IN CELEBRATION OF HIS DEMISE ON ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY
(By James S. Dwyer)
As summer enters its final stage, and before we all gird our loins for the anxious days of a presidential election in three months, it seems to me that we could all use one more official summer holiday to let off a little steam, drink a few beers, have some fun outdoors with family and honor a great moment in American history. All at Richard Nixon’s expense! Yeah, it’s a celebration that’s simultaneously overdue and right on time. After all, Nixon still owes us. Especially in 2024.
Like me, I suspect, the Fourth of July felt empty to many of you this year, falling as it did less than a week after John Roberts pronounced that the right-wing majority on the court had decided they would rewrite the Constitution and declare powers to the executive out of thin air as well as whole cloth, thus rendering a constitutionally bound president into an unfettered king, with astonishingly dubious casualness.
The announcement literally made me feel nauseated, like a real kick in the balls. It took a lot of weed, loud music and swimming over the subsequent weeks to shake the vibe. The joy of summer had been pruning-snipped, alright. I began to start longing for the holiday that so many million others are craving, which doesn’t yet exist, namely any day that finds therealdonaldjtrump@asshole.com in front of a prosecutor or a warden, facing a conviction and significant sentencing.
But we can’t celebrate our holidays before they have transpired. So, what else is there of significance, with heavy relevance, to celebrate America in the wake of the Roberts declaration of kingdependence? Surely there must be something?
Hmmmmmm. Oh, shit. Of Course!
We DO have something to celebrate this summer. Because guess what? No matter where (or if!) you were fifty years ago, there’s good reason to feel happy on the the eighth and ninth of August this year. What for, you say? Goddammit man, fifty years ago on that date Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace from the office of President of the United States. His support in congress had withered away as crime after crime was exposed during investigations that had already led to jail sentences for his closest staff insiders. Impeachment proceedings for His Nibs were just about to begin, and Nixon had been told in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the votes to survive in the Senate, should the House vote to impeach, which they were sure to do. So, on the evening of August 8th, Nixon went on TV and said, by the by, at the end of a short speech on international affairs, that he would resign the office of the Presidency at noon the following day.
His critics had good reason to be happy that this miserable, border-line basket-case paranoiac, had been driven from office. After months of slogging through hours and hours of testimony that made for more riveting viewing than anyone had expected, even people who’d voted for him sickened at the brazen criminality and self-dealing that Nixon was shown to have engaged in.
Though I was only eleven years old at the time, it wasn’t hard to see that something interesting was happening, and the president looked like he might be going to jail. I’ll never forget, having seen him resign on live TV that summer day back in 1974, telling my father when he came from work, “Hey Dad, Nixon was on TV and he was crying!” My dad, who’d voted for Nixon, twice, was disgusted by the whole thing. “That son of a bitch should cry, he’s made this country look bad!” The sense of having been personally burned by Nixon was palpable to me, even as a kid. Fortunately, I had MAD magazine to walk me though the nuances of names and deeds of Watergate. Later that year, I paid fifteen cents for a paperback copy of The White House Transcripts at a neighbor’s garage sale and skimmed it. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but I knew there was dirt in it. And swears! Lots and lots of swears. So many in fact that the editors of said text deemed it better to just roll with the euphemistic legalism “expletive deleted,” inspiring me to introduce a way to swear in class to my friends at school.
At the time, some said that Nixon had “been punished enough already.” Nonsense! Plenty of people become skulking paranoid alcoholics, lying to their own families, for lesser reasons than Nixon did. But all of Nixon’s suffering was of his own making, and was simply a consequence of the numerous bad choices he’d made and the criminal enterprises that he’d engaged in. The main reason he chose finally to resign rather than “hang tough” and force impeachment proceedings was to insure that he wouldn’t be punished with the fiscal hit of losing his pension ($60K per annum pension, $96K staff & office expenses, free office space & mailing privileges, and Secret Service aides!) if fully impeached. Resigning wasn’t his “last noble sacrifice” it was his last opportunity to self-serve at the public teat.
