Figure 1 – Figure 1 – Nixons departing the White House for the last time, August 9, 1974, from the Wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.
Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. It was a moment of collective memory. My wife worked at the time for Harrison M. Trice, who was a distinguished professor or organizational behavior at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Harry had been convinced that Nixon was going to declare martial law and stay president. Sound paranoid? The thing was that Harry had been a graduate student at The University of Wisconsin, when Nixon came with Senator Joseph McCarthy and declared: “We’re going to drive the communists out of this university with whips this thick.” Hmm! “You’re president is not a crook!” Except that he was a crook and had precipitated the greatest constitutional crisis in the United States since… Well, since McCarthy.
American’s were desolate. I was watching a newsreel last night, an interview of a woman, my mother’s age at the time, and she said: “This country is going to celebrate it’s two hundredth birthday in a couple of years. I want to be proud of America and right now I’m ashamed.” It was pretty powerful stuff. But political support for Nixon eroded to the point that Republicans in congress and the senate told him that they didn’t have the votes to stop the impeachment. And so… The constitution held. We were both appalled and proud.
There are many images of the day. But the power of the constitution, of the union, was best represented by the Fords escorting the NIxons to the helicopter which started the Nixon’s journey home (Figure 1). And then there was a last futile attempt at bravado as Nixon turned one last time, put out his arms, his fingers flashing V’s as symbols of false victory.
Figure 2 – Nixon poses one last time as he departs the White House, August 9, 1974, from the Wikimediacommons, taken by a US Government employee and in the public domain.
And now we have a constitutional crisis which I believe eclipses that of Nixon (and remember sharing the excitement over those months in ’73 and ’74?) Back then we had Republicans in both houses of Congress with sagacity. Now, where are they, and what will happen to our well-meaning President whose ethnicity seems to be what his opponents hate most?
Another note from here…the picture of Nixon in the plane has always looked so automaton-like, yet I’ve also imagined the first twinge of phlebitis nipping him at that moment. When he nearly died from that condition such a short time later, other experiences I’d personally noticed were corroborated in the matter of the harmful impact of stress on our health.