Where we're you when Nixon resigned?

[LincolnToddFan]

I was a schoolgirl of 14, attending summer school for my first year of high school so that I would have enough credits to graduate early.

I was walking across the grounds of my school eating-you guessed it-STARBURST fruit chews and listening to the resignation speech being blasted on the loudspeakers.

I was far from a fan of President Nixon, but I never loathed him like many of my peers did. My grandmother, a Roosevelt Democrat, was especially gleeful. She had never gotten over the fact that Nixon narrowly beat Humphrey in 1968 and she was apoplectic over the deaths of those kids at Kent State, which she ultimately blamed on Nixon. I'd never seen her so happy as when the Watergate hearings began.

I felt-still do-that Nixon was a brilliant, complicated man who wrestled with a dark side that he allowed to take over his better self. His statement to David Frost in the famous interview ("I gave them a sword") was never more true.

I felt confusion that day, as well as awe, and a pervasive sadness as I munched my candy and strolled across campus.