All you venerable DU'ers who were politically aware/active in the 70's,

What did it feel like when the country shifted in awareness after Watergate? When regular people became aware that Nixon was a bad guy?

I was a kid, but I grew up in a blue household, complete with pic of JFK and MLK on the kitchen wall. Literally no one in my highschool was a republican, or at least no one admitted to it. I do remember feeling that the whole country moved a little left, that people felt the democrats were more for the regular people.

Where are we now, if you were to draw an analogy?

Here we give much respect to our kupuna (elders) so here's to you, hope we can keep the momentum this time...aloha!

...and there was rejoicing when he resigned.:thumbsup:

Most 7 year old boys had sports or celebrity posters on their bedroom walls. I had political signs... ;)

... in the way that JFK,Jimmy Carter - and even Ike - were.

I remember it coming as little of a surprise that he was a crook as nobody had really expected him to be anything else!

At least Nixon's craftiness and chutzpah were acknowledged. Bush has always been seen here by the left here as a dangerous idiot: now the right are grudgingly admitting that we might have a point ...

The Skin

when Madame Toussaud's would publish the results of their poll for most hated villain in history and Nixon would be at the top, edging out the likes of Jack the Ripper, Hitler, and Stalin.

Is that like old?

After all, he was one of the first dirty campaigners in the post-war era. Then, he had to make his famous "Checkers" speech to "convince" people back in the early '50s that he was not a crook. Since he was Ike's running mate-- twice-- a lot of people gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Like you, I felt that the country moved a little to the left after Watergate. For example, looking at my Bicentennial edition USA history book, I think that there was some attempt at the academic level to do some soul-searching about America's past. Also, listening to old tapes I recorded from that era, there did appear to be a more progressive bent on the news and commentary, and public service announcements were more than just "Don't do grugs".

However, at the same time, there was a very vocal group who thought Nixon had been railroaded. There was also a backlash developing against the soul-searching, which manifested itself in the election of Ronald Reagan, who proudly proclaimed with his victory that it was "morning in America", and suckered plenty of Americans into believing it. To some of us, it became readily apparent that he had meant "mourning", referring to the gradual demise of our democracy which he was helping to set in motion.

As far as I can tell, the seventies were a very liberal decade, Nixon or no. It wasn't until Reagan that people made issues of things that were not issues before then - like ideas about raising and educating children. It was a good time to be a kid back then, certainly no one was saying that Sesame Street was left-wing indoctrination, as they were in the seventies. It was a big reform era. Of course, my experience is probably not definitive, as my family were black power militants, my mom had a huge afro and all.

front line protecting their quarterback for 5 years.

It took a category 5 hurricane that couldn't be spun by the media to blow past their protect-Bush instincts. There was no way for them to spin theose pictures.

Watched the Watergate Hearings during the summer of '74 and, at the time, believed it was the start of a new era in American politics. Of course, I assumed then that in the 2005 the US would be a social democracy -- like a Scandinavian country, only bigger and more diverse -- and that the world would have come together to eradicate poverty and start colonizing Mars.

If we hadn't had the Reagan-Bush Cold War war and reaction, it might have happened. I'm not getting my hopes up as high, this time.

I grew up in a household that voted Republican. My parents didn't learn a thing. It seems like once someone becomes a Republican, they are in capable of admitting it when they make a mistake.

not being able to talk openly about the world. You have my sincere sympathy.

At least my family basically agrees about politics, if nothing else.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

Welcome to DU!

It was pretty difficult at holidays when my father was alive. I'm 57 now, my house is where everyone comes for the holidays :) Everyone under my roof is a Liberal and proud of it!

some have never admitted it. In other words a lot like now. Some people will continue to say we had to invade Iraq no matter what happens to show the foolishness of it.

Once the watergate hearings began, the dominoes began to fall. I remember watching those hearings on national TV (before C-span) and being transfixed. I was heartened because the system was working and the truth was coming out. We all knew the Nixon administration was corrupt from the top down and had a secretive mindset. The attorney general, f.b.i. and law enforcement did lots of jive illegal stuff (before the Patriot Act made it legal). This is what I find similar today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/watergate/chronology.htm

Today we have Harry Reid with Fitz, and the revelations are starting to drip out. Once the perception that Nixon was a liar took hold, I sensed that even conservatives wanted to know the truth. They couldn't believe the president would lie to them! Since the chimp's poll numbers are dropping, I think that same perception is taking hold.

We young hippies and “radicals” knew it all along. There were ups and downs throughout the process but it kept going. Granted there was a better news gathering apparatus and no flagrant propaganda machinery, but there was also no Internet. During those hearings I felt a sense of vindication that we were correct all along. We wanted to make a better world and expected our government to do the right thing.

