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Politics and Memories
When I was a little kid, my family spent the summer on an endlessly vast farm in Vermont. I have tons of little-kid memories from that summer — the enormous beds, running across a lawn that seemed to go on forever, being stung by a bee, my grandmother trying to comfort me, my mother picking tomatoes in a big, floppy hat, my father explaining why moths were attracted to the light.
I hadn’t been allowed to watch grown-up television until then. Like all kids, I was more attracted to the television than a moth to the light. But I was only allowed to watch shows like Sesame Street, and grudgingly, if I wheedled and whined, Mr. Rogers — although my father made it clear that he loathed Mr. Rogers. (In retrospect, I reckon he suspected Mr. Rogers was a left-wing pederast.) Once in a while, when my parents were exhausted and their guard was down, I’d get to watch the Electric Company. They told me more television would “rot my brain,” and I suppose they were probably right. But this of course only made me more desperately curious about it.
So something was unusual that summer when my family insisted we stay inside every evening to watch television. We had to get back for it, even if it meant driving right past the ice-cream store. We couldn’t be late for this program called “Watergate.”
I found the show confusing and boring (and I suspect my mom did, too, to be honest). But the other adults were gripped by it. I remember head-smacking, hooting, a sense of incredulity.
It’s hard to tell what’s a real memory and what’s superimposed in retrospect. I think I’d fully understood already that we lived in a democracy, that we had a president and not a king, that the people chose the president by voting, and that this system was fair, just, and the best in the world. I knew the President lived in Washington D.C. I’d been there, because my grandparents lived there, so I could envision that.
When I examine that memory, I’m not sure what to make of it. I know that’s when I learned that it was possible for a president to do something disgraceful. I hadn’t known that before. I know it’s popularly conveyed that way, too — as a loss of postwar innocence.
But was it really a turning-point in American politics, or was it just the first thing I was personally old enough to understand?
How do people slightly older than me, much older than me, remember that summer? What are your first memories of politics? Any thoughts about how those memories compare to what you later learned and understood about the same events? How they shape your attitudes today?
Published in General, Politics
I was responsible for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. I was three years old, and they were bringing him out in front of the cameras in Dallas. I asked my mother, “Who is that man, Mommy?”
“He just shot the President,” she explained.
“Well then, somebody should shoot him!”, I proclaimed.
BAM!
They never even questioned me. Is it any wonder that for years, I was convinced that the people on television could see us in our houses.
My earliest political memory was taking part in a mock presidential election in the first grade. My money was on Reagan and some of my classmates must have had the same view since I remember several us singing the delightful ditty “Jimmy Carter has a way of stinking up the U.S.A”!
I’m pretty sure that Reagan won the mock election but I went to a conservative parochial school in the Midwest so that wasn’t terribly surprising.
My first memory of politics as politics was when the President (who had always been President, even though my mother told me that she and I watched TV when the guy who shot the last President was shot) went on TV and said “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Watergate summer was the last summer I spent on my grandmother’s farm. My grandmother had the idea that I was going to be a poet someday. (Sorry, Grandma.) Most of what I knew about Watergate I had read in the Columbus Dispatch or the Circleville Herald. Grandma wasn’t much of a Nixon fan, but I think that might have been because she suspected he wasn’t even as conservative as that pinko Goldwater. We listened to Nixon’s resignation on the radio as we drove to the county fair, with Grandma telling me to concentrate on the details, because this was history.
Everyone’s memories here are fascinating, aren’t they?
Thinking about it prompted me to look up the name of the farm on the Internet. I’ll bet it’s still there: I can’t imagine anyone would have built over something like that. But the name is nowhere to be found on Google. Do we have anyone in Vermont to whom the name Up-and-Up farm rings a bell?
It prompted me to look through Google images. Vermont looks just as beautiful as my memories have it.
I remember that too!
My mom was a newspaper editor and would drag me along to all sorts of political events when I was little. I saw President Ford at a fundraiser in, ’78? ’79?
