Young Americans
“Do you remember your President Nixon?” David Bowie asked the Watergate-gobsmacked denizens of God’s favorite country half a century ago. Starting with the pointed “your,” this was cheeky of him, considering that our President Nixon had vacated the White House on August 9, 1974. That was only two days — two days! — before Bowie recorded the vocal track for what would become the title tune of his 1975 album, Young Americans, at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound studios.
A whole lot was going on in them there days. So let me take you down in the time machine, as John Lennon might say. Let’s call Bowie the anti-Nixon of our most schizophrenic 20th-century decade, not that it lacks for 21st-century competition.
Vying over who owned the Zeitgeist back then was a Bingo game gone anarchist. Nixon, who’d had his own innings of introducing new Nixons to a bemused public, with mixed success — and who might have gone to his grave without any idea who David Bowie was — would have known that in his bones.
Choosing soon-to-be-legendary Philly producers Gamble & Huff’s house venue as his latest musical bivouac signaled the onetime Ziggy Stardust’s transit from space-oddity weirdness and diamond-dog doomsaying, along with whatever other oddball but predictive flights took his fancy — e.g., Pinups, his anticipatory punk-covers album before punk existed — to what the main man himself acutely called “plastic soul.” And it was.
Then, as always, our anti-Nixon was as comfy with his own artificiality as his Potomac doppelgänger was hamstrung by his. But Bowie was dabbling in audibly fake authenticity for once, which seemed to be just what Dr. Rorschach had ordered to make temporary sense of our permanently spread-eagled, 50-state inkblot.
That made Bowie the ideal greeter station-to-stationed just then at America’s eternal revolving door. You know, the one where the only Muzak our muffled ears ever hear is the Beatles’ “Revolution” on repeat as we’re trapped eyeing each other through imprisoning but somehow promisingly spinning glass. We were and still are a bit like those bourgeois dinner guests inexplicably confined in a sumptuous manse in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel — we’d get out faster than Laurel and Hardy if we could figure out how.
So far as revolving-door ch-ch-ch-changes go, it’s no surprise that we (white, naturally) ignorami mistook Bowie’s latest bust-a-move for what it wasn’t. Namely, our introduction to what we’d soon learn to call disco. Try to imagine disco as the soundtrack to the Nixon era and you’ll instantly realize what a short, strange trip it was from the Saturday Night Massacre — when the Department of Justice’s two top officials quit rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire initial Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox before then solicitor general Robert Bork dutifully bent over to split the clam without even asking for K-Y jelly in October of 1973 — to Saturday Night Fever and Saturday Night Live.
Former White House counsel John Dean still shows up on cable news sometimes, enjoying his late-life promotion to wise man after being Nixon’s legal flunky turned Senate stool pigeon.
Despite some surface noise to the contrary, Bowie never went full-on Bee Gees on us. No You can tell from the way I sing that I’ve got my balls tied in a sling / And you can tell from my tone of fright that the sling on my balls is much too tight for him. Never a true convert to disco, or anything else, he was a man born for flirting with everything under the sun, over the moon, and whatever orbital rubbish happened to float in between. That was why we trusted Ziggy Zeitgeist to identify our next bright-shiny thing 180 in this damn automat restaurant’s door.
Given his quasi-janitorial job in the culture, it’s not to Bowie’s discredit that, aside from the aforesaid title tune and the Lennon-abetted funk collab “Fame,” most of Young Americans hasn’t aged any better than the unrefrigerated Stilton so many English housewives discovered in their kitchens once Swinging London bit the dust. (It was better than biting the Stilton.) Nonetheless, Bowie’s intuition that the times they were a-chord-changing was at its sharpest in the most transformational year of my lifetime. Well, until recently, but we’ll get to invidious comparisons down the road.
If Bowie’s “Do you remember” question about our fallible national memory was mischievous, it also turned out to be prescient. That’s because the difference between 1974 and 1975 was so seismic. Although it wasn’t too big of a hit — “Fame” took the honors there — “Young Americans” caught the cusp of that calendar flip like no other song I know.