And Nixon never did apologize, either. Regarding Watergate (and leaving unremarked his other crimes) he would only offer up “I was wrong in the way that I chose to handle it.” Though he’s obliquely referring to the cover-up here, it’s easy to observe that one can also “choose” to “handle” criminal enterprises by not engineering them in the first place! Admitting the tactical blunders that led to your downfall is hardly an apology, Mr. Nixon.
Quite the opposite in fact! He later famously extemporized the bizarre “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” line while being interviewed by David Frost. What sort of bullshit sophistry is that, Mr. Nixon?
But, despite the satisfaction of seeing him flee in shame, the nation was ultimately robbed of the opportunity to see proof right in front of its eyes that “the system” actually, truly works, and that “all are equal before the law.” To experience the cathartic, celebratory hurrah! of seeing Nixon stand trial for his (egregious! numerous!) crimes, and possibly do prison time, would have allowed us something like a proper end to the story, the way George Washington would have wanted it to play out. It would also have served as a sort of inoculation against such future bad actors who might seek to attain the highest office. Someone like Lex Luther perhaps.
But with typically clumsy, if well-meaning, stumble-bum good-guy-isms, Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford (the only President of the United States to never have been elected President of the United States) botched the moment right from the start, that afternoon of August 9th, 1974, just after having been sworn in as President. Despite trying to reassure the nation that “our national nightmare is over” he would in fact, within days, issue the pardon that would insure that the wound that Nixon had inflicted on the heart of America would not only not properly heal, but actually fester into something worse. Our national nightmare had in fact, just begun.
For certainly we wouldn’t be where we are today, with a treacherous yet strangely unprosecutable ex-president still lurking about, threatening, fomenting, and causing incredible harm to the body politic, if Nixon had been made to bow before the law.
So, it’s bad enough that Ford deprived us of this element of the healing process, but worse, he seems to have done it for partisan reasons. He probably realized that imprisoning Nixon would doom the Republican party to the wasteland for a generation, or was counseled to that effect. I have a detailed argument to make (at some other time) that the GOP (so-called) never really got over Watergate and Nixon’s implosion, in fact lost their minds, and that brick by brick, the road to MAGA began there.
If you doubt it, ask yourself why the Supreme Court just re-litigated, without acknowledging that they were doing so, United States Vs. Nixon ? And they decided FOR NIXON! Of course, the current Supreme Court has shown little regard for precedent, so the unanimous decision rendered July 28, 1974 was a mere triviality to them. And of course they never mentioned Nixon at all, but the mealy mouthed language of John Roberts’ opinion in Trump Vs. United States in essence finds for Nixon to be allowed to conceal the tapes and prosper from his crime wave. And in those halcyon days, Rehnquist (maybe even a bigger prick than Clarence Thomas) actually recused himself due to his former close ties with Nixon (he’d been Assistant Attorney General under convicted felon John Mitchell!) Amazing.
My impression, during the Reagan years, was that the Republican party wanted to undo the social, cultural, & economic changes born in the crucible of the 1960s. I now realize that, as of Today, the Republican party is more about getting into a time machine and then going back so that they can prevent their own, initially abolitionist, party from being born and nominating Lincoln to the presidency. Or if you’re one of the Supreme Court’s leisure class radical right wingers, going back even further to redefine chief executives as having king-like powers, nostalgic for King George. Or King Orange.
So, to illustrate to those suspect jurists who favor kings that we, the American people, harbor no such longings, let us rise up in celebration of Richard Nixon’s Demise! Driven from office when his vast crimes were exposed! Even though he didn’t end up dying in prison (which I believed he should have done, and said so at the time), and even though some of what he did might even be deemed quaint when held up (down?) to the standards of the Current Republican Standard-Bearer, the fall of Richard Nixon was, is, and forever will be a victory for truth, justice, and the American way.
So go outside, light some sparklers in your driveway while you drink the beverage of your choice. What the hell, why not go nuts and light off some of those snake-things too. Like Nixon, they stink and leave a foul stain. And like Nixon, they’re still good for a laugh.
The Cuttingsville Times 