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‘Fort Pelosi’ Hits Rock Bottom
As an 18-year-old high school graduate a couple of weeks from starting college, I remember holding the microphone from my cassette recorder to my parent’s stereo in our small Oklahoma town to record President Richard Nixon’s August 8 resignation address to the nation.
Afterward, I stepped outside our home’s front door, gazing upward towards the cloudless blue sky on a beautiful summer evening to let the history of that moment settle in. I still have that cassette tape. I can still quote key phrases from the speech from memory. I had just made my first trip to Washington a month earlier, on my way to Canada as part of an International Air Cadet Exchange Program. I’d seen how the final throes of Watergate had gripped the nation’s capital. Tumultuous times.
I confessed to my seven-year-old son recently that when I was his age I was usually out in the street playing with toy guns and eating a pack of candy cigarettes a day. “Where were your mom and dad?” he asked. I told him the truth: “Entertaining in the den with real guns and real cigarettes.”
I dreamt last night of my childhood. Richard Nixon loomed large.