Its despairing vignettes of heartland heartbreak (Bowie had been listening a lot to a newbie named Bruce Springsteen) kept being interrupted by a zesty, sweaty, hedonistic chorus, with a jaunty saxophone hook that interlaced the two. The resulting panorama envisioned American life as an endlessly renewable, perpetually hurtling present, with no time for more than an occasional glance at the receding (and sometimes, alarmingly oncoming) rear-view mirror.
Not, as may go without saying — and that’s what they all say, I can hear you groan — that any of us could imagine actually forgetting Richard Nixon. He’d been a churlish constant in our lives since, in my case, early childhood. Considering that my parents’ politics pretty much came down to despising him, it’s a wonder that my first word as I spat out my first taste of Gerber’s in a budding foodie’s first tantrum wasn’t a denunciatory “Nixxum.” For all I know, it may have been.
I still can’t imagine forgetting him, not this side of Alzheimer’s. But my graying demographic’s ranks are starting to lose teeth, the illusory reassurance of 401ks, and much else, which means that this event could be blessedly imminent. To Gen Z kids the same age 18-year-old Tom was the day Nixon resigned, his name can’t conjure up much of anything, if it registers at all.
Otherwise, all the formerly vivid headline names in America’s greatest-ever political soap opera — once again, until recently, but I’m delaying invidious comparisons to our dictator-in-waiting as long as I decently can — have vanished down the memory hole. Aside from we faithful subscribers to Dotage.com, who else remembers bent lawman John Mitchell, wannabe superspy Gordon Liddy, clumsy stonewallers H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, or even Veep Spiro Agnew (forever a poster child for the nolo contendere plea in a court of law), not to mention crusading prosecutor Archibald Cox? We once knew their faces better than the shell-shocked one we saw in the mirror each morning.
Nixon’s one-time speechwriter and later TV panjandrum turned revanchist presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is still around, or so Wikipedia tells me. But he’s in his mid-80s and MIA so far as the cultural conversation goes. Former White House counsel John Dean still shows up on cable news sometimes, enjoying his late-life promotion to wise man after being Nixon’s legal flunky turned Senate stool pigeon. And then there’s evil Henry Kissinger, who perpetuated his obscene role in American history by perpetrating the ultimate obscenity: living to 100, decades after miĺlions of Vietnamese and Cambodians lost their chance to do the same.
But even at the time, however, no matter how unforgettable our Nixon was, the country’s hunger to put the horror show behind us was palpable. By extension, that meant not only Watergate but the whole brackish foofaraw from November 22, 1963, on: assassinations, Vietnam, LSD, civil-rights eruptions, more assassinations, more LSD. And this our incredible country — sometimes that’s a compliment, sometimes it isn’t — triumphantly did. The French are still quarreling over 1940, if not 1870 or even 1789. But we were such cheerful amnesiacs that Watergate didn’t have any long-term consequences even for the Republican Party, despite the drubbing it got in the 1974 midterm elections. Just two years later, Gerald Ford came close enough to defeating Jimmy Carter to put Carter’s smile on semi-permanent hold, and 1980 gave us Ronald Reagan — who went on to be re-elected in a landslide not noticeably smaller than Nixon’s in ’72.
Because the interlude we now fuzzily call “the Seventies” is universally derided by people who weren’t there at the time, it’s easy to forget that, for millions of Americans, it was a decade infinitely more liberating than its immediate predecessor. Predictably, “the Sixties” gets all the good press, but let’s not forget that its new freedoms were all but monopolized by an oddball archipelago of college campuses, the hippie kingdom Robert Christgau dubbed “mass bohemia,” which wasn’t all that mass (witness Nixon’s abovementioned capture of 520 electoral votes in ’72), and what only rubes (and George Jones and Tammy Wynette) were still calling the jet set.
