Where we're you when Nixon resigned?

[Juan Marrero]

It's rather late for an addition to this thread, but I can't resist when the subject is Richard Nixon. I was in high school when he resigned and I recall my mother crying during his speech. Watching the heroic Pat Nixon walk to the helicpoter the next day was heart-breaking. I would place her in the category of First Ladies who left the White House after experiencing a trumatic loss, never to quite recover.

The Nixon tapes are a gift to his enemies and a bane to his admirers (the few left). It may or may not matter to his reputation at this point that the few minutes bigoted remarks and the really dumb ideas are those that are culled and broadcast each time the Archives releases a "new" batch of conversations. I imagine there is alot less titilation to the rest. Few people could, survive reputation intact, if their every meal conversation were recorded. But it was wrong for him to have recorded the conversations, tragic that he did not destroy the tapes and imprudent for Congress and the Supreme Court to have sought and ordered their release. I wonder if South Vietnam would have held, if "mad man" Nixon had been there to threaten Hanoi.

Does American history run on ridiculously predictable cycles? Lincon and Kennedy, assassinated; Johnson and Johnson, turbulent presidencies; Nixon, Johnson, and Grant: impeachment and scandals. You need almost a Tolstoyan view of history to account for this.