Sorry for the long post, but bottom line is there are striking similarities then and now. In the end of Watergate, our judicial and political process survived a constitutional crisis. I'm counting on history to repeat itself. If it doesn't we don't deserve to be a country.

And BTW, the music was better until disco came along. I blame that on the republicans too. LOL

Nixon did give us one of the better campaign jingles of all time!

"Why change Dicks in the middle of a screw?
Reelect Nixon in seventy-two!"

And ya, the music was good...along with more predictable favorites my 16 year old loves Dylan and Joni Mitchell and The Band and Hendrix and has hipped his friends to it too. (They all listen to rap.)

I'm praying for that shift in people's awareness and want to know the moment it's here.

I know it's coming, I can feel it. If we had a real free press it would be here...actually we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place but ANYWAY...aloha and thanks for your thoughts!

My own recollection is of three things that must have caught my attention:

1) their was an executive privilege fight over the availability of the WH tapes the existance of the tapes raised eyebrows,

2) the obviously conveniently timed gap on one tape certainly turned heads

3) and the Saturday Night Massacre had people shaking their heads.

I do not in anyway remember people being joyful. The reaction was more like getting a root canal and having the needlefiles perforate the side of the tooth and then also break off, leading to agonizing attempts to get them out and finally giving up and yanking the tooth.

When I was in high school , we lived six doors down from shrub's family. His parents sent out invitations to a fund raising barbecue.(Poppy running for Congress).
My parents were insulted and r.s.v.p. saying "we are Democrats."

College life was turbulent. We protested against the war, racial injustice, poverty. We never gave up hope. Then Watergate happened and I felt we had made a difference.

I still have hope. I wont give up.

IN the short run, the Republicans were shut out of the Presidency and the Congress for a number of years. A fairly moderate president, who gave us the EPA, normalized relations with China, and begun attempts to nationalize health care was put away.

In the long run, the Republican reaction gave us a whole new kind of conservatism, the Reagan conservatism, and that nasty beast , much more activist than its Eisenhower predecessors still rules the roost.
With Nixon discredited, the Republican moderates were locked out of power for generations.

with Reagan because two factions rode in on his coattails -- The NeoCons (although they were not granted the power they have today) and the Religious Right.

Our country hasn't been the same since Reagan.

Nixon ran a very tight, very secretive White House (much like the current administration). I'll never forget Haldermann and Ehrlichman. They were called the German Shepherds (as in watchdogs) because no one got past them if Haldermann and Ehrlichman didn't want them to have access to Nixon.

By the way, Rumsfeld (and I think Cheney, too) worked in the Nixon administration.

The current set of events thanks to exploitative offshoring over the last 25+ years more than merely speak for themselves. They shout it.

in a row....the impact on republican presidential control wasn't very long.

speech. Watched the watergate hearing every chance I got, I worked evenings at the time. It was all too obvious then as it is now that the president was a crook, a dangerous man.

I worked on a letter sorting machine at the post office. We had headphones to listen to the radio. When Dickie got bounced, everyone, stopped their machines and stood and cheered. The bosses went nuts.

I see the mood of the country changing and edging left. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the Democrats, as usual, are held in as much contempt as the Republicans because they continue to play the "not as bad" game.

we hated Nixon ... watching him squirm and "get his" was as good as it gets ...

but sadly, and believe me i see a very disturbing correlation today, he was 99.44% of what liberals perceived as the main battle ... everything we did was focussed on hating Nixon and following the Watergate developments that finally drove him from office ...

to me, it kind of felt that after his resignation we declared victory and went home ...

and look at DU today ... thread after thread about hating bush and hoping Fitzgerald or even the Intel Committee in the Senate will nail him ... it's important and i fully support those efforts ...

but we don't see enough discussion on DU about who liberals or progressives or the left really are and what we want our society to look like ... "it's the issues, stupid" ... too many are mired in electoral politics to the exclusion of architecting the world they envision ... when Democrats finally return to power, they will have won an election but not a mandate to govern ...

making the mistake of focussing on Nixon as our raison d'etre brought us 30 years of right-wing shift ... and i'm afraid we're doing it again now ...

and keep clarifying and focusing on our core values. Here we just had a great meeting with a couple of hundred Democrats, a facilitated conversation about values. Peter Block came over from Ohio to help us, he was great. In his opening comments he made the most meaningful statement:
"Everybody likes to complain...complaining is fun. But just for these two days, I'm asking you to change the nature of the conversation, and talk about what we want to create and what we can do."
We could have easily bitched for two whole days about how *cked up our organization is. Instead we worked on values and goals and I want to tell you it was powerful. Highly reccomended.

right as a result of Nixon/Agnew and Watergate. Both of them absolutely despised the media. Agnew called the media "nattering nabobs of negativism."

