Summer of ‘74
It was August 8th, 1974. I graduated from high school two months before, and I was in the final stages of preparing to leave home. Denison University, up “on the hill” in Granville, Ohio, awaited me. I spent that last summer before college painting houses, and watching the House Judiciary Committee investigate and debate the actions of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.
It was my second summer of Nixon. My last summer of high school, 1973, I watched the Senate Committee hearings on Nixon, with the famous Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat who could have been Hollywood cast for the part, as Chairman. (Speaking of Hollywood, the Minority Counsel on that Committee was a young Fred Thompson, who spent the latter part of his life as an actor, including “serving” as the second District Attorney on the Law and Order series).
The Tapes
So I knew the case against Richard Nixon, inside and out. On July 24th, 1974, the United States Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the “tapes”. Those were recordings from the White House of Nixon’s own conversations with his staff about the Watergate break-in and coverup. I fully expected Nixon to burn the tapes on the White House lawn rather than turn them over (the suggestion of one of his speech writers, Pat Buchanan). Had Nixon done so, perhaps he would have survived in office to the end of his Presidency.
But Nixon did turn them over to the Special Prosecutor, who then passed them to the House Judiciary Committee. And the Committee moved inexorably towards impeachment of the President, the second time in American history.
I don’t think I knew at the time, what happened in those early days of August. The leaders of the Republican Party in the Congress: The House Minority Leader, the Senate Minority Leader and Senator and former Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater; all went to see President Nixon. They told him that he was going to be impeached, and the Senate would convict him. They asked him to resign.
Champagne
What I did know on the evening on August 8th, sitting in our downstairs recreation room with a few friends, was that Richard Nixon was speaking to the nation. And there must have been some fore-knowledge of what he was going to say – champagne and glasses were available. Nixon announced, that as of noon on August 9th, Vice President Gerald Ford would be the next President. We toasted to the end of Nixon, and of three years of America’s fixation on Watergate.
The House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment, but the full House never debated or voted it. So Richard Nixon became the first President to resign, but not the second to be impeached. And since there was no impeachment, there was no Senate trial. Exactly a month later, President Ford granted a full and blanket pardon to Richard Nixon for anything he might have done, declaring that “…our long national nightmare has ended”. As a freshman at Denison, all the folks watching in the student lounge in Crawford Hall instantly knew what I thought about that. Nixon got off – far too easily.
Over the ensuing years, I mellowed on President Ford’s decision. I gained some understanding about how much our attention was diverted to Watergate, beyond what was happening in the world, and in our nation. And now I hear some of those same arguments, directed towards President Biden, suggesting that he should end this current Trumpian nightmare. “Move on” they say, there’s too much to do: COVID, the economy, the environment, infrastructure, and so much more.
Nixon Redux
But I have come to think of all of this differently. Donald Trump was politically advised by the younger generation of Nixon’s followers. Roger Stone was critical in his political aspirations. Stone, a young Nixon staffer, believed so strongly in the disgraced President that he had Nixon’s face tattooed onto his back. At sixty-eight, he maintains his physique, perhaps to maintain the structure of Nixon’s visage.
Almost three years ago, I wrote an essay about Stone called Stone’s Dream. The premise of that essay was that Stone believed if only Nixon had “toughed it out”, burned the tapes, stonewalled longer, then he would have survived. Stone taught Trump well. He stonewalled the Mueller investigation that found hundreds of contacts with Russian intelligence. The day after Mueller testified, Trump leveraged Ukraine for “dirt” on future opponent Joe Biden resulting in his first impeachment and trial. But Trump got a “pass” on that as well. So why shouldn’t Trump absolutely insist that he won the 2020 election, so much so that he encouraged his supporters to come to Washington, march on the Capitol, and stop the certification of the Electoral votes. He always “beat the rap” before. He was tough like Stone.
Accountability
Today’s impeachment trial of Donald Trump is not just about Trump himself. It is about responsibility and accountability. Nixon was never held accountable for his actions in Watergate, despite his key aides all serving jail sentences. The Congress didn’t hold him to blame, accepting his resignation as enough. The Courts were denied the opportunity to air the evidence, Nixon protected by his blanket of Federal pardon.
Maybe our “long national nightmare” was only temporarily ended by Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Perhaps that action created a recurring nightmare, each time a little stronger and more frightening. Nixon was a crook, a thief, a man who abused the powers of his office for personal political gain. Yes, he resigned the Presidency, but lost little else. Trump was more, a man all-to-willing to launch an insurrection to maintain the office for which he no longer was entitled. If we, the United States, do not hold him accountable for those actions, either in the Senate or the Courts, what nightmare will shock us from “sleep” next?
