August 9, 1974 .... Where Were You On That Day?

[napkinz]

Where were you on this historic day:

[AndyA]

1. Remember it very well.

I was with my Mother and Brother visiting my Grandmother (on Mom's side) in Missouri. I recall my Grandmother had a very down to Earth view on the whole situation, and she wasn't really political at all. Of course, she had a very down to Earth view on everything, and was always able to cut right through all the smoke and mirrors and do away with all the distractions to get right to the point.

That was the last vacation I took with my Mother, as she was killed in 1976, so it's memorable for several reasons.

[antiquie]

2. Asbury Hotel, L.A.

Across the street from D&B, bosses and clerks all in the bar watching tv.

After August 9, 1995, the date was removed from my calendar.

[markiv]

3. i was sad to see the headline

because i had to deliver the bundle of papers under it

always hated the sight of that bundle

just another day of getting up at 5:30 am, and rushing to get it done before certain customers complained if they got it one minute later than 6:30 am (and yes, I mean you, Mr N)

[frazzled]

4. I have no recollection of where I was, but I do have a question

I just remember watching it on TV and being happy, relieved, etc. But it was not one of those moments (at least to me) where the shock is so great you remember every detail of the experience, such as the assassination of JFK. We'd been through a long, dramatic public airing of Watergate, and this was simply the culmination. It was going to be impeachment or resignation, so we were pretty much prepared.

So all I recall is watching it on television. I was living in New York City at the time, though was about to leave to go to graduate school in another state, far away. It was just a great going-away present.

So I am wondering why this anniversary is getting so much attention here? It's not a "big" one (39 years). It hasn't been widely discussed on this date in previous years, to my recollection. It was an important event, but why, in particular, are we putting so much focus on it today?

[napkinz]

11. I don't think it matters what year it is ...

... it's just that August 9, 1974 is one of the most important dates in our history.


The first president in our history to resign. One who was involved in a criminal conspiracy.

Just how bad was Nixon?

I found this article online:


Woodward and Bernstein: Nixon’s crimes were worse than we knew

June 12, 2012
by CARL BERNSTEIN and BOB WOODWARD

WASHINGTON — As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?”

Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.”

History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established. Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.

Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the president of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.


Read more:

http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/column/woodward-and-bernstein-nixon-s-crimes-were-worse-than-we/article_c9664e56-b3f8-11e1-bc67-0019bb2963f4.html

[dixiegrrrrl]

14. Most excellent information.

Thank you for that link.
Seems like yesterday.........

[snooper2]

5. In my mothers womb

lol

[napkinz]

12. Any chance your mom was watching it live on TV?

nt

[snooper2]

15. I don't remember

[napkinz]

27. oh ...

I just know my mom has told me where she was on all the historical days I missed because I hadn't been born yet or I was only a few years old. Everything from where she was when JFK was killed, to RFK, and so on throughout the '60s and early '70s.

Even though she's told me her experiences and I've seen footage on TV and YouTube, I still can't believe the turmoil this country went through during those years. And that we survived it all and I'm here.

The only sad thing is in MY life such horrors have not been "rectified," if that's the proper word. I mean, we all lived through the Bush years, and it just makes no sense how Bush and Cheney and Wall Street could get away with the crimes we've witnessed.

What will the children of tomorrow think of our era when they are told about the events of the past decade?

[JustAnotherGen]

6. In Weisbaden - Then West Germany

No idea what I was doing at the time - I was only a year and a half old!

[tabbycat31]

7. Not even a thought

My parents were married at that point, but I was not born until 1980.

[markiv]

8. that double V finger salute at the helecopter was pathetic

he really owed himself better than that, a nice crisp wave or salute would have made a better more dignified parting visual - you'd think he could have gotten advice on scripting that. the double V with the hunched up suit coat was just too easy a target for cartoonists drawing a crook with a 5 o clock shadow, jowles and beady eyes. how could they possibly not have seen that one coming? maybe he was just beyond reach of them by then. i know i'd be cautious in gestures if i were going straight onto a photo on a page in a history book (and i anticipated that moment at least 24 hours in advance)

he had his higher moments in his career, but he ended with a bookend of the 1962 'you wont have nixon to kick around anymore'

[KansDem]

34. He was "warning" us...

Double "V" is...VV or "W"

"If you thought I was bad..."


You just wait!