We were in the front row so he was only 10-15 feet away from me. All I can remember was his recounting the wondrous economy of his administration and how under Carter it had all gone “kablooey.”
I remember thinking, given my inaugural experience, that he was probably right about Carter, but what a strange, childish word for the President of the United States to use.
For some reason, I was forbidden to watch the Howdy Doody Show. As a result, I still have an unhealthy fascination with Clarabell. As to Watergate, I was all for getting rid of the demon Nixon and I actually admired that old goat Sam Ervin. I was working for the federal government and living in a high-rise apartment in Alexandria at the time. I viewed Nixon’s departure from the White House on live TV and could simultaneously watch from my twelfth-floor window as his helicopter rose and flew away.
My Dear Dr. Berlinski,
First, I am of a generation before Sesame Street (thank Gd for small favors).
Children’s shows more like this.
(click on the photo)
Politics more like this.
My sister and I were in complete accord that we should be allowed to stay up later (bedtime 8:30pm) to watch more television. Unfortunately, both my parents were united in unyielding determination that we weren’t going to get it.
Regards,
Jim
I lived in Germany, on a U.S. Military installation, until I was 8 years old. I would have been 6 years old. It was 7:30 pm in Germany when the Kennedy assassination occurred on Friday. I remember waking up the next morning when Dad told me about it on Saturday. So I was probably sent to bed as the news started percolating there. My parents probably didn’t bother explaining it to me at that time. In the United States, it was mid-day when it occurred, and it was more immediate.
My next political memory is when we visited the States in 1964. My grandfather had the Republican National Convention on TV, and I heard a lot about Goldwater. I may have watched the acceptance speech, but I don’t know. By 1966, I was living in the States.
I remember watching Lyndon Johnson occasionally, on prime time television, when he was giving speeches from the Oval Office. It was mostly about Viet Nam. I remember the western twang, “My fellow Americans….”
I was in 6th grade when the 1968 elections were in full swing. Since George Wallace was running as a 3rd party candidate, there was a lot of talk in school of how the Electoral College worked, and what would happen if no one got a clear majority. The discussions got pretty vague on how the House of Representatives selected a president if that occurred.
I remember watching my first presidential inauguration in class, where they brought in a television.
I became interested in politics during Nixon’s presidency. I was a Nixon supporter, and am amazed at how little I knew about him beyond his presidency. I didn’t know that he was Vice President the first 4 years of my life. I didn’t know about his run against Kennedy. He was just the President. I guess I knew that by the time 1972 rolled around, but it took awhile for me to realize.
I was very interested in Watergate. I watched a lot of the hearings. By the time of the resignation, I knew how historically significant that was. To this day, I thought his exit from office was an anomaly. I also learned about his liberalism, and it’s someone I wouldn’t support today.
Anyway, Watergate made me cynical about politics, but it was a coming of age for me, politically.
We had a mock election in junior high social studies class. I voted for “Ike”. He won the class election by quite a margin.
My parents travelled a great deal so we spent summers in Europe. The rest of the world was baffled by the indignation with Nixon’s behavior as they considered him an able statesman and found the domestic uproar over a little political sleight of hand farcical. As I watched the drama unfold it was my first glimpse that humans are unruly creatures and life and behavior is complicated. As a child I viewed adults as heroes or villains, situations as good or evil; this was a coming-of-age drama to me to watch a flawed man that had taken some good and courageous actions then be destroyed by the demons of his own ambition.
Love all these stories.
Shortly after the resignation, having just completed year one of medical school, I was rewarding myself with three weeks in Europe, starting in Paris. I was armed with a first-class Eurailpass and thoroughly disarmed by a heartthrob, Lily, a stunning Swedish, Heidelberg-educated official Paris tour guide, whom I had met on the train from Zermatt to Lausanne the previous December. She was 15 years my senior, yet appeared to be my age. I was so smitten, I am retrospectively surprised anything else registered. Yet, having had a life-saving stent placed in my LAD 5 days ago, I can authoritatively say that I much prefer the heart throb Lily provoked. I think I miss that more then anything else from my youth.
