On This Day In History, 1974: Nixon Resigns as President

[Zomby Woof]

Allow me to quote from our esteemed late colleague, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

Read this in its entirety: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm

[Are_grits_groceries]

1. That was a good day!

And here we were so happey that something like that would never happen again in our lifetimes.

Then came Bush/Cheney. Much worse by far. Cheney and Rumsfeld got their training then. They learned, but a lot of people didn't.

*sigh*

[Dennis Donovan]

2. I was just shy of 9 years old that day...

...yet I have such a stong memory of the event, right down to the helicopter scene. I remember having the very same feelings watching Bush's chopper fly away 35 years later...:D

[Octafish]

3. It was a great day.

Now all we have to do is to expose and remove from positions of power the people Nixon served.

[Cirque du So-What]

4. 'Fleeing the WH like a diseased cur'

Man, do I miss HST!

I wish we could have had similar success with WhistleAss in driving him from office.

[Zomby Woof]

5. Kick for Resignation Day

[pleah]

6. Should have been on his way to jail. n/t

[struggle4progress]

7. I had to slaughter a cow that day, on the ranch where I worked. We got it into the chute

to kill, and it suddenly panicked and jumped over one of the seven foot walls on either side of the chute. I kid you not: the poor animal leapt over a wall taller than I am and ran off into the hot summer distance. So we got into a truck and followed it until it got exhausted, then shot it, heaved it into the back of the truck, and took it back to butcher it. I still remember that getting a dead cow into the back of a pickup truck is not easy. I spent the rest of the afternoon skinning it and sawing it into pieces small enough to cure in the walk-in locker

Around chow time, stinking with sweat and the offal of the slaughter, I headed back to the bunkhouse to clean-up: I walked in the front door, and everybody turned around and said Nixon resigned!

Yeah? I told them, He was even harder to get than that cow

Nixon had made me so cynical that I couldn't really rejoice that he was finally gone: much as I despised him, I really didn't expect things to improve with his departure. Years later, I watched his funeral on TV while waiting for a mechanic to finish repairing my car, and I was surprised to realize that somehow with time I had forgotten how much I had despised him: by then, I had learned to live with my disillusionment without making peace with it, and Nixon had just become another tragic figure in my eyes, a dead man towards whom I no longer felt rancor

I'll never forget, of course, the damage he and his supporters did to the country -- though after Reagan and the Bushes, Nixon's contempt for law seems like a mere chapter in a much longer story