Supporting Nixon

IN 1972, WHEN I WAS a high school senior, Richard Nnixon ran for reelection. My friends and I enthusiastically supported him. At the time I was not necessarily a Repblican, not necessarily a Demorat. My political identity had not yet been formed. I had not yet emerged as a full fledged left wing democratic socialist Bernie Sanders liberal,as I am now and have been for many years. Of my high school clique-gang, only one among us,the smart one, the one who became an endicronogist, a diabetes doctor, had the good sense to support George McGovern, whose political ideology was perfectly aligned with mine as mine is now. We Nixonians had our own little chant: "Reelect the president!" We thought ourselves terribly clever. George McGovern was one of many failed Demoratic presidential candidates who would have been a great president, but lost. Others include Hubert H. Humphrey, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris.Each of them lost to a far inferior Republican candidate, inferior by virtue of either being a criminal, an idiot, or both. In the fall of 1972, my first semester as a high school senior, the Watergate scandal had not yet broken open; that would happen in the spring of 1973, when the Watergate tapes came out, the seventeen minute missing part, Rosemary Woods, Nixon's private secretary, and her energetic foot, Nixon's self incriminating tape recordings made by the White House taping system which he inexplicacly allowd to run, when he easily could ahve unplugged it.. all that. It seems amazing to think that anyone much younger than I,and I am sixty nine, is too young to remember those turbulent times, the summer long Watergate hearings in 1973, which I spent watching from early in the morning until early afternoon, instead of getting a summer job. What did the president know and when did he know it? As 1973 and 1974 gradually and steadily revealed that Nixon was indeed a criminal, which we now kwow he was his entire political life, from college, when he bought votes for his election to the student council, on to his resignation in August 1974, I, like seemingly everyone else in America, turned against him, and I soon emerged as a liberal Democrat, thanks in part to Tricky Dick, although I have no doubt that I would have anyway, Nixon, or no Nixon. Richard Milhouse Nixon, the inspiration behind my lifelong political ideology. As we like to say: go figure. By 1975, it was as if the entire nation was ashamed of itself for having reelected Nixon, but for having done so by a landslide,a super landslide. People denied having voted for him, falsely. Everybody in America claimed to have voted for McGovern, when in fact very few had. When Ford pardoned Nixon, there was another national uproar; it seemed that everyone in the country wanted to see Trickie Dick go on trial, be convicted, and incarcerated. The leader of our gang was an influence on me in my supprt of Nixon, but I take full responsibility for it, and I freely admit that I made a mistake. As for our leader, he was class president, a natural leader. But he wanted to become a writer, which was a bad idea, and he ended up with no career, and is now living in a log cabin in the Pacific Northwest, immersed in alternative cosmic paradigms, chasing interdimensional entities. without a career (one should never plan to be a writer, or a rock star, those things just happen, by accident.) Worst of al,he is an avid, MAGA cult member Trumper, to the core. I reminded him recently of our experience with Nixon; no luck. He never learned his lesson. At least I did.