Early the summer of 1973 my father and I had a small communications failure, the chainsaw slipped, and I spent my vacation walking funny with a knee I couldn't bend because there were stitches holding the skin in place. I ruined a brand new pair of jeans and, by jumping at the last possible moment, managed to retain my kneecap.
This proved to be a good thing, though it mostly ended my soccer career.
We had finally acquired a television, a twelve-inch black and white, possibly because -- my guess -- dad and I had begun driving to a colleague's house to watch football and that worthy fellow grew his own grapes and made his own wine.
Because the television was, in our house, a new and fascinating thing, and because I couldn't run and play and swim that summer -- I was 14, and briefly took up putt putt golf -- I watched the Senate Watergate hearings. All of them. Every single moment. And, when PBS ran the Army-McCarthy hearings, I watched all of that, as well.
This is how I came to believe in the American system of government. To help celebrate one of my favorite anniversaries, please leap back into the past with me. Or to the future, whatever it proves.
On August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States of America. And the system worked, I hope not for the last time.
Six inches to the left of my foot is a Spiro T. Agnew garbage can, which I purchased in about 1980 at Pike Place Market at collector's prices, something like $12, and which has followed me from apartment to apartment, house to house, across the country. It is battered and rusted and ill-treated, and I propose never to part with it. I have collected no other political memorabilia; at one point I bought every book about Watergate, but have yet to read a single volume, and so stopped buying them. A year before Nixon's resignation, Agnew -- who spoke the words "silent majority" and carried Nixon's cudgel, but did little else -- was driven from office for bribes he took while governor of Maryland.
The great and the puny, eh?
I was raised to hate Richard Nixon, and it came easily. My parents had emigrated to Washington from California, and had watched Nixon's rise to power. Had voted twice and with, apparently, great passion (I was not yet born) for Adlai Stevenson, but had somehow become conservative Democrats by 1973. Somewhere in my flat files is a legal-sized yellow wanted poster for Richard Nixon from my brother's brief anti-war career, and when I find it next it will be framed and will hang next to a poster from the cultural revolution which hangs, across from a photograph of Johnny Cash, in this room where I come to write.
Today I come to once again charge Richard M. Nixon with breaking faith with the American people, with tearing the fabric of our social contract beyond our ability to repair it. Not because he may or may not have tried to lead the military to a coup d'etat, nor even because he took Dick Tuck's quaint, rat-clucking dirty tricks to a paranoid extreme in an election he won 49-1.
For most of our political history, the American press understood the difference between public and private matters. They drew no attention to FDR's inability to walk, paid no mind to his apparently evident affair with his secretary, nor (if I have the rumors right) to his wife, past her good works, for which she was sainted by my mother's generation. The press paid no mind to whatever indiscretions JFK committed while in the White House, and before. On and on. Those were the rules, rules for a kinder and gentler time long gone by.
What mattered was how he (and, yes, it was almost always a he, but fogive a brief shout to Ms. Cissy Farenthold) did the job. How they did their jobs. What mattered was the policies they promulgated, the decisions they made, the quality of their leadership.
Nixon took advantage of that understanding to conceal his pathetic misbehaviors (though he taped them all for history, of course) as he fretted that he might not be re-elected. And in so doing he convinced the media that this gentleman's agreement (and it was a man thing, no doubt about that) had outlived its usefulness. He also convinced the voting public that a WWII bomber pilot was a dangerous coward. Echoes.
He convinced the public that we could not trust our leaders.
Maybe that's a good thing, that last thing. Maybe we shouldn't trust. Surely we shouldn't trust blindly. But if we don't trust our leaders, we then expect them to lie to us, and accept that as the nature of our new contract. And the dangers of that arrangement are spread before us each day.
Let us be clear: I do not care whether JFK slept with Marilyn Monroe, though I suspect many red-blooded American men would quietly have cheered had they known. Fear may be the right word; I have no patience for marital infidelity, but it's not -- should not be -- a public matter. I do not care that Bill Clinton had oral sex in the Oval Office, and, again, I suspect many red-blooded American men -- the generation brought through adolescence on Playboy -- quietly thought to themselves, why not? (Leaving off the age and power differential in this particular case, which is more complicated -- perhaps less complicated -- than it seems necessary to address here.) And I do not care for the details of Gary Hart or John Edwards or Elliot Spitzer or John McCain's transgressions. They do not matter, not to me as a voter.
OK. These transgressions reveal some things about character, and they are not pretty things. The same kinds of weakness which professional athletes and other entertainers constantly reveal: that too much entitlement, and perhaps too much wealth, is a bad thing. That men (and women, but they have had less time to build up a notable public track record) can come to a place where they truly believe, for a time, that the rules do not apply to them. When their agile and creative minds can justify behavior they would otherwise deplore.
Welcome to the human race.
Nixon fundamentally broke our trust. And he left behind a time capsule or two (read: Dick Cheny) who believed too strongly in the imperial presidency. Who were pissed that they got caught. Who believe that winning is everything, that football is life. From Nixon forward we have covered politicians as if they were pop stars, more focused on their peccadillos than their policies, looking for gaffes and strategic campaign blunders more than we talk about the ideas they advocate. For their part the rising politicians have, being bright and agile folk, generally, played to those new rules. Writing about celebrity is easy. Writing about policy is a difficult and exacting business, and it obliges the writer to have the capacity for deep thought and research. The modern media environment cannot afford that skillset, and is grateful the audience does not, in the main, demand it.
For many years I had three front pages tacked to my walls: The New York Times, the Seattle Times, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, all from August 9, 1974. At some point, probably when I went to my first college apartment, I took them down and replaced them with rock 'n' roll posters. And threw them out.
But this anniversary I still seek to observe each year, for it is a reminder of the greatness this country can still rise up to. It is a reminder that the system works, or can be made to work. The members of the Ervin committee, they had a difficult job, and they seemed to do it honorably.
One day in 1973, the Ervin committee called a man named Alexander Butterfield to the witness microphone, and he told America that Nixon had been stupid and vain enough to tape record his doings in the oval office. He testified just before lunch break, and after he was done I walked up stairs, dragging my right leg as I did that summer, and told my mother that Nixon was done. Finished. She did not believe me, but she listened, and I could see the faint trace of hope in her eyes.
I do not know about Gerald Ford and Nixon's pardon, and we never will, to our satisfaction. But I fear that at that moment the system broke in ways we have never been able to repair.
I do know this: Our long national nightmare is far from over. It's not all Nixon's fault, but he started it.
And it remains, somehow, up to us to undo his damage.