By the mid-’70s, America’s then still formidable suburban middle class and even some proletarian outposts were joining the fun. Women’s lib, gay lib, self-help books — and disco, kinky promiscuity, and let’s not forget cocaine — were all offering fresh opportunities to be yourself or somebody else with a vengeance. My newly enthused, forever self-renewing compatriots were taking the pursuit of happiness more literally than anyone had since Thomas Jefferson was diddling Sally Hemings. Too bad that, like all her opinions, her opinion of pursuing happiness has gone unrecorded.
No doubt it’s hyperbolic to say so. But all this seemed to flow directly from the country’s relieved goodbye-to-all-that once Nixon was gone. Indeed, I often think “the Seventies” symbolically began the minute his last trip on Air Force One deposited our disgraced president — with, by implication, the whole LSD/Vietnam foofaraw crowding the luggage compartment — in a temporarily sunless California. Or better yet, at the moment in mid-flight when he became a disgraced ex-president and Air Force One stopped being Air Force One, once his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, got sworn in back in Washington promptly at noon. Beat symbolism like that, I dare you.
Our whoops-a-daisy switch from five glum years of Nixon’s bum Shakespeare to the Midsummer Night’s Dream giddiness of “the Seventies” was beautifully captured in the final scene of my favorite Watergate movie of all time. Right after Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, as the newly wised-up heroines of writer/director Andrew Fleming’s 1999 comedy Dick, kiss off their tainted former idol by gleefully chanting “You suck, Dick!” as an enraged Nixon (Dan Hedaya, in his best-ever performance) gives them the finger while departing into exile, Fleming cuts to the duo gracefully roller-skating around a pointedly deserted Oval Office as the credits roll to the jubilant pulses of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”
I still can’t watch that coda without choking up. But, to paraphrase poet Joseph Brodsky, it was my youth, my one and only youth.
Carnival in Rio!
In fact, on the night of the Watergate break-in — June 17, 1972 — I wasn’t much older than the giggly, oblivious teenagers who witness the burglary in Dick. But they had a steeper learning curve.
Once Dunst and Williams are given silly jobs as White House dog-walkers to induce them to forget what they’ve seen, which they didn’t particularly understand anyway, they start out full of starry-eyed patriotic veneration for the presidency. Plus, in Williams’s character’s case, a swooning infatuation with Nixon himself, whom she imagines as a white knight, as he and his steed gallop (Gallup?) toward her on a romantic beach.
As it turns out, she caused the Watergate tapes’ infamous 18-minute gap by switching on the machine to falteringly croon Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” while alone in the Oval Office one day. By the end, she and Dunst have become Deep Throat, feeding a bumbling Bob Woodward (Will Farrell) the info he’ll use to bring Nixon down.
The Capitol is eternally self-important. But this vibe was different — it was almost carnal, as if we were one smoking gun away from turning the joint into our improvised Plato’s Retreat.
Fleming has said he conceived his satire out of rage at Nixon’s elder-statesman 1990s rehabilitation. He wanted us to remember what a gut punch it had been for Americans to learn that their president was a crook and his henchmen were heinous, and believe me, it was. In a way that’s all but inconceivable today, mired as we are in MAGA’s Thunderdome — millions of ordinary citizens, both Democrat and Republican, were genuinely shocked and disillusioned by the desecration of our one and only presidency, as one sordid revelation after another tumbled out.
If you want to get seriously time-warped, with a Linda Blair head rotation thrown in, many of them were also particularly outraged by the news that Nixon had used taxpayer dollars to upgrade and refurbish his San Clemente home. Tell it to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. History Man. Alert readers may notice that this is a certain former real-estate mogul’s first onstage appearance in my little memoir.
During the 1972 election, despite Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post gumshoeing and desperate efforts from George McGovern’s flailing campaign to raise the alarm, Watergate was barely on most people’s radar — and Nixon, of course, won in a landslide. But by spring and summer of ’73, everyone knew we were in the shitter for real, and practically every day brought another trust-battering trauma. When Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby that year, dozens of readers wrote to thank Newsweek for putting the front end of a horse on its cover for a change, and that was one of the ordeal’s lighter moments.
