That, plus the Democrats control of the Congress, made it far more likely that the truth was unearthed in Watergate.

What I did I do cope? Raged at classmates (Nixonites) they were so blind they could not see what was right in front of their face and watched the hearings and read every newspaper article I could find.

This feels just like that time to me but I am truly afraid this poor excuse for a man is going to get away with it.

All the way up until Dean testified, it seemed like he was absolutely going to get away with it.

After Dean testified it was over. He was absolute toast.

Dean was a Nixon loyalist all the way up until he was put under oath.

No one believed Dean until the tapes came out and they corroborated everything he said. Turns out every single thing he said was true.

You had to wait until the next day to read the paper. News sites told actual news. Things are completely different now. Then when the tapes came out, it was just all over -- both sides agreed it was unacceptable. This time, again, things are different. Suddenly it's perfectly fine for a republican to do what they want. Old rules still apply to the dems though, cuz that seems about right, eh?

Apparently our elected officials don't work for us -- they work for the sole purpose of trying to keep the job for another term and then another. There used to be integrity in government work. No longer.

Didn't really answer the question but I'd say no, the dread of him getting away with it didn't really exist because no one knew the full extent until far later in the process. Here we know it all. It's perfectly obviously. It's the senate we need to be concerned about. Apparently our forefathers never anticipated a truly corrupt senate, but that's what we've got.

Gut feeling -- there's far too many implicated and involved in this situation (and who knows what else), so they have to ensure Trump stays in office to protect themselves. Pretty sure it's all going to come out sooner or later, at least I hope so. Nothing is worse than watching someone commit a crime in plain daylight and they just get away with it.

Nixon didn't do anything as horrible as what Trump has done. He deserved to be removed from office, but he hadn't been such a liar or crook. He also hadn't committed such cruelty.

I was more sure that Nixon would be punished than I am that Trump will be. I also felt that being removed from office was a good punishment. I was relieved when Ford pardoned him. I had no idea that would ever lead to "moving forward" from other crimes by presidents.

At the time what Nixon did was the most horrible thing we thought we'd ever see a POTUS do ...

I was out of HS by then, but had always been a news junkie and the impeachment was all anyone was talking about. Mum said that when it came right down to it, Americans did NOT want to see a president -- any president -- going to jail. It would be a huge embarrassment on the world stage and no one wanted that. It would make America look weak and foolish. We were knee-deep in the Cold War and it would have given an enormous opportunity for our enemies to take advantage.

But Dad said that Nixon should go back to San Clemente and we could just construct a fence around it and call it the Nixon Federal Correction Facility, population: 1.

(in keeping with today's hearing).

But seriously, it's a very interesting question, and I look forward to the discussion that follows.

I was 25 in '74, and I never even considered that he "might get away with it" - but of course, the Republicans weren't corrupt to the bone then, as they are now. And once Nixon's guilt was made plain, Republicans chose to put country above party - as everyone, in those days, assumed they would.

It's a sign of how bad things are now that no such assumption can be made of Republicans - in fact, the only assumption that can be made is that they will abandon any principle they once held in order to protect their corrupt - and clearly guilty - IMPOTUS.

and I thought you were addressing babies conceived while watching the Watergate drama unfold on TV.

Nixon, for all his flaws, was not the out-and-out traitor that Trump is. He was, as all Presidents are, in a bubble that protected him from knowing what people really thought, or really thought of him.

I was working at DCA (Washington National Airport) at the time as a ticket agent. So I got to see various principals in the entire Watergate thing from time to time. And I vividly remember the crash of UA flight 553 on December 8, 1972, in Chicago. Mrs. E. Howard Hunt was one of the fatalities. She was carrying some ten thousand dollars in cash with her, which led to a lot of interesting speculation.

What was most noticeable was that by June, 1974, the tension in the city was palpable. Even though as an airline employee, not a federal government employee, I was very much outside of all things federal government, it was becoming noticeable. The last two or three weeks before the resignation almost all work came to a standstill. It couldn't continue like this.

