Lowell Mick White
  • Home
  • Writer
    • NORMAL SCHOOL
    • BURNT HOUSE
    • Messes We Make of Our Lives
    • Professed
    • That Demon Life
    • Long Time Ago Good
    • Single Story Ebooks
    • Stories and Miscellaneous Writing
    • Interviews, Criticism
    • Misc Audio/Video
  • Teacher
    • Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop
  • Editor
    • Alamo Bay Press
  • Lowell
  • Blog
    • Podcasts
  • Links
  • Contact

Ordinary Horrors

Nixon Resignation: What I Was Doing Forty Years Ago

8/8/2014

1 Comment

 
PictureNot quite crying.
Second summer session was over and my dad was driving us back home to West Virginia. We left the morning of August 7th. I remember looking at the headline in the Minneapolis newspaper, reporting on the fallout of the smoking gun tape, which had been released two days earlier. Didn’t have time to read the paper, though—we got in the car and headed off. I was—excited. Thrilled. I felt this tightness in my chest—I can almost call it back now. I was thrilled—I was happy. I loved history, loved politics—I loved the stories that came from out in the material world. I was a kid but I was smart enough to know I was living in weirdly historic times—Vietnam, riots, moon landings, assassinations—Watergate! I was thrilled. It was an amazing time to be alive.

We drove on all day, listening to the radio news updates—there was a lot to say but not much action. The votes for impeachment were there. They weren’t there yet. Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott were going to the White House to deliver the bad news. No, they were going later.

Sometimes we listened to music. At one point “American Woman” came on.

“Who was that?” my dad asked.

“The Guess Who,” I said.

“The who?’

“No, not the Who!” I said. Kinda teenaged snarkily. “The Guess Who.”

“I don’t know, goddammit,” he said. “Just tell me.”

I thought he was making a joke. He thought I was being a smartass. I sort of was. That’s the way things often worked between us.

Spent the night someplace in Indiana. Drove on the next day. More news all day long, none of it good for Nixon.

I really loved Watergate. I’d watched the hearings all the way through the Summer of 1973—I was watching the day Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House tapes. I had a Sam Ervin t-shirt. I had a crush on Maureen Dean. I’d been off with my dad closing up the lake place when Nixon staged the Saturday night massacre, a cold October night, and when William Ruckelshaus came and gave a talk at the college the next winter, I attended and got his autograph. When the first tapes were released they were of course famously redacted, and Rolling Stone had a contest to fill in the missing expletives. My mom happened to see my entry before it was safely in an envelope and freaked out—”You’ll get arrested! You can’t send obscenity through the mail!”

I sent it anyway. Ha.

So…then we drove on through Ohio, news all day. Nixon was going to speak that evening. What was he going to say? He was going to resign. He was going to fight on. Goldwater and Scott finally delivered the bad news. No votes in the Senate…he was going to go…probably. We stopped off to see my aunt and uncle. Dad I think wanted to visit some but I was afire to get to Cox’s Mills and sit down in front of a TV and watch it all happen. I was anxious. Had to see it. We headed on, Just after we crossed the river into West Virginia, “Whipping Post” came over the radio. What an odd song to hear! AM radio reception was always bad in West Virginia, bursts of music filtering through the mountains between bursts of static, but the Allman Brothers came through the static that once. How often did you hear non-hit Allmans on the AM radio? Very strange. I told my dad that I bet Nixon felt like he was tied to a whipping post…

We got to Cox’s Mills in time for the speech. Our family had been Republican since there were Republicans—we all wanted to see what was going to happen. My dad thought Nixon was getting what he deserved. (My dad had been county Republican Chairman until he resigned in the spring of 1973—over Watergate, he said. But it occurs to me as I write this that that was also the spring my parents were divorced, and my dad had other problems then, too. So maybe Watergate was an excuse?) My grandfather was more upset over Nixon’s tax cheating than he was about the break-in and coverup. My grandmother wanted to see Nixon cry.

“I just want to see him cry, is all,” she said.

The speech came on. It wasn’t much of a speech.

My grandmother was in the other room. She called out, “Is he crying yet?”

Nixon didn’t cry. He just quit. And that was that. The news had people on talking about stuff, but I don’t remember what anyone was saying. I felt kind of let down. I went to bed at some point and slept late and missed Nixon’s farewell speech the next morning—I don’t think he cried then, either. I slept late but woke when a big thunderstorm blew in. Then the power went out.

“The son of a bitch’s only been gone a half-hour,” my grandfather said. “The country’s already going to hell.”

Life was empty after that. No more thrilling news. I was deflated. A couple of weeks later Rolling Stone arrived with its coverage of the resignation, and there was a wonderful Annie Leibovitz photo of Dan Rather sitting in front of the White House looking depressed. I remember he said he felt like rock fans did when the Beatles broke up. I was a rock fan and a politics fan, too, and I understood.