To the vast majority of my fellow citizens, it felt like a release from bondage when newly minted, reassuringly anodyne president, Gerald Ford, told us that our long national nightmare was over. But not in my hometown — heck, no. Ever since the break-in, we’d been having the time of our lives. Beltway lifer Chris Matthews probably puzzled most of his fans when he wrote somewhat later that, inside the District, Watergate had been “Carnival in Rio.”
But we knew exactly what he was talking about. If you’ll forgive me for garbling my Wordsworth, to be young in Washington, D.C., in those halcyon days was bliss. Was very heaven, truth to tell.
Admittedly, having been raised as a Nixophobe from cradle onward did help. It wasn’t just that we and our parents’ lifelong nemesis — Nixxum! — was getting his deeply satisfying comeuppance. It was that, for once in our lives — or twice, counting JFK’s Camelot — the whole country was riveted by the happenings in our unloved, except by us, hometown, not only as glumly unavoidable news but as must-see, where-the-action-is entertainment. Unbelievably, we were sexy; we had glamor. The whole world was suddenly talking about our white-chiseled ‘hood, and hey — Fuck you, New York! Up yours, Hollywood!
I didn’t realize how Sexy Beast we’d gotten in the rest of the nation’s eyes until my apolitical Aunt Carol came out from California for a visit during the summer of ’73. As we were driving down Virginia Avenue one day, my mom pointed out the actual Watergate hotel scalloping past us on the left, more or less as idly, as she’d have pointed out the Lincoln Memorial. Excitedly, my sweet aunt asked if we could stop in and watch the hearings.
She meant Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate committee hearings, and that’s how I came to be quite close to where the literal action was that summer. Pulling the only string she had available, as she’d worked for the senator in question — and he was, we shall discreetly say, devoted to her — Mom had wangled a summer Senate internship for her then 17-year-old son before I scooted off to Princeton.
Seventeen, can you believe it? I was as high as a kite, and about as psychologically sturdy. But in a most un–Senate Office Building manner, the adults I passed in the halls seemed pretty damn cranked too. The actual legislators among them only turned piously solemn when they spotted a TV camera nearby.
Lord knows, the Capitol is eternally self-important. But this vibe was different. So help me, it was almost carnal, as if we were one smoking gun away from turning the joint into our improvised Plato’s Retreat.
Since my intern pass gave me the run of the premises — and frankly, because our invariably trivial tasks left us lots of downtime — I decided one day to amble from my senator’s office in the Old Senate Office Building to catch the Ervin Committee in flagrante. Fortuitously, it turned out to be the day John Dean testified, exposing the cover-up and putting Nixon’s presidency at real risk for the first time.
Right, right. History-in-the making, and all that. But I was way in the back of that big room and his voice was droning on near inaudibly. You-are-there frissons aside, I’d have been better off watching on TV, as Hunter S. Thompson once wrote. His book, Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, was my bus-commuting reading that summer.
Then there was July 13, 1973: the day Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House taping system. That was the beginning of Nixon’s endgame, even though he was to stick it out in his Oval Office bunker for just over another year. On I forget which trivial bit of business, I was walking down the basement tunnel that links the Capitol to the old SOB when I spotted a mysteriously familiar figure coming the other way. Damned if it wasn’t George McGovern, the self-same man whose 1972 presidential candidacy the Watergate plotters had done their best to first promote (he was seen as the Dems’ weakest contender) and then undermine.
As we drew abreast of each other, I couldn’t help myself. I started grinning like an idiot. He gave me back a smile as wide as Mount Rushmore. Neither of us had to say a word to understand each other, and that’s my favorite memory of those hazy, crazy Watergate summers: George beaming at me, me beaming at George, on the day we learned about the tapes and both of us knew Nixon was toast.
