Yes, I was around. So many years ago, that always makes it tough to compare, because the emotional component of your memory is not there to the extent one’s emotions are in today’s climate. Certainly, the fact that Republicans did not rally around Nixon helped. The fact that Republicans played key roles on the Watergate Committee helped. People could see that both parties were going to deal with a president who was that willing to play outside the rules.
Nixon was not Trump. Nixon was a brilliant man, not a dolt. Today, to me, his transgression, spying on Democrats, seems light weight compared to Trump’s behavior. Since I very much leaned left, no love lost on Nixon for my part. He had promised to end the war, and that end was too long coming to please the anti-war movement.
An unpopular war, a hippie culture derided and hated by those we hippies called Rednecks. Very similar division, no? It was a type of culture war. Racial tensions, assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, massive demonstrations in Washington.
Yet, be it because of the distance of time, or the flip side, because today’s climate is right there in our face, I cannot really compare the Nixon years with the present. The present climate seems so much worse, so much more divisive, in part because both parties, and both bases are so hateful of the other. That was not the case back then, we’ll not to this degree I think. It was obvious then that it would not stop until Nixon saw the light and spared the country. And he did! Now, that is one hell of a difference.
I was young then. I was politicized for the first time in my life. Radicalized really. I saw through the lies I had been taught, as a result of the entire era, not just because of Nixon’s downfall. Maybe ending the war, and Watergate ending turned things around for a spell…
FWIW, I find today’s “morale” far, far worse than those years.
And yes, what
@The Thriller said certainly helps make today’s climate worse. We had the three major networks then, and I guess PBS. We did not have talking heads driving home their bias, and in so many cases, their lies, night after night. Or the internet where we could all gather and treat each other like loving brothers and sisters