Nonetheless, I recall having had a dream the night after Nixon resigned; it was more like a hypnopompic hallucination, actually – half asleep, half awake. I had the sense of floating in the surf, rising and falling gently, being carried along with a sense of safety and continuity. I was quite consciously aware that this represented what would be an orderly transfer of power. It was quite remarkable, all the more so in retrospect, given my present sense that when it comes to power in the US, all bets are off.
Ambivalence prevents the telling of other nocturnal (and even some diurnal) commissions of that journey. The nostalgia, I fear, would be bittersweet beyond endurance of my present precarious emotional state of vulnerability and mortality.
Goodness. I’m so glad you’re okay and that they caught that in time.
I was four when my mother took me to a Goldwater rally. Shortly thereafter she explained to me that if I ever went into the polling booth and voted for a Democrat my hand would fall off. And then I would have to walk to the parking and people would point and laugh at me because they would know what I just did.
I remember LBJ saying he wouldn’t run and my mother applauded. I remember going home for lunch the day after the ’68 election and learning Nixon had won and getting to announce it to the class. News traveled much slower back then but it made me think being in the media was cool.
I was in Canada when Nixon called it quits and thought it was weird to come home to an unelected president.
Reagan was the first presidential vote I ever cast. I was pretty well dyed in the conservative wool by then. But Rush really taught me how to think and articulate conservative principles.
I was very lucky. After babysitting my grandkids Saturday night, I helped my wife, Gigi out to the car (she is post op bunionectomy and still non weight-bearing). Nothing strenuous, but it was suddenly quite cold out – about 26 degrees F – and I suddenly developed crushing upper left chest pain, radiating into my left arm. I drove the mile home, quickly, took an aspirin and atenolol & called the ambulance. By the time it arrived, the pain was almost gone.
In the ER, EKG, CXR and cardiac enzymes were OK so they sent me home (Took UBER for the first time as I was alone, my wife can’t drive because of her foot, and cabs take an hour to get). Luckily, I didn’t get pain again.
At work Monday, I talked to a cardiologist, who told me I definitely had cold-induced angina & that a stress test might well kill me. Had a cath and stent the next morning. Amazing, especially since I never had angina having spent most of the summer splitting and stacking firewood in 90 degree heat. Luckily, it hasn’t snowed here yet or I would have gone out to shovel the driveway and likely died there.
Had the ER doc has a higher suspicion, he would not have discharged me.
1964 and Goldwater. I was confined to bed at the time so had a lot of time to read and listen to the radio. My folks were Republican all the way and loved Goldwater, and loathed Lyndon Johnson. In 1966, my dad ran a Congressional campaign in the Western District of Montana, which included Butte, then a Montana metropolis (we dream big and live small) and deeply Democratic town and corrupt as hell. I worked in the campaign, going door to door passing out flyers and bumber stickers, licking envelopes, all the usual stuff. My dad ran one of the local radio stations and I got to go with him to the various precincts to collect vote count information. It was really exciting. I’ve loved politics ever since, although less now because of all the noise.
My parents were for Reagan. I was 8 years old, and had that childish enthusiasm for watching other people argue.
Still do, I am afraid. Though as soon as I could manage it, I have preferred to be in the scrum instead of merely spectating.
We are SO glad you are still with us!!!
Luck had nothing to do with it. Another life saved, thanks to Global Warming!!!!
I could well have been the guy who goes to the ER complaining of chest pain, is discharged and keels over dead an hour later. The ER doc followed their protocol and exercised no independent judgment. A higher index of suspicion was called for, leading to deviation from protocol. My (new) cardiologist said my 30 second description was the clearest example of cold-induced angina he had ever heard; that I should have been catheterized emergently. This is modern medicine by algorithm. It is satisfactory for most – but not all.
End digression. Sorry. Needed to ventilate due to major life change. I am also trying to preserve my vestigial sense of humor, usually scatological. I hope my earlier lascivious implications were understood as merely an attempt at humor.
