to tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein were covering the unfolding details about the break-in, the cover-up and White House involvement in the Washington Post. Of course, The Lantern ran wire stories to keep the Ohio State community informed.
With this intrigue in the news, the presidential race between Nixon and his Vice President Spiro Agnew and antiwar candidate Senator George McGovern and diplomat Sargent Shriver was heating up in the fall. This was the first election in which 18-year-olds could vote and the first in which students could choose to vote where they went to school. I turned 21 in the summer of 1972. It was my first election. I registered as a Democrat and voted in Columbus.
Ms. Martha Brian was a seasoned journalist who had a "trophy room" filled with newspaper memorabilia and black and white photos of herself with dignitaries and politicians. Brian had the well-deserved reputation as the toughest professor in the j-school, and her Public Affairs Reporting class was billed as the toughest class in the News-Editorial Program. She was also my advisor and mentor. Besides writing weekly investigative papers on topics like urban renewal and gangs in downtown Columbus, the Public Affairs Reporting class was tasked with producing the November 1972 Election Day Supplement to The Lantern.
Brian assigned student reporters to cover all of the political races from Board of Supervisors up through State Legislature, Congress and President. This was a continuous assignment over several weeks, on top of the weekly papers, which covered completely different but equally challenging topics. Brian said we needed to be able to work on deadline and under pressure, so she piled it on in her classes.
I sat there as she assigned the lower level races to my classmates. Which politicians would I follow throughout the fall? Eventually, the list was whittled down to one race — President of the United States — and four students, including me. Would I get the coveted assignment [McGovern-Shriver] or the one no one wanted [Nixon-Agnew]?
Traveling with the National Press Corps
Brigid and I were awarded the prize assignment — covering the McGovern-Shriver Campaign.
Although we didn't know each other at all before Brian teamed us up, I became fast friends with Brigid — a flamboyant mint-cigarillo-smoking feminist with a vibrant joie de vivre and head of lavish, red curls. Except for being independent-minded young women, who wanted to be writers, Brigid and I were complete opposites who turned out to be congenial traveling partners.
Thanks to a small grant for student reporting, Brigid and I spent the next few months traveling to campaign events in Cleveland, Toledo, and Columbus to follow the candidates in her basic but reliable college student car.
I was 21, and it was my first taste of mint-flavored skinny cigars, expense account travel, and real news reporting. We were like Thelma and Louise, smoking cigarillos and cruising to different cities to cover the Democratic presidential ticket.
Brigid and I were like Thelma and Louise, but we didn’t drive off a cliff, and the guy who was after her looked more like Columbo than Brad Pitt. We were traveling alone — free from parents and boyfriends.
Brigid and I had a wild ride traveling with the National Press Corps assigned to the Democratic candidates. Our adventures opened my eyes to another side of journalism … and kind of freaked me out. You’ll remember that 1972 was the presidential campaign that Hunter S. Thompson immortalized in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. I was there!4
Our first assignment was to drive to Cleveland, catch up with National Press Corps bus downtown, follow Shriver through a series of events, visit the campaign's headquarters in this aging rust-belt city, and come back to Columbus with stories and photos.
Shriver was a prince. He was so gracious to the two of us college reporters. We were the only college student reporters traveling with the national press. The McGovern-Shriver Campaign wasn’t known for being punctual, but he gave us an interview in the back of his limo on a busy street in downtown Cleveland, before he flew to another stop. Unfortunately, Brigid was new to 35 mm B&W photography. They took a picture of the two of us flanking Shriver in the back of his limo, but it didn’t come out. (Dang it.)
Unlike Democratic VP Candidate Sargent Shriver — a former ambassador, Kennedy in-law and complete gentleman — the middle-aged men who comprised the National Press Corps were a trip.
There we were: Brigid and Pam, two naïve but self-assured college co-eds with corduroy bellbottoms, wire-framed glasses, peasant blouses, mint cigarillos, Associated Press (AP) passes and a university-issued Nikkormat loaded with Tri-X film.
