I lived through Watergate. I was a young liberal in 1968--majoring in Spanish and English Literature. To say that I and my female classmates (Mount St. Clare College--Clinton, Iowa.) were disheartened when Nixon was elected is an understatement. We had watched the debacle at Grant Park on television while it happened! We were devastated.
Nixon was arrogant, dismissive of any opposition. He was backed by the morally outraged older generation-- it was a world where racial and gender equality was a dream, forget sexual freedom. It was a world I struggle to explain because it was so different from today. Yeah, people talked about equal rights for women but female teachers had no maternity leave. Women had very little concrete progress in the world. My black classmates had it even worse.
In the next 4 years I fell in love, married a man who was majoring in education. Somehow he managed to sweet talk me into going into teaching--but that is another story. I was pregnant when I graduated college. ( Sweet talking--again!)
I could not take a teaching job out of college because y husband and I could not afford to pay a substitute teacher while I was on maternity leave. Boggle your mind that a teacher would have to pay for her own substitute while on maternity leave? There was no maternity leave in those days! Try this on for size-- female teachers did not receive the same pay as male teachers. There was a clause about being head of household that allowed for single females with children to be paid more if they were head of household--BUT in those days there were no unmarried mothers hired as teachers. So Nixon's election was like a giant step back, into the scary, ultra conservative 50s. Bust the teachers unions like the small gov Republicans want to do, and this is what you get. Look what De-regulation has done for airline employees and passengers while the CEOs rake in the profits--but, again, I digress.)
I opted out of politics. I read Dr. Spock not news magazines. I could not believe that the country did not see Nixon for the arrogant tyrant that he so clearly seemed to me. There was discontent over the years, but that was dismissed as blowhard liberals whining about an election they were bound to lose. There were rumors about Nixon having an "enemies list" but no one in the mainstream was talking about this. I really felt that there was nothing we could do.
In 1972 in the summer, the Watergate Plumbers were arrested. They were arrested trying to plug a leak. This paranoid obsession with leaks and not the actual facts led Nixon and his supporters to make one miss step after another--ring any bells? They were ringing for me back then, but only because I had a background in Spanish and English political history. Otherwise I might have continued with diaper folding--yeah, we used cloth diapers back then-- and ignored the newspapers, which were mostly Republican slanted in my area. But even in my area, the idea of wiretapping another political party had folks mildly upset. Nobody said WTF back then but that was the mood.
People who did not mind Nixon's politics, were beginning to be worried about his lying, his cover ups, his power grabs, his dismissing anyone who disagreed with him as an enemy. The formal investigation was stymied but the tips were still coming in, from well placed sources. People who feared Nixon but knew that he must be stopped because he had gone over the edge, picked up phones--landline phones in offices and homes that could be traced, and unleashed the truth.
It didn't happen all at once. There were whole months when the scandal was reported to have been quashed. That it all amounted to nothing. It was disappointing but not unexpected. Things like this happen in our system and if the powers that be are clever, or at least humbled, they can get past this. Our system does not like, I'm willing to say, will not accept, arrogance and blind stupidity on the part of our leaders. A bumbling cover up and a refusal to back down from a bald faced lie --this gets the public goat more than bugging a rival or buddying up to Russians bearing gifts.
People notice the funny business, but the arrogant refusal to admit a mistake really pisses us off. Telling an FBI Director to "stay the hell out of this business" doesn't wash in 2017 any better than in 1972. I watched with my friends, in slack jawed shock, as some of Nixon's most conservative supporters slowly turned against him. Paul Harvey is the one I remember best. I don't have the time to explain Paul Harvey but he WAS everything that made the fifties the fifties. When he turned on Nixon it was a shock to me.
Still the televised hearings were not held until the next summer. I was home all day folding diapers so I was the one to take notes and report to my husband and friends. My mom would call long distance in the middle of the day to marvel over the events of the day--anyone remember daytime long distance rates? Sometimes the phone bill ran 19$. My dad had a conniption fit! But then he was a Republican and my mom, a Kennedy Democrat, was rubbing his face in the scandal.
As I remember,r the Saturday Night Massacre, in the autumn of 1973, was the real turning point--the time when ordinary people began to rumble and almost everything we heard on the news was Watergate. The time that the boulder was unleashed on Indiana.
It was not until summer 1974 that the smoking gun was revealed. By then the public was so disgusted with Nixon's behavior it didn't matter what was said in those missing 18 minutes. They assumed the worst. Rightly so? No one knows. He incompetently, arrogantly covered a lie for the last time--assuming that people would believe him regardless of the lies. No one had any patience left, not the news people, not the Republicans.
I sincerely believe that this is where we are now. I made a post some time ago, that this thing was progressing like Watergate on steroids. Still, it is going more slowly than some of you expect it should. Hang on. If this scandal doesn't take him down, there will be another one. There will always be another one with Trump. The one good thing is that people, ordinary, everyday people are listening and thinking. That's what it is all about--not winning elections or losing elections, but listening and thinking--s6
PS--sorry for the long winded history lesson but I was asked to explain. You know how we teachers are.
I wasn't alive then, and it's great to have such a thing painted out this way. 