As it happens, my least favorite memory of that summer also features the Ervin committee in a cameo. After a hard day’s trivia — choosing form-letter answers to constituents’ correspondence, what a gas — I’d gone over to see my girlfriend in McLean, Virginia, and of course she’d been watching the hearings. Sitting on her bed, she had an announcement she couldn’t wait to make.
“I believe John Ehrlichman,” she told me proudly. No, smugly, and Christ, I should have broken up with her right then. I’d figured out long before that she was crazy, but she’d never told me she was a Republican. Besides, she never let me sleep with her, then or ever. The one mercilessly chosen 2 a.m. when she came close, I couldn’t get it up.
There it is: my botched “Summer of ’73” moment, the night before I scooted off to Princeton. Incidentally, she later got into S&M and then became a born-again Christian. Damn you, John Ehrlichman.
All the President’s Movies
I don’t mean Nixon’s own favorites, like Patton, which he famously watched over and over to nerve himself to invade Cambodia. If you’re curious, there’s an interesting book called Nixon At the Movies that analyzes the White House log of every last flick he had screened while in office, especially valuable for telling us which ones he watched at which points of his presidency. It’s practically the Netflix equivalent of an EKG.
I’m thinking instead of the many representations of Nixon over the decades in movies and TV. He’d probably hold the record for POTUSes depicted on film if it wasn’t for his inevitable usurper: John F. Kennedy, so appropriately it makes your head spin. For American actors, Nixon was and sometimes still is the native equivalent of deciding you’re finally ready to tackle King Lear. Or Shylock, Macbeth, Iago, or even Hamlet, since Nixon combined elements of all five.
Of the dramatizations of Watergate in its immediate aftermath, the prestige item, obviously — in which Nixon only plays himself on TV — was 1976’s All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the Washington Post’s intrepid sleuths. Talk about glamor! I once spent an afternoon watching them do take after take of a wordless scene of Woodstein turning away from a townhouse in frustration. Trying to juice things up, Hoffman’s pantomimed annoyance kept getting hammier, to no avail. In the finished movie, all that hard work was reduced to a two-second snippet, and I wondered why I’d wasted an afternoon. I wondered why Dustin had, too.
What we ended up with was, of all things, an escapist movie about the McCarthy era.
All the President’s Men was a big hit, of course, and for the most part deservedly so. Yet few even noticed the movie’s great hat trick of selling the audience on a “political” thriller by leaving the politics out. There’s scarcely a glimpse, if that, of the era’s roiling antiwar protests, or any sense of the deep, decades-long animosity to Nixon nursed by the Capitol’s liberal elites — including the patent disdain for the man, plainly cultural as much as political, of WaPo editor Ben Bradlee as lionized by Jason Robards. You’d never guess from his high-toned guff about the Constitution that, when I chanced to visit the real Post’s editorial conference room some years later, the setting plate for the front page screaming NIXON RESIGNS was mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy.
Reducing my Nixxum to a merely postulated villain, the way the movie did, must have struck him — as it did me — as the ultimate insult. The added indignity was that this overdose of newspaper nobility came after years of the real Ben Bradlee suavely applying his Brahmin tongue to various Kennedy buttocks, not exactly his Watergate M.O. That must have left Nixon seething.
Sure, he deserved everything he got, and more. If not for Ford’s pardon of him, actual jail time might have loomed, and Nixon used to mope that a lot of great political writing had been done from prison. His peculiar prime example of such, as I recall, was Mahatma Gandhi, an incongruous pairing if ever there was one.
Again, until — cough — recently, no other president (or, cough-cough, former president) could outdo him as a maestro of self-pity. All the same, Nixon’s resentment at being the victim of a double standard wasn’t wholly misplaced.