Like Thelma and Louise, we were joyously traveling in an old boat5 of a car, on an expense account, with no parents, no boyfriends, no husbands, no relatives and no professors to tell us what to do. Obviously, Brian trusted us to not f*ck up the cake assignment for the Election Day issue.
Besides the two of us, the press bus carried only one other woman, a reporter for Time Magazine, and about 50 middle-aged white men, who represented major, national newspapers, AP, United Press International (UPI), the three major television networks and probably some international news outlets. By today's standards, the lack of diversity was glaring. An all-white, all middle-aged (except for us), and overwhelmingly male press corps was dispatched to cover all white, all middle-aged, all male politicians. We three women reporters were also all white. (Perhaps some things have changed in 50 years.)
Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72: Co-Ed Version
It's too bad blogging had not been invented yet because many of the more provocative and quirky stories we returned with never saw the pages of The Ohio State Lantern.
Although initially surprised to see us on the bus, the members of the National Press Corps were very welcoming, except for the woman reporter, who sort of snubbed us. Of course, a bunch of middle-aged men would be gracious to two young college co-eds, especially with one of us being a vivacious redhead.
At one of the Cleveland stops, the candidate was late. Not knowing how long the delay would be and not wanting to vegetate on the bus, the guys decided to take this serendipitous gap in the schedule to visit the hotel bar and invited us along. (Where are the selfies?)
Although Brigid and I were Ohio State Buckeyes and not teetotalers, knocking back a few mid-morning shots of Kentucky Bourbon and a couple of beers was not something we did. (And here, I thought the mint cigarillos were edgy.) Yes, of course, you could find us drinking 3.2 beer and dancing at the Castle at midnight, but hard liquor at 10 a.m. shocked us. They tried to coax us into drinking a couple of rounds with them. We resisted resisted the booze, even when they offered to buy. We eventually let them buy us sodas, not shots or beer. Brigid and I were the only ones at the table who were sober when the candidate arrived.
Listening to reporters and TV cameramen recount campaign trail horror stories was a real eye-opener for me. After all, I was only three years out of small town Ohio. The members of the National Press Corps assigned to McGovern-Shriver had been traveling with the two candidates for months, and November was just around the corner. Cynicism and sarcasm among the reporters was at its highest. The seasoned journalists were tired of traveling and so ready for election day, and then along came two fresh-faced newbies at the beginning of our reporting careers.
The jaded reporters knew the candidates’ speeches by heart. It was entertaining to hear the guys recite sections of speeches and later hear the candidates say the same words. They sarcastically put down and made fun of the presidential candidates on both sides. These reporters were at the top of our chosen field — a field, apparently not welcoming to women — and far too many of them were letches and jerks. The "heroes" of my profession were a bunch of smart-ass old drunks. This was a disturbing epiphany, less than a year from graduation with an BA in journalism.
No wonder Brian was so tough and strived for perfection in everything from her neatly tailored suits and her stiff Spray Net hairdos to her tenacious pursuit of the news. She had to be.
As the booze flowed, one AP reporter, who looked like the TV character Columbo, became overly friendly with Brigid and kept pestering her about our next campaign stop. Our next stop was back to Columbus. Usually, we would drive to the location, book a cheap hotel room, spend a day or more with the campaign and go back to Columbus when they left for another state. After Cleveland, the campaign was going to Minneapolis or thereabouts — some place even colder than Cleveland, as I remember. Columbo, who was old enough to be our father, was trying to convince Brigid that she should go with him on the press plane. I watched them flirt from across the table and decided she was likely playing him for a chump.
The candidate finally showed up for the hotel appearance and then we were back on the bus and off to a big high school event with students and community members. We had good seats in the press box to facilitate photography. Besides the guy trying to pick up Brigid, a few other reporters were helpful to us as newbies. They pointed out who was who on the stage and in the audience and explained the bus drill when there are multiple stops on the same day.