The evening of August 8, 1974, when Nixon came on television, things came to a complete and total standstill at the airport. Planes didn't even board so that passengers could watch his talk on the TVs at the gate. There was absolutely no one in the main terminal. All of us agents were in our back room, right behind the ticket counter, watching him speak. Every couple of minutes one of us would take a quick look at the ticket counter to make sure no one was needing attention. Nope. No one was.

To this day, whenever I watch that speech again, I'm so afraid he'll say, "I'm a fighter, and I'm going to stay and fight" and not resign. For me his actual resignation was unexpected, which probably indicates how little I understood about what was really going on.

But the sense of relief was enormous, and the next day, we were all (mostly all; there were a few die-hard Nixon supporters there) giddy with happiness that he was gone. We kept on walking into the back room to watch Nixon's farewell address to his staff. If you've never watched it, see if it's available on Youtube. It's maudlin and embarrassing. Good riddance.

But here's the most important thing. If somehow Nixon had gotten away with it, meaning the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up, he was not in the process of undermining the most fundamental aspects of our Constitution, government, and country. Trump is.

Nixon did until almost the end when Butterfield revealed the existence of the WH Oval Office recording system. After they were heard, few thought Nixon would "get away" with anything. But, Nixon, Haldeman, Erlichman and the rest kept things under wraps for over 2 years.

Here's it like backwards Watergate. Everyone knows what Trump did and all the stuff the underlings did is just now being revealed.

I remember how Nixon had his daughter Julie on talk shows defending her father and claiming it'll all come out and prove her dad is totally innocent.

...during the election, it got no real traction. The cover-up was working fine, and even if there were suspicions about Tricky--and there certainly were--well, he was Tricky Dick, after all, and "Middle America" had pretty obviously decided that he, baggage and all, was preferable to McGovern. Their mistake, obviously... …but there we all were. Once the menace of McGovern was past, it began to leak out, and McCord's letter to Sirica, published in late March of '73, started the avalanche. There followed a delirious few weeks in which every day, on the news, we saw a new level of criminality, sleaze, and sheer incompetence established. By June of that year, when the Ervin Committee got underway, Nixon's fate was sealed, and most people knew it, though it took over a year to work itself out.

THAT was the single biggest difference. Until the existence of the secret Oval Office tapes was exposed, Nixon was very likely to serve out his 2nd term... to get away with his crimes.

But, he actually taped himself ordering crimes, and then taped himself again while even more energetically covering them up.

It did take, if I recall correctly, SCOTUS, to order him to turn the tapes over. And even then he did still destroy 14 min. of one.

But back then we had a SCOTUS that wasn't in the right wing's pocket. And a Democratic House and Senate. Those were the other very critical differences.

For all Nixon's sins (and, we now know, treason), he actually understood American government, and the Constitution. He did indeed pursue an Imperial Presidency in his own fashion, but as a criminal he paled in comparison to Trump.

This, today, is a considerably more distressing thing to be witnessing.

Today, one can only see our entire 200+ year experiment in democracy to be at risk. During Watergate it didn't feel as much like ALL of our institutions protecting our country, all of the Founder's checks and balances, were one by one being bulldozed over, or else just ignored, by the president's party. Which is what is happening today.

It allowed him to acknowledge that that jig was up when GOP Senators came for that private talk. He was twisted, but unlike Trump his actual brain still worked.

I don't know if Trump is even capable of letting go. Maybe if someone convinced him this was just another bankruptcy and he fooled all us rubes and he was really the winner. Or maybe he'd have to be escorted out.

and turned over all the WH tapes, then resigned from office when told he would be removed if the articles of impeachment reached the senate.

I focused on other stuff and was totally surprised.

(I graduated from high school in 1974, so I had plenty of distractions: New boyfriend, college, also went to summer school that summer and took college chemistry)

Like then, I'm trying to distract myself. I'll get too depressed if I don't.

...and honestly MUCH more interested in seeing the Rolling Stones that summer. They'd released both Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street since last being in America. This tour was their 1st time playing any of that music in America.

With all the great music that was happening then I did pretty well keeping up with politics the extent I did.

Watergate started then, and became a slow drip of worsening news, for 2 years.