At the time, however, All the President’s Men didn’t have any real competition from other Watergate-themed movies, at least not directly. Instead, we thrived on a vogue for paranoid — but fictional — political thrillers: The Parallax View, Redford again in Three Days of the Condor, and so on, which fed on Watergate-era suspicions and fears while cooking up wholly different conspiracies. For head-on, big-screen portrayals of Nixon, we had to wait two decades, for Oliver Stone’s Nixon, released a year after the real one died. We waited even longer than that for my beloved Dick, Ron Howard’s — Ron Howard’s? — Frost/Nixon (2008), and a not-yet-disgraced Kevin Spacey, in Elvis and Nixon (2016). (Spoiler alert: he doesn’t play Elvis.)
It was a different story on the small screen, where the then nascent miniseries format brought us dueling Nixons before decade’s end. The earliest was also the best: Washington: Behind Closed Doors, from 1977, with Jason Robards — him again! Nixon must have chewed nails — as scheming, deceitful President Richard “Monckton,” in a wickedly funny reprise of what we’d just lived through for real. A big part of its impudent thrill was that we could recognize who nearly all of these people were behind their gossamer disguises, from Robert Vaughn’s steely-eyed H.R. Haldeman to Harold Gould’s Kissinger.
For political junkies, the Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations were methadone at best and Ovaltine at worst, after Nixon’s daily dose of unadulterated heroin.
On top of that, not only did the Washington locations look a lot more authentically lived-in than in All the President’s Men, but the series was shot so soon after the actual events that its locutions — the clothes, the hairstyles, the attitudes — are blessedly spot-on, a virtue I appreciate more keenly the more time’s winged chariot does its thing. My youth, my one and only youth!
Much less successful was 1979’s Blind Ambition, based on ferrety John Dean’s Watergate memoir and starring a ludicrously miscast Rip Torn — the embodiment of goatish, bawdy lust — as our most sexually, if not humanly, repressed POTUS ever. When it came to asking ourselves “What’s wrong with this picture?” Torn was only outdone by veddy-British, plainly miserable Anthony Hopkins in Stone’s Nixon, proving to posterity’s affronted gaze that Nixon can only be played — that is, understood — by an American. Warts and not much else, he was one of us, as then New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Wicker wrote at the time. To vast consternation, may I add, but Wicker was right.
A partial corrective came in the form of the belated 1989 TV adaptation of Woodstein’s The Final Days. Just like everything else this side of Dolly Parton, it wasn’t as good as it could’ve been, except for Lane Smith’s superb Nixon: wounded, bitter, and oddly vulnerable, in what was clearly the part of a lifetime. Considering how unjustly forgotten Smith is today, he may be forgiven if he occasionally wished it had been the part of somebody else’s lifetime instead.
Nowadays, my increasingly geriatric colleagues and I sometimes bicker agreeably online about our favorite Nixons. As a rule, Smith and Hedaya get the highest marks, with some of us (okay, me) tossing in a vote for Cliff Robertson’s surly proto-Nixon in Gore Vidal’s 1964 The Best Man.
For obvious reasons, Torn and Hopkins barely rate a mention. Neither does John Cusack — whose Nixon in Lee Daniels’s The Butler was perfectly adequate, but too fleeting a performance to linger much in memory. Most of my peers relish Philip Baker Hall in 1984’s Secret Honor more than I do, but I also don’t like the movie much. Few of us were altogether happy with Frank Langella’s much-too-confident, much-too-virile Nixon in Frost/Nixon, even as Michael Sheen’s simpering David Frost left the original Frost looking like Aldo Ray.
Even so, we have an ulterior motive, one we’ll never admit. Pretending we’re only talking about actors and performances is our secret way of reminiscing about the good old days. Or glory days, as Springsteen might say.
Nostalgia?
Depoliticized or not, All the President’s Men was one of Redford’s two movies of the era that helped define the 1970s. Or half of that split-screen decade, anyway. The other half — the “Seventies” half — comes flooding back whenever I rewatch that gooey, gelded, but affecting lump of reverse-engineered sexual chemistry, The Way We Were. I saw that one with my crazy girlfriend too, in Georgetown’s long since defunct Key Theater.
