Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Western civilization when one of the Italian kids on the team came running down the path to our site waving a copy of Italy's major communist newspaper, l'Unita, with a headline proclaiming what so many have labeled the ultimate signal of the decline of the West--Nixon's reluctant farewell...
That evening over our pasta we watched Nixon's resignation speech on the news. There was no pity for this broken leader; he had fallen before we were born. The Italians at the table watched our reactions. We showed no shame for Nixon--this man was as politically remote from us as the distance between Tarquinia and Washington--but on the other hand we drew no elation from watching the president take responsibility for screwing the democratic system, but point the blame elsewhere...
...After Nixon had said his piece we just shrugged and finished dinner. Ford became president and we didn't talk about politics much for the rest of the summer. When I came home in the fall, I asked my friends in high school what they had done when Nixon resigned, but they were not too interested in the subject and I dropped it. The malignancy had been removed. That was all that counted...
...BEEN relatively easy for people my age to deal with Nixon's duplicity, because sadly it came when we were young enough to look at high-level corruption as a fact of life. But for an older generation that had placed its faith in the integrity, if not the competence, of its public officials, the Watergate scandal was often traumatic...
Charles L. Mee's story about his own reaction to Nixon's resignation is a tale from a member of that older generation born just before World War II, and there is much more to his reaction than a shrugging off of the events of that day in the summer of 1974. In fact, except for a couple of short fantasy episodes, Nixon is rarely mentioned. His betrayal of the country is taken as a given, and the book revolves around Mee's efforts to deal with what he calls the death of the Republic, and the people who killed...