My first vote Prez vote was for Gerald Ford in ’76. I was proud to vote for him. Say what you will about Ford–dim bulb, stupid ideas (remember WIP (Whip Inflation Now) buttons–but it took enormous courage to step in after Nixon retired.
I’ve voted for a Dem once–a friend for County Attorney. My hair fell out.
OOPS. Double post.
My God. I’ve learned enough about cardiology these past six weeks to have a pretty good grasp of what “the widowmaker” means and to have a sense of the shock you’ve just been through.
Apart from shaken up, how are you feeling physically?
civil westman
I could well have been the guy who goes to the ER complaining of chest pain, is discharged and keels over dead an hour later. The ER doc followed their protocol and exercised no independent judgment. A higher index of suspicion was called for, leading to deviation from protocol. My (new) cardiologist said my 30 second description was the clearest example of cold-induced angina he had ever heard; that I should have been catheterized emergently. This is modern medicine by algorithm. It is satisfactory for most – but not all.
I hate it. Good story +Risk factors = admission. As you demonstrate, 1 troponin is not enough to rule out ACS. Protocol and ” evidence based medicine” be damned.
Thank you, Claire. I am physically fine, having been quite active the past few years and having lost 30 pounds intentionally after back surgery. I was a “light” smoker, having begun at age 46. Smoked 5 cigs/day for ten years, quit for ten years’ began again in 2012, quit September 25 2015 (told myself something will probably happen after quitting!). Never more than 5 per day. My delusion: both parents smoked heavily, were overweight and lived until 91, dying of aortic stenosis. Believed I was immune! I will go back to work tomorrow and on low cholesterol diet and meds, along with anti-platelet med. Had to stop a stimulant antidepressant and, having lifelong depression, not sure I will be motivated to actually do much. Will report back. Your caring helps!
My parents introduced me to politics: not because they talked to me about it, but because I was an observant kid. It seemed important to them, their voices were not neutral when table conversation turned to current events. All I myself knew, was that the nuns in school were all a-flutter about the handsome, Catholic Kennedy, while my parents oddly enough, did not speak of him with the same tone. I was eight.
In the years after his election, if I heard a fire klaxon in the night, I would wonder why they were not waking up and taking us to the shelter at the public library. Hearing the sound of distant aircraft, I thought The Russians were coming to bomb us. Since the house was under the flight patterns for Idlewild (now JFK), Grumman, Republic-Fairchild, I didn’t sleep too well.
Growing up Irish (mostly) in Boston, one was never very far from politics. But when “one of our own” ran for President in 1960, the landscape changed dramatically. Of course, it was an idealized landscape, with no talk of women on the side or Mafia courtships in Chicago, but there was a tangible hero worship, with the Dark Knight, Richard M. Nixon, confined hopefully to obscurity. To this day, I have a vivid memory of a commemorative JFK dinner plate, replete with wooden stand, that graced the sideboard in our dining room for everyone to see. But that all ended in tragedy.
Before anything else — who starts smoking at age 46?
I’m so glad they caught that in time. I’m also pretty stunned that the algorithm said, “Send him home.” I think even I’d have figured out from the symptoms you described — “very cold out, crushing upper left chest pain, radiating into my left arm” — that this is not the right answer.
I’ve posted already about how current events effected me politically, but I thought I’d mention that a big driver for my interest in politics, what made me a political junkie, was Advise and Consent by Allen Drury.
I was young enough when I read it not to understand that the fictional Senator from Utah, Brig Anderson, was being blackmailed over a homosexual liaison. I kept asking myself what exactly was he ashamed of? It was written in such a way that you had to read between the lines to get it.
Nor did I realize that the book was a fictional portrayal of the real-life Alger Hiss hearings, which I hadn’t even heard of then.
Drury’s real life coverage of the Senate was during Lyndon Johnson’s “master of the senate” days. He watched Johnson rise and then run the senate as its majority leader. That book is considered a masterpiece of the political / fictional genre.