Funnily enough, not unlike All the President’s Men — which, I know, it predated by two years, gumming up my timeline, but so what? — it’s also a movie on a “political” subject, in this case the Hollywood Red Scare of the 1950s, that mostly leaves the politics out in favor of peddling soothing star charisma. Probably to avoid confusing or even alienating 1973 moviegoers by requiring them to get a handle on yesteryear’s ideological intricacies, its key scene — the revelation that Barbra Streisand’s character is about to be named publicly as a Communist, threatening her screenwriter husband’s career and explaining their otherwise bewildering breakup — got left on the cutting-room floor, to Streisand’s dismay.
Of course, La Barbra’s idea of dismay is probably most people’s idea of banshee fury, but never mind. For the record, Redford wasn’t happy, either. Anyhow, what we ended up with was, of all things, an escapist movie about the McCarthy era — one that was suffused with nostalgia but never specified what we were supposed to feel nostalgic about.
Then again, generic (and romanticized) nostalgia has never been a bad recipe for box-office success. And back then, plenty of people were glad to be lulled into embracing Joe McCarthy’s menacing heyday as a happier, simpler time. The movie opened literally the day before the Saturday Night Massacre, so no wonder America flocked to it.
Was it possible, the Crazy Girlfriend and I wondered before she didn’t sleep with me yet again, that we’d ever feel nostalgic about Richard Nixon? (She’d stopped believing John Ehrlichman by then. She was a Republican and nuts, not necessarily in that order, but nobody’s fool.) True, for political junkies, the Ford and Carter administrations were methadone at best and Ovaltine at worst, after Nixon’s daily dose of unadulterated heroin. This self-evident truth about my tribe’s strange idea of the pursuit of happiness was best expressed by a Doonesbury cartoon that had Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer bemoaning the lack of any news worth reporting, before crazily going into an all-caps recap of Watergate’s Greatest Hits. In the final panel, he mourns, ‘I miss him so.”
That set the pattern. Even if more sober news organizations knew they’d never have it so good — or so they thought, he added ominously — moving on was the nature of the game for them. If such a thing as nostalgia for Nixon existed, it was expressed in jokes: “Tanned, Rested and Ready” Nixon buttons in later presidential campaigns, Randy Cohen’s ultra-droll “When He Reemerges” fantasy in the New Yorker.
By the time Matt Groening introduced a disembodied Nixon as a talking head in a jar on Futurama, the gag was just another somewhat quaint boomer curio. Futurama had much more to do with Groening’s (and my) adolescence than any satiric tomorrow. After all, nobody really wanted him back, dead or alive. Or even babbling in a jar.
But then, decades after the fact, we got hit with an undeniable, unassailable, gobsmacked-and-then-some reason to start thinking of Watergate and Nixon as the good old days. Some months into Trump’s first (?) term, my smart niece, Julie, asked me if he was really worse than Nixon. Seizing my unexpected chance to quote Laurence Olivier in A Bridge Too Far, I told her, “Oh, yes. Much worse.”
True, Nixon was a crook. But he was also a shrewd and knowledgeable chief executive with moments of real statesmanship. He could be venal, but he didn’t openly make millions off the presidency while still in office. (Everybody cashes in afterward, the Obamas rather more flagrantly than many of us expected.) He catered to the same resentments and grievances that would later fuel MAGA — but in a dour way, not a crassly self-exhilarated one.
He was self-serving, but had enough vestigial patriot in him to decide against contesting the 1960 election results, even though his grounds for doing so would have been far more solid than Trump’s nonsensically fabricated ones. He did try to rig the ’72 election in his favor, but — talk about your silver linings — at least he did it before, and not after, election day. When it was time for him to go, he knew it. He didn’t summon an insurrectionist mob to keep him in office.