Besides the high school speech, the candidate and the press visited the McGovern-Shriver Campaign Headquarters in a Cleveland industrial district. I had never seen so much hustle and bustle and so many ringing phones in one location.
The HQ was in an old brick factory building that had been gutted and filled with college students manning phone banks at giant Steelcase desks piled with campaign literature and signs. It was exciting for us to see so many people our age working their asses off to elect McGovern, the peace candidate. My generation was sick of seeing friends and relatives drafted and sent to Vietnam. Some didn’t return. Others returned but were forever changed by physical injuries and/or post traumatic stress injury (PTSI) from their wartime service. Eighteen-year-olds were being sent to war, and 1972 was the first year they could vote.
Toward the end of the day, Columbo, Brigid and I had a Casablanca moment.
We were standing in a windy parking lot when frumpy, middle-aged Columbo made a last ditch effort to lure Brigid — a strikingly beautiful young woman who was completely out of his league — onto the waiting press bus and the plane that would take them to McGovern-Shriver’s next stop, hundreds of miles west. I was behind Brigid waiting … watching his facial expressions … and really not knowing her choice. With a whirlwind of bus stops that day, we had had no time to privately discuss what was going on.
Motioning like Columbo, the reporter kept telling her that it would be perfectly OK for her to come on the plane with the press. Plenty of seats. It would be fine. He would submit her ticket with his expenses. She wouldn’t have to pay for anything.
Eventually, she turned around and looked at me as if to ask, “Now what?”. Although she didn’t speak, her eyes she asked for help. I think she wanted an out.
His last pitch to get her on the plane was, “You’re friend can come, too,” meaning me.
I did not expect that. Besides being engaged to my boyfriend, I was disgusted by the behavior of most of the men I met and wasn’t going anywhere with them unless we saw them at another Ohio campaign stop.
“I don’t wanna go,” is all I said.
Brigid turned back to him and basically said, “Me either.”
We left him standing there with the others watching from the bus.
As we walked to her car, she thanked me. She was intrigued by the adventure of being a stowaway on the National Press Corps plane. Even if it lasted only one more stop, it would be a great story, she said. Brigid was thinking like Thompson, erhaps. I gave her an easy out when I calmly but directly said “no.” Also, she was the driver on our excursions. If she had gotten on the plane, I would have been taking the bus back to Columbus.
Maybe in that split second she also realized what holy hell Brian would have given her for pulling such a personally dangerous stunt. Just look at the scenario: one smart and spunky 21-year-old woman (with only the clothes on her back) gets on a plane with 50 much older, day-drinking men, most of whom were married and away from their wives. The National Press Corps was like a mobile frat house, and my hunch was that we had seen only the surface layer of men behaving badly on the campaign trail.
The contrast between the McGovern Headquarters in a converted factory building and the Nixon Headquarters in a converted bank was stark.
It was almost dusk as we reached a sleeker a part of downtown Cleveland, away from the factory district and the McGovern-Shriver HQ. In the distance, a gleaming white, glass-enclosed office on a busy corner caught our eye. It wasn’t a department store because there were no displays, but what was it? As we walked closer, we saw the “Nixon Now” and “Reelect the President” signs. The Cleveland office for the Nixon-Agnew Campaign was in a former bank branch office, gleaming with white marble and dotted with men in business suits attending a campaign event.
Brigid and I didn’t go in and crash the party — although we considered it. She did snap a few photos from the outside, and we walked on.
Toledo … Columbus … and Election Day
Closer to election day, Brigid and I covered a bitterly cold campaign event featuring McGovern speaking to hundreds of people in a cavernous industrial venue in Toledo. Unfortunately, we never got to interview him directly that evening, as we did with Shriver in Cleveland. Snow on the ground and more snow predicted forced the campaign to move on quickly. We saw a few of the TV guys from the Cleveland event but not Columbo.
