“What do you remember about Watergate?” asks this week’s prompt. I am finding it a very difficult question to answer. Right now I could tell you everything that happened from the night of the break-in at Democratic Headquarters on June 17, 1972 (two days after I graduated from college), to the resignation of Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974. But how much of it do I actually remember from when it happened and how much do I know from books and movies? It’s really hard to say.

I read the book All the President’s Men shortly after it came out in February 1974, and learned about a lot of what transpired from Woodward and Bernstein. Of course much of what we now refer to as Watergate is not even in that book. It only includes events through the revelation of the tapes by Alexander Butterfield (July ’73) and then a brief mention of the Saturday Night Massacre in a hastily-written last chapter. I have also read other books about Watergate over the years which have certainly supplemented my memories.

I do remember Archibald Cox being appointed special prosecutor in May 1973. The previous year he had been my college boyfriend’s thesis advisor. My BF and I had met in a junior tutorial on the Supreme Court (’70-’71), in which we actually read Supreme Court cases and wrote papers about them. An American Government concentrator, I had already studied the American Presidency as a sophomore, and requested a junior tutorial on either Congress or the Court. What I wanted was to learn about the Court, not take a mini-Constitutional Law course, but that was how it ended up. In truth, the best part for me was the one other student in the tutorial, a smart and handsome swimmer from Adams House who soon became my BF. The next year (’71-’72), while I wrote my thesis on the McCarthy presidential campaign, he wrote his on Congressional power under the 14th Amendment. When he went to ask Cox to be his thesis advisor, he was dubious about his chances for success, but I think Cox was intrigued by this undergraduate who could speak more knowledgeably about the law than most of his law students. My BF got a summa on the thesis, so obviously Cox did a good job of advising him. They spent a lot of time together, and I felt connected by association. A year later we were both excited by the special prosecutor appointment. By October ’73, when Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre, my BF was at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and I was still in Cambridge (the other Cambridge, as they say in England), but we wrote letters to each other about it.

During that whole period I was working for the US Department of Transportation at their Systems Center in Cambridge, and every day as I walked in I saw the big pictures of Richard Nixon and John Volpe on the wall in the lobby. The reason DOT even had a facility in Cambridge was that Volpe, Nixon’s Secretary of Transportation, had previously been Governor of Massachusetts, and he wanted this pork barrel project for his home state. Most of the people I worked with were either Republicans or apolitical, so there wasn’t much talk about Watergate at work.

I was living in a wonderful old house on Cambridge Street (shown in the featured image) with three roommates. Arlene, the roommate I was closest to, was a graduate student in sociology at BU, working on a dissertation about people who wanted to have their bodies frozen when they died. When I consulted her this week about her memories of Watergate, here’s what she said: “I remember that summer [of 1973] sooo well. I was transcribing the interviews for my dissertation all summer. I had a piece of wood across cinder blocks and an electric typewriter. The Watergate hearings were on in the background all day. I filled you in when you came home and then we watched whatever was rebroadcast on the small tv in my room. I’m pretty sure you were home from work in time to watch the evening network news. [I was.]  The tv was a portable one and couldn’t have had more than a 12 inch screen. As I recall, I had a window air conditioner and a bright orange rug, so the viewing was comfortable. That all seemed so catastrophic then, but pales now in the age of Trump. Ugh!!”

I remember being impressed with Sam Ervin, the chair of the Senate Watergate Committee. He was from North Carolina, and presented a very folksy demeanor, but was obviously smart as a whip and did a great job of running those hearings.

I also remember being impressed with Peter Rodino, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee which oversaw the impeachment proceedings. He began his investigation after the Saturday Night Massacre, and meticulously spent eight months gathering evidence. He was my congressman, in fact had represented my New Jersey district since before I was born. When I visited Washington during high school and got gallery passes to watch Congress in action, the one for the House came from Rodino, and I met him then. I voted for him in 1972 at home, and in 1974 by absentee ballot, before changing my voter registration from New Jersey to California.

Finally, I remember watching Nixon’s resignation speech on Thursday, August 8, 1974, at 9:00 p.m, again on Arlene’s little television set. The resignation was effective at noon on Friday, which I think was also my last day at DOT. So Richard Nixon and I left the federal government at the same time, although for opposite reasons — he because he had broken the law, and I because I wanted to study law.

There is much that could be said about how horrified we all were forty-four years ago, and how evil we thought Nixon was, and how he now seems positively benign compared to the present occupant of the White House. However, I will leave that to others.

Nixon's address would go down at 3:00 in the morning, London time. But this was history and we were not going to miss it.
Read More

Watergate. The word is redolent with history, even more so now with an imperiled special prosecutor, a sitting president trying to malign real news sources, looking more corrupt by the day. We are reminded of Santayana’s quote…those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We seem poised at another Watergate moment; just searching for the “smoking gun” to surface.

The real Watergate story trickled out in dribs and drabs during my junior and senior years in college. The country was abuzz as developments proceeded. There was no 24 hour news cycle, nor as deep a partisan divide as we see today. Over spring break in 1973, my junior year, my whole family went on vacation to Virginia, first Colonial Williamsburg, then on to Virginia Beach stopping in Newport News to visit some college buddies. It would be the last time our entire family vacationed together, since I married 14 months later and left the nest. But on that family trip in 1973, I remember the excited talk over breakfast as the first tidbits about the Watergate investigation started coming to the forefront. My family, all of us liberals, wondered where this was headed.