[napkinz]

39. seems he was drunk more than once ...

found this while searching (it's from 1973) ...

and this (Nixon often drunk during his presidency):

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19820414&id=IlI0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=IWgEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6733,7423344


and Nixon drunk, suicidal in last days of his presidency:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19760327&id=o3NIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TV0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6329,2164180

[napkinz]

38. Carl Bernstein did an interview just the other day ...

He said Nixon was drunk the night before. Bernstein said that Nixon called Henry Kissinger and was slurring his words and rambling and asked Kissinger to never share with anyone that he was crying and falling apart.

If I can find a YouTube video of that interview I'll post it.

[loli phabay]

9. carpathian mountains, did not have tv or even know who any of these guys where

[closeupready]

10. I vaguely remember this - I think that was the year

we went to Disney World in Orlando. At any rate, he's the first president I remember.

[LeftinOH]

13. Camping with the grandparents (Ohio); it gave the adults

something to talk about while we kids played around.

[joeybee12]

16. I remember it...I was at home...I was young but knew he was a crook...

I was very happy to see him leave and I didn't get why the media considered it such a solemn occasion and why it was a "crisis" with our government.

[wandy]

17. You could not forget it............

It was one of those hectic days. A coworker and I had stopped off to grab lunch. Lunch, when you had time, amounted to Mickey Ds and eating in the car while listening to the radio.
There were many others doing the same thing, in fact the parking lot was fairly full.
The speech started. It was as if time stopped. Not a car started. We should have been back to business. We sat, listed, like others around us.

Then Nixon said the magic words.......

"Tin Soldiers and Nixon's GONE!"

There was applauds, cheers even. People got out of their cars and did little victory dances. I'm not making this up. I was one of them! Jubilation all around!

Looking back, it's sad to think that Richard Nixon was the last worthwhile republican President.
Sad to think that by todays republican standards Richard Nixon was an honorable man.

[Puglover]

18. I was in the student union at Wartburg College

in Waverly Iowa eating a "brownie goop" My adviser was at the table with us. He was ecstatic

[gollygee]

19. I was a little kid

My dad put an audio tape recorder in front of the TV and every so often would bring it out, and the recording was less of the TV and more of me goofing off and making noise and him telling me to be quiet because it was a historic event and I should pay attention.

[Jenoch]

24. I was 12 and had a cassette recorder

and I was the one who put a microphone next to the TV speaker to record the president's resignation speech. I wonder whatever happened to that cassette?

[Freddie]

20. Watching TV with my parents

They were teachers and home for the summer. In a few weeks I would move into the dorm for my freshman year of college.
I remember going to my room after the speech and turning on the radio. This song was playing:

C'mon people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

At that point it hit me that this was a profound, unprecedented moment for our country and we had a lot of healing to do.

[BarbaRosa]

21. Ruidoso, NM

I was working as an ORTech at the hospital. I watched this on a worn out crappy color TV that was given to me cuz it was worn out and crappy, but a step up from no TV.

"They fired the shit heard 'round the world."

I can't remember whose quote this is, but it seemed to fit.

[dixiegrrrrl]

22. Gleefully watching the event on tv

Having followed the Watergate issue very carefully, there was a point, called the Saturday Night Massacre*, when we knew Nixon was most likely going down.
At the time, which seems so quaint now, the country was deeply shocked by Nixon's firings.

*the Saturday Night Massacre:
As part of the Watergate investigation, the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, appointed a Special Prosecuter, Archibald Cox,
who asked Nixon to turn over specific audio tapes recorded in the Oval Office.
Nixon refused and ordered Richardson to fire Cox.
Richardson refused, Nixon fired HIM, then Nixon ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox.
He also refused and resigned.
Next up was Robert Bork, the Solicitor General, who DID fire Cox. Illegally, as it turned out.
Bork later said he fired Cox because Nixon had promised to make him a US Supreme Court judge.
Nixon resigned before he could appoint Bork.

[longship]

31. Sat Night Massacre.

That was what started the House Judiciary Committee down the impeachment path. Within a week, there was little doubt that Nixon was in deep doo doo.

Btw, you have it backwards. Richardson resigned when Nixon asked him to fire Cox and Ruckelshaus was fired by Nixon for refusing. IIRC.

[dixiegrrrrl]

41. Is that not what I said????

Richardson and then Rucklehouse?

from my post:
Nixon refused and ordered Richardson to fire Cox.
Richardson refused, Nixon fired HIM, then Nixon ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox.
He also refused and resigned.