We also covered a big on-campus, outdoor event for McGovern-Shriver at Ohio State. (After all, it was the first year 18 year-olds could vote, and students could vote where they went to school. Students were excited about voting.) It was one of the last absolutely gorgeous sunny fall days — perfect for an outdoor event. People were lazing around in the grass, chitchatting, playing frisbee, and smoking cigarettes. The Dave Workman Blues Band with Willie Pooch — the best band in town — entertained us while we waited for at least one of them to show up.
Many of us lazed around in the grass for at least two hours, waiting for the candidates who never came. They were in town, and no reason was given for missing the large campus rally.
The Election Day Supplement for The Lantern was a big hit with the students. Brigid and I and the Nixon-Agnew team members all had big feature stories about the presidential races. Our fellow classmates covered everything else. Although McGovern didn’t win, I do remember there being some shake-ups in lower level races due to college students voting locally.
After the end of the quarter, I never saw Brigid again. I heard she graduated that December and moved. I regret not being able to say “goodbye” to my sidekick or get a photo with her. Leaving Columbus was so popular back then that they even made a movie about it — Goodbye, Columbus. My boyfriend Dennis and I also planned to leave town after graduation.
I still backed for McGovern in the election, mostly because of the Vietnam War, but as a reporter following his campaign I could see why the seasoned reporters in Cleveland were so jaded. The Nixon campaign was very slick with the Madison Avenue “Reelect the President” slogan — as if Nixon was the one we could trust! The McGovern campaign had heart and energy but seemed completely disorganized and lacking in internal communications.
Tricky Dick Won
Given what I had seen on the campaign trail, I wasn’t surprised when Nixon won by a landslide with McGovern taking only Massachusetts and Washington, DC. The election looks like a massacre when you see at the Electoral College numbers (520-17). When you look at the popular vote, it doesn’t look like such a wipeout for the Dems. McGovern got 38% of the popular vote (28.9 million votes) because we won two highly populated areas plus some votes everywhere else, but many states have a winner-take-all electoral vote rule. Nixon got 62% of the popular vote or 46.7 million.
Anti-Nixon sentiment on college campuses remained high after the election. My friends and I, particularly the journalism students, intently followed the evolving Watergate story and the links to the Nixon White House, leaked by Deep Throat and reported by Woodward and Bernstein.
In January 1973, the trial of the Watergate burglars began. In April 1973, White House Counsel John Dean started to cooperate with the prosecutors. Dean was to Nixon what Michael Cohen is to Trump. Both did jail time for their crimes, and both were key witnesses against their former presidential bosses.
By May 1973, the televised Watergate Hearings conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities began. As Brokaw reported in his documentary, everyone watched the hearings on TV. It was shown publicly in libraries, storefronts, retail showrooms and gritty working class bars where union guys like my Dad stopped for a cold beer after their shifts ended.
As college students, Dennis and I lived in poverty in a drafty old house near campus and didn’t own a television set. My parents gave us a $200 1965 Pontiac Catalina (“The Chief”) as a wedding present. It was a luxury not to have to walk or ride our bicycles everywhere. The Chief enabled me to work off campus as a waitress for Schmidt’s Sausage Haus three nights a week and bring in the big bucks slinging beer and brats while the live polka band played. I made $6/hour in tips, plus my tip wage, when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. It was hard work, but the money was amazing. Dennis, former live-in boyfriend now husband, massaged my throbbing feet when I got home, while I counted the cash. We were both working nights — me at Schmidt’s and him at the Ohio State Laundry6 — and finishing up our degrees during the day. Our goal was to drive The Chief to San Francisco shortly after graduation in August 1973 and meet up with our friends.
Between classes and before work, we went to Ohio State’s main library and sat in silence with a hundred other students watching the Watergate hearings. The accommodations were rustic by today’s standards — no cushioned seats or big screen TVs hanging from the ceiling. We sat in several rows of beat-up metal chairs, arranged theater style around one black and white portable TV on a flimsy metal rolling stand. We didn’t care. Like the January 6 hearings, the Watergate Hearings were riveting. No one talked. Some people took notes. Some people sat on the cold marble floor. We all wanted to know the truth about Nixon. (Listen to the Watergate hearings here.)