As the weeks and the leaks progressed, we got a clearer picture. The term “Saturday Night Massacre” came into the lexicon, when Nixon insisted that his Attorney General, Ellliot Richardson, fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Richardson and his Deputy AG, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than do the deed (will the Trumpers be as principled? Most around this investigation seem to lack a spine so far. I’m looking at you, Paul Ryan, not to mention the weasel Devin Nunes). John Dean turned state’s evidence and spilled his guts. Indictments piled up. The special prosecutor learned of tapes made in the Oval Office and subpoenaed them. The Supreme Court ruled Nixon had to release them. We learned of 18 missing minutes, which Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s secretary took the blame for. I can still picture her demonstrating the lean across the desk which caused her foot to come off the recording device, she claimed.

Finally, it was clear that Nixon and his closest advisers were all guilty of ordering the break-in into the Democratic Headquarters during the 1972 election (not Russian hacking, this was bungled Republican hacking), and the subsequent cover-up and articles of impeachment were drawn up. Rather than face sure impeachment, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

Dan and I had married seven weeks earlier. We broke out a bottle of wedding champagne to celebrate and a visiting friend snapped the Featured photo in our first apartment, as we celebrated Nixon’s fall.

Years later, Nixon decided to try to tell his side of the story and agreed to a series of televised interviews with David Frost, at the time not considered a serious journalist. Nixon thought he could get the better of him. Frost got coaching from respected historian and author James Reston, Jr to shore up his research and give him advise on how best to approach Nixon; not let Nixon out-maneuver him. In the wonderful film Frost/Nixon, the Reston role was played by Sam Rockwell, up for an Academy Award this year. Until last December, Jim Reston was my next door neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard and a more thoughtful man I never met. I reveled in our long political conversations, though we never talked about that particular moment in time. Current events provided more then enough to keep us engaged. He had a framed, signed poster from the movie hanging in his living room. I would wander over all the time and he knew that his family was welcome to use my pool without asking. I will miss his good, wise company.

In 2003, I was helping my older son’s private school with their capital campaign. I went calling on an elderly couple, George and Rebeka Richardson, who lived far from me in Nahant, an ocean-front community north of Boston. I showed up at the appointed time but no one was home. This was in flip-phone days. I called my house to ask my husband to check my day timer. Did I have the correct time? I stayed a while, but no one showed up. When I finally made contact again, she was mortified that she had forgotten our appointment, invited me to return, but this time for lunch. I again made the trek, launched into my talk about the school (not knowing she was a former member of the school’s Board of Trustees!). They were very gracious and interested.

After our discussion, she went into the kitchen to heat up soup for our lunch. They were a patrician couple. I chatted with George. He said, perhaps I had heard of his brother, Ellliot. I was flabbergasted. I felt like thanking him for his service; the man who had defied Nixon! Elliot was already deceased at by that time, but George spoke proudly of his older brother’s service to the country, and justifiably so. He was a WW II hero and had held several different cabinet positions under multiple presidents, but is most famous for defying Nixon by refusing to fire Archibald Cox and resigning instead. I hope we learn from that history lesson, which I was in the enviable position to hear about from his own brother. May Elliot Richardson’s steadfast courage be an example for those in power today.

This is how it started.  I asked him to write down the lyrics to “Both Sides Now” for me.  We were both seniors in high school, hanging out in the same circle of hippie wannabe ne’er do-wells. The song was on the radio all the time and I wanted to learn the words. I knew he knew them. So the next day he handed me a tiny yellow scroll made of stuck together Zig-Zag papers with all the verses of  Joni Mitchell’s song written in his tiny, barely legible printing.

We were teenagers, about to fall in love. That dizzy dancing way you feel . . .

I don’t remember who said it first. I don’t remember how long it took before one of us noticed we were in pretty deep. These things happen when you’re not really paying attention. One day you’re goofing around with each other and the next thing you know you’re always looking for places to make out. The coincidental meetings become less coincidental. Friends begin to notice. And then you start doing the things that define you as a couple. You hold hands a certain way. You know all the lines from A Thousand Clowns, which you both have seen a million times.You start your tradition of in-jokes and secret meanings. It’s important that no one else understands these things. They belong to the two of you and no explanations are offered to anyone else. You begin building a world around yourselves, daring anyone to decipher your private code.

You flaunt your feelings then. As the song says, “. . .and feeling proud/ to say ‘I love you’ right out loud.” Who said it first? Does it matter? Not really.

We went our separate ways for the summer after graduation, and wondered if time and distance would make a difference in how we felt about each other. Letters, so many letters. Private thoughts, deep thoughts, longing, in-jokes: piles of letters written from great distances over a couple of months. Letters saved, but eventually lost in a fire. Letters you wouldn’t necessarily want your children to find one day, even though his handwriting was nearly illegible anyway.

He went away for his first year of college, but then he came back.

And after four and a half years of being a couple, we got married.

What was it that brought us together at 17? We came from different backgrounds, different religions. He had a clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life and who he wanted to spend it with. I had no idea about any of that. He was patient and focused. I was a moving target. And then. . . and then, we kissed in the rain and we held hands and it just felt right to be together. I loved his hands and the way he listened–really listened–to me, and the way he made me feel secure and cherished and loved. When I needed him most, there he was–with a shoulder to cry on, and all the time in the world. I baked him a cake for his 18th birthday, and have celebrated every birthday with him since.

Today, when he looks for me in a crowd, I think he’s still looking for that dark-haired teenage girl he fell in love with close to fifty years ago. I wonder if that’s why it takes him a while to find me sometimes. It’s true that we are grandparents now–but look closely: those teenagers in love are still here.