Altho, actually, according to Wikipedia which I just checked a minute ago,
Richardson and Rucklehouse both resigned in refusal, they did not get officially fired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Massacre

[longship]

43. Interesting.

I know it's a silly, minor quibble, but my memory of the day was that Nixon fired Ruckelshaus after Richardson resigned.

I may be wrong and Wiki is usually reliable.


Thanks for responding.

[leveymg]

45. I think it was Bork who actually pushed the button firing Cox.

There were several top people at Justice who resigned or were fired after refusing to do Nixon's dirty work on that one. Bork was a Good German - he knew how to follow orders, and was rewarded for it.

[longship]

51. Indeed, Bork fired Cox.

He later claimed that he threatened to resign after he did the ill deed, but said that Nixon convinced him that they couldn't have some Justice Department staffer running the department and that as solicitor general, he would be okay.

At least I remember Bork saying something like that. Of course, this is Bork. Whether that was what actually happened, nobody's alive to say.

I do remember John Chancellor reporting that night. Here's a partial transcript:

Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. The president has fired the man you just saw, the Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and he has sent FBI agents to the office of the special prosecution staff and to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General and the president has ordered the FBI to seal off those offices. Because of the president’s actions, the Attorney General has resigned. Elliot Richardson, who was appointed Attorney General only last May in the midst of the Watergate scandals, has quit, saying, he “cannot carry out Mr. Nixon’s instructions.” Richardson’s Deputy, William Ruckleshaus has been fired. Ruckleshaus refused, in a moment of constitutional drama, to obey a presidential order to fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor. The President has abolished Special Watergate Prosecutor Cox’s office and duties, and turned the prosecution of Watergate crimes over to the Justice Department. And the Justice Department is now headed, at the President’s direction, by the Solicitor General Robert H. Bourque (sic), who has held his office only since last June. Bourque (sic) issued a terse statement tonight, saying an explanation of his firing of the Special Watergate Prosecutor: “All I will say is that I carried out the President’s directive.”

The series of events that precipitated this crisis began at 8:15 o’clock Friday night when the president announced that he would not obey a court order to surrender the Watergate tapes. Instead, Mr. Nixon said he would make available a summary of recorded White House conversations, which he felt were relevant and, which he personally would edit. He would have the president’s say--the president said he would have the summary authenticated by Senator John Stennis, who would be allowed to hear the full tapes. At the same time, the president ordered Special Prosecutor Cox to stop his efforts to acquire those tapes. The president acted less than four hours before he would have been forced to make one of two choices, either to bow to a circuit court of appeals’ order to surrender the tapes, or to federal--to federal Judge John Sirica, or to appeal that order to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Nixon acted after meeting with the Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin and the Vice Chairman Senator Baker. Both went along with the president’s proposal. That was an important consideration. There was one other. Had the president defied the Supreme Court outright, he knew he faced a movement toward impeachment by some members of the House of Representatives.

So, here is where we stand. The president has offered a compromise designed to circumvent a court order, which would have required him to turn over the secret tapes to a federal judge. He has lost his Attorney General in a dramatic resignation. Mr. Nixon then tried to get the Deputy Attorney General to fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor and when the Deputy Attorney General wouldn’t do it, he was fired. Then Mr. Nixon got the Solicitor General to do the job and named him the acting head of the Justice Department. And half an hour after the Special Watergate Prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the Special Prosecutor, the offices of the Attorney General, and the offices of the Deputy Attorney General. That’s a stunning development and nothing even remotely like it has happened in all of our history.

All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the president has set himself against his own Attorney General and the Department of Justice. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and what it means is that the worst dreams of everyone who has worried about the president’s secret tapes have now become true, become reality.

[dixiegrrrrl]

23. About those clips..

In the first one, I was amazed to see how young Kissinger was.

in the last one, notice the pursed lips of Ford..that universal sign of doing something wrong.

[napkinz]

40. Kissinger just appeared in Colbert video ...

at 1:48 in the video

[femmocrat]

25. At home, glued to the TV.

I remember it well.

[Blue_In_AK]

26. I was in Bolinas, California, taking care of my two-year-old.

It was a happy day. I couldn't believe the ogre was stepping down. I felt very hopeful. I was young and didn't know any better. I thought things would get better.