He wasn’t impeached even once, for Pete’s sake! Let alone twice. He was never an embarrassment to our country on the international stage, except maybe a little toward the end — you know, like when he declared, “It’s a great day for France,” while in Paris to attend Georges Pompidou’s funeral. Realpolitik induced him to accommodate any number of dictators without unease, but he didn’t lick their boots while hoping to emulate their thuggish example someday.
Oh, yes: much worse. Yet the contrast isn’t only between Trump and Nixon. It’s between today’s America and the way we were.
We had our share and then some of Birchers, Klu Kluxxers, and Nazis, among other deplorables. But they were loons, not the Republican Party’s mainstay. Nor did they have Fox News and a whole right-wing media ecosphere egging them on, or a whole flock of senators and congresspeople increasingly happy to flatter and legitimize them without bothering with dog whistles. Can anyone remember when there even was a “quiet part” that ostensibly mainstream politicians were expected not to say aloud?
Once the smoking-gun tape exposing the coverup went public, GOP support for Nixon cratered overnight. Only diehards and crazies still wanted him to hang in there. The Republican Establishment, still in unimaginably robust health back then, thought otherwise, and didn’t mince words. The Senate delegation that went to the White House to tell Nixon the jig was up included not only then minority leader Hugh Scott, but Mr. Conservative himself: Barry Goldwater.
Today, even Mitch McConnell, who loathes Trump unspeakably, and Nikki Haley, who doesn’t have the decency to loathe herself, have dutifully bent to kiss the ring. J.D. Vance, who once compared Trump to Hitler, is on the ticket as his veep. Little did we guess we’d end up saluting Liz Cheney — who went to my high school, by the way; small world — as the lonely conscience of the GOP.
Nixon did manage to semi-rehabilitate himself in the public’s mind in later life, but he and we both knew he was washed-up in politics. Despite never having been impeached, let alone indicted for any crime — thank you, Gerald Ford — he couldn’t have run for dogcatcher in a town without a dog. Today, with 34 plump felony convictions under his expansive belt, Trump was the odds-on favorite to be re-elected come November even before the assassination attempt we all witnessed three weeks ago turned him into the martyr/hero he’d previously only played on social media.
Trump has made it garishly clear that he agrees with Nixon’s once outlandish claim to David Frost: “If the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Trump’s not-always-private version has always been “If Donald Trump does it, that means it is not illegal.”
But unlike Trump, Nixon didn’t have a supine Supreme Court ready to agree that, yup, outlaw presidents were now the law of the land. The Roberts court just did. Instead, Nixon’s SCOTUS smacked him down but good in an 8-0 ruling that included three justices Nixon himself had appointed. The fourth, William Rehnquist, recused himself, something we all know Clarence Thomas will never do.
Never bright, my hopes for Amy Coney Barrett are dimming, and forget Neil Gorsuch. Not to mention unconvicted would-be teenage rapist Brett Cavanaugh. If you wonder why I unhesitatingly believed Christine Blasey Ford, the answer’s simple. I grew up there.
I guess that just about wraps things up. (Whew.) But if you’ve persevered this far, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that my other favorite line from “Young Americans” is another rhetorical question. “We’ve lived for just these 20 years,” Bowie gasps. “Do we have to die for the 50 more?”
I do still google the Crazy Girlfriend’s name sometimes, just not as often as I used to. She’s now a law professor specializing in legal issues involving the mentally ill, and no, I’m not making that up. Nothing true about America is ever made up, and that’s because we know that all of it is.
As for me, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that my life hasn’t been the nonstop thrill ride I used to imagine it might be. If only Susan had let me sleep with her even once. But I did get to live through Watergate; David Bowie, too. And that is the only immortality you and I may share, my Nixxum. ❖
Tom Carson’s first piece in the Village Voice was a review of David Bowie’s Heroes, in late 1977. He is the author of two novels and has written about politics and pop culture for publications ranging from LA Weekly to the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and GQ. A two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for criticism, he lives with his cat in Louisville, Kentucky.
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This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026.
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