Picture
Dan was bummed.
1 Comment

    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

      Sign Up for Occasional Updates

    Submit

    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All
    1920s
    1960s
    1970s
    1978
    1979
    1980
    1981
    1982
    1983
    1984
    1988
    1990s
    2000
    2020
    2021
    9-11
    .99 Cents
    Academia
    Advice
    Aging
    Alamo Bay Press
    Alamo Bay Writers Workshopdcff08d18c
    Alamo Hotel
    Albert King
    Ali
    Alice Flaherty
    Allan Shivers
    All My Children
    Allusions
    Alysa Hayes
    Amazing
    Amazon
    #amediting
    American Eagle
    #amprepping
    #amwriting
    Amy Winehouse
    Anger
    A Night At The Opera
    Animal Industries
    Annie Leibovitz
    Answers
    Anxiety
    Aong And Twenty Miles
    Apache Trout
    Appalachia
    Architecture
    Armadillo
    Art
    Atomic Mutant Dogs
    Austin
    Austin Central Library
    A Visit From The Goon Squad
    Awards
    Awp
    Baby
    Back Pain
    Bad Baby
    Bad Behavior
    Bad Guts
    Barn
    Bars
    Baseball
    Basketball
    Beatest State
    Beer
    Bergstrom
    Best
    Big LAAH
    Big Tex
    Big Tex[t]
    Birth
    Birthday
    Black Box
    Blizzards
    Blocker Building
    Blood
    Bluer Even Than The Sky Above
    Bob Dylan
    Body Count
    Book Club
    Books
    Bookstores
    Book Trailer
    Boredom
    Bourjaily
    Bourjaily Writing Quote
    Bow Wow Wow
    Brag
    Brains
    Bricks
    Bridges
    Brilliant
    Brindled Pit Bull
    Bruce Noll
    Buda
    Bullying
    Burnt House
    Busy
    Cab Driving Story
    Carnegie Library
    Cats
    Chance
    Change
    Chaos
    Character
    Chattanooga
    Chekhov
    Childhood
    Child Labor
    Christmas
    Chuck Taylor
    Cicadas
    Civil War
    Clash
    Club Foot
    Comp
    Complaining
    Conroe
    Country
    Coup
    Covid
    Cox's Mills
    Crazy
    Creative Writing
    Creativity
    Crime
    Cursing
    Dachshunds
    Dakota
    Danger
    Daniel Pena
    Dare Me
    Dave Oliphant
    Dead Professors
    Deep Eddy
    Denver
    Depression
    Desk
    Destroy All Monsters
    Deven Green
    Diane Keaton
    Diane Wilson
    Dirty Mind
    Dissertation
    Distractions
    Disunion
    Dogs
    Dog Soldiers
    Dope
    Dorothea Lange
    Drawing
    Driving
    Driving At Night
    Driving In The Rain
    Driving In The Snow
    Drought
    Dry Line
    Dullness
    Dystopian Romance
    Eagles
    Ebook
    Editing Process
    Editings
    Education
    Election
    Elizabeth Hand
    Emerson
    Engl 347
    Enrest Hemingway
    Eternity
    Extended Narratives
    Eyeballs
    Faculty Incivility
    Falklands
    Fame
    Fascism
    Fiction
    #fiction
    Five Things
    Flannery O\'connor
    Flat Tires
    Fly Fishing
    Found Items
    Fredo
    Free
    Friction
    F. Scott Fitsgerald
    Furniture
    Game Of Thrones
    Gang Of Four
    Garbage
    Genya Ravan
    Ghosts
    Gila Trout
    Gival Press
    Giveaway
    Glue
    Godfather
    Goodreads
    Gorillas
    Grackles
    Grading
    Grad School
    Grand Central
    Greatest
    Great Gatsby
    Grubbs Hall
    Guilt
    Gulag State
    Gulf Coast
    GUTS :(
    Gutter Brothers
    Handicapped
    Handwriting
    Happiness
    Happy Endings
    Harvey
    Head
    #heartbreak
    Higher Education
    History
    Holidays
    House
    Hunter Thompson
    Ice
    Ice Storm
    Ideas
    Impeach
    Improvisation
    Insane
    International Relations
    Internet
    Intertextuality
    Interview
    Intro
    Irs
    Isaac Rosenberg
    Its A Wonderful Life
    Jack Kerouac
    Jake Pickle
    Jennifer Egan
    Jimmy Carter
    Job Interviews
    John Domini
    John F. Kennedy
    John Kelso
    Johnson City
    Kansas
    Keith Richards
    Keller Bay
    Keos
    Keybard
    Kim Addonizio
    Kindle
    Koop
    Larry Heinemann
    Larry Mcmurtry
    Laura Leigh Morris
    Laziness
    Leakey
    Leaves Of Grass
    Lebron James
    Lee Grue
    Lewis County
    Lightning
    Lightnin Hopkins
    List
    Lists
    Literacy
    Long Time Ago Good
    Louisiana
    Lou Reed
    Love
    Lowell
    Lowell Mick White
    Lucinda Williams
    Lumbar
    Lust
    Lyndon Johnson