As late as November 1973, when Dennis and I were strolling the streets of San Francisco, Nixon was saying he wasn’t a “crook.”
By August 1974, when Nixon resigned, Dennis and I were no longer antiwar college students working in the laundry or hippies hanging around San Francisco. We were working stiffs — cogs in the corporate machine. I took a job doing paste-up, layout, typesetting and copyediting for Nationaline Supply, an incredibly backward plumbing and electrical supply company owned by an old dude whose pajamas could be seen hanging out under his suit trousers. (Ugh.) I learned a lot about graphic design, print production and plumbing at that job before I sued them for sex discrimination (and won!) Dennis got a good-paying job with the Social Security Administration and traded in his bellbottoms for polyester. We moved into a newish townhome, north of campus, near the Olentangy River and outside of the gritty student ghetto that surrounded Ohio State. It was the end of an era for us.
None the less, we rejoiced at Nixon’s fall from grace, much like people rejoiced over Trump's mug shot after he was charged. We felt betrayed by the government when that milquetoast Ford pardoned Nixon in September 1974.
My parents felt betrayed by Nixon, as I’m sure there are Trump supporters who feel betrayed or let down now that there are so many criminal cases against Trump. Mom and Dad were Eisenhower Republicans and union supporters. They were fiscal conservatives and social liberals who didn’t like nanny state government meddling in their private lives. They were budget hawks, who couldn’t care less who was gay, who was “pregnant out of wedlock” (and what their choices should be) or who smoked cigarettes or pot. It was all about the money, which may be why they eventually turned against the Vietnam War.
They stuck with Nixon for 20 years, but Watergate was the last straw for Dad. He quit the Republican Party and switched to Democrat after Nixon’s resignation. Intel on his voting record after that was that he still often voted Republican but did flip back and forth. (My parents are the type of complicated Ohioans that both parties are trying to reach.)
Woodward and Bernstein published their book All the President’s Men in 1974. It was made into a movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman a few years later.
Should a President Be above the Law?
Where were you in 1972-74 during the waning days of the Nixon era? If you were too young or not born yet, ask your older friends and relatives where they stood on the Nixon question.
If you were a college student7 or older in 1972, what did you think about the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s involvement in it and other related illegal activities? How did you feel when Nixon was pardoned? Should Nixon have been pardoned?
Looking back at the Nixon Era and the slow unfolding of the truth — thanks to dogged journalism and a brave informant — can give us insight into our country’s current presidential crisis of confidence. Trump, Trump’s lackies who spread the election lies, and the insurrectionists should be tried and punished if they are found guilty. Many of Nixon’s men went to jail, but Nixon, the mastermind, didn’t. I don’t think we should make that mistake twice. After all, Republicans are the party of mass incarceration.
Dad was in the Navy. Mom was in the Waves. They were both WWII veterans.
Students got course credit for writing, editing and taking photographs for The Lantern.
The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 made cannabis a Schedule 1 drug — the most dangerous level of drug with no redeeming qualities. This was after Nixon’s medical advisers said marijuana should be legalized. Look how many people have gone to jail in the last 50 years because of Nixon’s vendetta against people of color — particularly black people — and the those pesky antiwar college students.
I was there in that I was covering the 1972 presidential race. I have no idea if Thompson went to Cleveland, Toledo or Columbus.
There was an expression that some of the giant old gas guzzlers like the Pontiac Catalina “drove like boats” because the ride was smooth and kind of floated along as if you were riding the gentle waves of Lake Erie.
The Ohio State Laundry deserves an entire article of its own. What an odd place to work. I did my photojournalism portfolio on the OSU laundry. Yes, I had some very unglamorous jobs — XXX theater, landscape crew, industrial laundry, and multiple waitress jobs — in one year.
Now labeled a “Baby Boomer.” I prefer “Old Hippie.”