The right illogically blamed the "liberal" media for Nixon's downfall.

and I was a teenager. I was amazed one day to hear this gradeschool kid refer to Nixon as "Tricky Dick". (I knew the term; I was just surprised that one so young used it.)

Our household was a republican one. However, within it, no one made any effort to defend Nixon.

I myself (stupid, stupid, stupid) felt kind of sorry for Nixon at first. And I knew I wasn't going to be into "free love". (Just my own personal opinion.) I saw the Nixon haters as being somewhat dissipated. Among young people, you couldn't say a word against the "radicals", or in favor of Nixon or republicans, without being mercilessly ridiculed.

Later, at college, I met some people who were pretty neutral as far as what political party they liked--they didn't seem to back either one. These people, also, were ridiculing Nixon, and watching the Watergate hearings eagerly.

I bought a National Lampoon magazine that had a fold-out of Nixon's nose, and it said, "America is changing its name to Nixxon!" This was a parody of a PR campaign by some oil companies that was going on at the time: gas stations like Esso and Enco were all being combined into "Exxon" and they'd have ads that said, "We're changing our name to Exxon!" (Incidentally, the National Lampoon at the time had something of a rightwing slant...yet they had a regular column titled "Pat Nixon's Hot Flashes", and they ridiculed Nixon with the best of 'em.)

It's an oft-overlooked fact that BIG OIL was controlling the repukes of Nixon's time, too.

When we get some TELEVISED congressional hearings on this scandal--something that even the non-political people can't completely ignore, then we will be almost to the end of this disgusting mal-administration. (Since we have the internet, daily transcripts of the investigation, posted widely across the net, could be just as good as televised hearings.) May that day come soon!!

After Watergate there was a smug shift to "the rule of law" and "the system works" blather. So, there was really a shift to the right.

Watergate distracted from the exposure of the racist, imperialist and property oriented values of the government which were widely under attack before Nixon.

Nixon was the human sacrifice capitalism required in 1974. Libby is the human sacrifice of 2005. And Bush will be the human sacrifice of 2006.

Unless the core values are uprooted there will be smugness when he falls but no real progress.

Most of my family is still pug. Needless to say, we try to avoid political discussions when we are together.

Nixon was the first politician I can remember being aware of - and I instinctly disliked him. I knew he couldn't be trusted. It was probably in the very early 60's.

I'd agree that after Nixon there was a shift to the left of many people, but at the same time, the pugs were getting more radical. This was the period when the dems neglected nurturing their base and didn't see the value of educating liberals who would become the talking heads of the future. The pugs dug in, developed their base, started think tanks, aquired the madia, etc. Don't forget Goldwater, either.

If you weren't there, you may not understand how much the Kennedys influenced the country. Both John and Robert were impressive orators, and they espoused liberal themes in many cases. The press was more generous then: we didn't see the failings of our officials splashed on the front page. Jackie was the Queen, and Jack the King.

The Vietnam war further polarized the country in the late 60's and early 70's. The animosity betwween the two sides was trememdous. After the war, too many people wanted to pretend there hadn't even been a war and ignored the troops when they came home. But I give Johnson a lot of credit for trying to move the country in socially responsible ways. Too bad he couldn't let go of the war earlier.

Not only was the press kinder about not revealing the picadillos of the politicians, it was also much more independent. People trused Walter Cronkite, Edward Murrow, and David Brinklery and Chet (can't remember his last name!). I can't say how much good investigative reporting was done in the 60's and 70's: certainly after Watergate it became desirable in reporters. But remember, Kathern Graham was considered incredibly counrageous in backing Woodward & Bernstein. Nixon's band of henchmen were just as vindictive as the current ones.

There's another aspect to the press which we did not have: we did not have 6000 or so idiots on radio spewing out their messages of hate and intolerance. Newscasters were expected to be serious and trustworth and honorable and above that kind of behavior. (I know they are not really newscasters, so please don't flame me!)

I'd sit and watch the Watergate hearings everyday, tokin' and sippin' and I remember jumping up and down on my couch when Nixon resigned. I toasted his demise long into the night.

But then came Reagan years later, so I drank myself into oblivion til the late 80's when I got politically aware again and sobered up.
Now I get drunk on despising the present day republicans.

on the media or whatever. Lynyrd Skynyrd put "Watergate does not bother me" into one of their songs. I was (and am) in the South, obviously...