    Mad Max Fury Road
    Malvern Books
    Malvinas
    Mankato
    Manure
    Manuscript
    Marc St Gil
    Masks
    Maud Hart Lovelace
    Mavis Staples
    Mckenzie
    Mcmurtry
    Memoir
    Memorial Day Flood
    Memory
    Messes We Make Of Our Lives
    Mexican Brick
    Mick
    Midnight Disease
    Minneapolis
    Miracles
    Misfit
    Mistake
    Morgantown
    Mortality
    Mother Earth
    Movies
    Moving
    Murder
    Muses
    Music
    My Sharona
    Mystery
    Nature
    Nebraska
    New Haven
    New Mexico
    New Orleans
    New Years
    Nixon
    Noir
    Norah Jones
    Normal School
    Nose
    Notebook
    Novella
    Novels
    Now Playing At Canterbury
    Office
    OJ
    Olivia
    Oscar Casares
    Outerbridge Reach
    Outlines
    Out Of Context
    Out-of-print
    Pain
    Pandemic
    Pandemic Life
    Parades
    Parker Lane
    Passion Planner
    Pedagogy
    Pens
    Photo Archives
    Photography
    Phrenology
    Pickup Trucks
    Pinball
    Planner
    Podcast
    Poetry
    Police
    Porn Star
    PowerPoint
    Prince
    Prison
    Productivity
    Professed
    Prophecy
    Psu
    Ptcd
    Punctuation
    Punk
    Questions
    Radio
    #rage
    Rain
    Ralph Nader
    Rant
    Raul's
    Ray Bradbury
    Reading
    #reading
    Readings
    Realization
    Rebel Drive-In
    Recapitulation
    Redneck Village
    Rejection
    Reji Thomas
    Reliction
    Republican Debate
    #research
    Rest
    Reunion
    Revelation
    Reviews
    Revisions
    Riff Raff
    Riff-Raff
    R.L. Burnside
    Robbery
    Robert Caro
    Robert Olen Butler
    Robert Pirsig
    Robert Stone
    Rock And Roll
    Rocky Fork
    Rolling Stone
    Rolling Stones
    Ronald Reagan
    Rosanne Cash
    Salmon
    San Antonio
    Sand
    San Quentin
    Scapple
    Scar
    Scary Objects
    Scholars
    Scrivener
    Self-loathing
    Shade Trees
    Sharks
    Shelby Hearon
    Shindig
    Shitty Jobs
    Shoot
    Skinny
    Sleaze
    Sleep
    Soft Eyes
    Soiree
    Solace
    Soundtrack
    Soundtrack Sunday
    Speed Of Sound
    Spring Break
    Squalor
    State Fair
    Steelhead
    Stevie Ray Vaughn
    Stoicism
    Storms
    Stuckness
    Students
    Stupid Job
    Sub
    Sublime
    Sucker-punch
    Suicide Commandos
    Summer Fun
    Sun Also Rises
    Sunshine
    Super Bowl Kickoff
    Super Bowl Kickoff Time
    Sway
    #tamucw
    Taxicabs
    Taxi Driver
    Teaching
    #terror
    Texas
    Texas A&M
    Texas Graves
    That Demon Life
    The Best Years Of Our Lives
    The Clash
    The Dead Weather
    The Edge
    The Forgotten
    The Future
    The Last Educations
    The Man Who Came To Dinner
    Themes
    The Past
    The Wire
    Thom Jones
    Thugs
    Thunder
    Thunderstorm
    Time
    Tolstoy
    #TolstoyTogether
    Tolstoy Writing Quote
    Tomcat
    Tom Wolfe
    Tornado
    Torture
    Transcendentalism
    Treason
    Tropes
    Trout
    True Believers
    Turkey
    Tweet
    Twitter
    University Of Texas
    Vaccine
    Video
    Violence
    Virus
    Vision
    Vote
    Vultures
    Wall
    Wallaby
    Walt Whitman
    Warren Zevon
    Watergate
    Watermelon
    Weather
    Weirdness
    West Virginia
    Where I Lived
    Wildlife
    Wildlife Rehabilitation
    Windows
    Winter
    WIP
    Wisdom
    Witness
    Wonder
    Word Processing Software
    Work
    Working
    Writer At Work
    Writers
    Writing
    #writing
    Writing Process
    #writingprocesses
    Writings
    Writing Tools
    Wrong Number
    Xmas
    Yearning
    Young Adult Reading
    Youth

    Archives

    July 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    January 2012
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010

    RSS Feed


    Sign Up for Occasional Updates!

Submit
  • Home
  • Writer
    • NORMAL SCHOOL
    • BURNT HOUSE
    • Messes We Make of Our Lives
    • Professed
    • That Demon Life
    • Long Time Ago Good
    • Single Story Ebooks
    • Stories and Miscellaneous Writing
    • Interviews, Criticism
    • Misc Audio/Video
  • Teacher
    • Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop
  • Editor
    • Alamo Bay Press
  • Lowell
  • Blog
    • Podcasts
  • Links
  • Contact