[hobbit709]

28. In the beer garden at AWHQ.

[krispos42]

29. Future plans for my parents.

[spartan61]

30. I was sitting in my first graduate class

at UConn and the instructor brought in a TV so the class could all watch the resignation speech. History in the making!

[Politicalboi]

32. I remember August 9th 1969

More than this.

[deutsey]

33. I watched Nixon's resignation with my grandmother

I was 10 years old and didn't really understand what Watergate was.

[benld74]

35. Summer after my HS graduation, probably doing nothing important

BUT I do recall the event. Buddy of mine has original event taped on the monster sized VHS recorder he received as HS graduation present from his parents. The thing was over half the size of their console television!

[Waiting For Everyman]

36. I was 24 and back home in the DC area, after a few years in California,

watching the tv non-stop with my cutie days-old son, pleased as hell and incredulous at our good fortune to be getting rid of that rat Nixon. In short, on cloud nine. It was a very heady time for a while (until Ford pardoned him a few weeks later, what a buzz kill).

Nixon was much worse than people today think, because most of his bad deeds didn't make it into the written accounts -- especially to anybody who opposed him. I knew all about that from first-hand observation. Nixon had a surveillance state similar to the one now in its own way, supported by the Rand Corporation and other entities. And he never got caught for a whole ton of stuff he did, unfortunately. I think actually that's why he decided to go, before more came out in the hearings. I had watched all the hearings on tv, and they were fascinating.

IIRC, I think we were already dealing with the first gas-crisis then too. It was a very complicated time. But Nixon going was a stroke of luck, all due to Daniel Ellsberg, lol, which is such poetic justice.

It was a lot like Shrub's leaving, only better, because Nixon didn't expect to go. That was a time when Corporatism didn't always get its way and the people occasionally "won one", and I miss that.

[oldhippie]

37. I think I was in Korea, but maybe Taiwan or Okinawa .....

I remember listening on Armed Forces Radio one night when the House Committee passed the Articles of Impeachment. Sam Irvin, IIRC. I remember I was doing temporary duty at a Nike-Herc launch site that night. (I even remember the particular POS crypto system that was giving me a hard time as I listened to the radio.) I don't remember how many days it was from that until he resigned, but if it was more than a couple of days I may have already moved on to Okinawa or back to my base in Taipei. I moved around a lot in those days.

[AngryOldDem]

42. 14 years old, and doing a happy dance.

I could not stand Richard Nixon.

[leveymg]

44. From what I remember of that summer - that was a really good day!

[sarisataka]

46. In school

they brought in a TV so we could watch the unprecedented happen live.

[cloudbase]

47. Philadelphia.

I had recently finished my plebe year at the Merchant Marine Academy and was assigned to the S.S. Export Courier for the first of my two six-month sea periods. That was the day a handsome young midshipman got his first taste of life aboard ship.

[loyalsister]

48. I know where I lived

and I know that's probably where I was. But I was 4 yr.s old, so I don't remember details about it. I really wish I remembered my dad's response.

[duffyduff]

49. I was at home with my mother watching Nixon's resignation on television

I was a Watergate buff then, Watergate buff now, Watergate buff until I die.

I predicted during my senior year of high school, right before the election of 1972, that Nixon would either be impeached or resign (this was a few months after the Watergate break-in). People thought I was crazy, but of course I was right on the resignation part.

[struggle4progress]

50. I was working on a ranch, and that day a few of us were supposed to slaughter a cow.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023431795#post32

[darkangel218]

52. I wasnt born yet

[Zorra]

53. I was with my college gf at the CSNY concert at Roosevelt Stadium the night before,

when Graham Nash (at least I think it was Graham, it may have been David, we were kind of experiencing multi self-induced perceptual anomalies at the time, and neither of us could remember) came out and yelled "THE FUCKER RESIGNED" and the place went totally gonzo.

They played "Long Time Gone" next, CSNY was fired up.

But I can't remember anything about where I was, or how I got there on the 9th; it's a total blank.

"Long Time Gone"

It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone

And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Appears to be a long time
Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

Turn turn any corner
Hear you must hear what the people say
You know there's something that's goin' on around here
The surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day, no

And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long, mmm
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long time before the dawn

Speak out you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind if you dare
But don't, no don't, no, try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair, mmm

And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long, mmm
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

[Link Speed]

54. I was living in the Princess Acapulco Hotel

I watched it in the lobby with other ex-pats.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

55. where I belonged and I wish I could go back.