Nixon Resigns

A few weeks before I was due to enter the U.S.Air Force, I sat in my grandparents' living room and watched the old fox flicker on television. He looked weary, angry, somewhat surprised. He looked like he thought at any minute it would all be made all right. He had a look in his eye like a cornered animal, something I'd always been taught was the most dangerous kind of animal. He spoke in a steady voice, the same voice that said we were bombing Cambodia, the same voice that said we were going to have price controls, the same voice that had droned on and on about things which a 17 year old didn't much care about.

This was different. The old fox was cornered and trapped and was eating his leg off right on national television. He was making his escape. If he wasn't in one piece at least he was still a free man.

The television people, with the casual cruelty they specialize in, showed film of the man striding on the stage of the Republican convention of 1972, strong, confident, arrogant. They showed film of the landslide in November 1972 and the announcers saying it was one of the biggest in history.

"This is telling me the wrong thing," my grandfather said. "This is telling me he didn't have to do that break-in, that he would have won anyway."

I looked again as the cameras now caught the old fox and his family running toward the helicopter as if they were escaping the roof at Saigon. I guess the man realized that he looked like a rabbit dashing toward its hole, because at the door of the helicopter, he turned and waved and, amazingly, flashed the "v" sign one last time. V for what? Victory? Peace? Vermin?

I wanted to hate the guy like the media told me I should. After all, this was Tricky Dick, the man who had done his best to subvert American democracy. I guess I should have hated him. Instead, I felt badly for the old fox. He was a son of a bitch, to be sure. And the whole Watergate thing was uncharactoristically stupid for this cold and canny politician. But there was something in the man's eyes that caught me. Something he had finally allowed to show through as he read his angry screed that August 9 in 1974. Something human. Something hurt. Something that I understood because of my own outcast childhood.

I can't say I loved Richard Nixon. But at that moment, when he was most desolate and alone, I could say that I felt a weird kinship with him.

A month later I was in the military marching around under a new president. I missed the whole pardon fiasco because they didn't let us have news in basic. In a way I was glad that I could serve under Ford and not Nixon.

Still, as I lay in my bunk at night, the scratchy blanket covering me in the hot San Antonio night, I wondered if the old fox could sleep at last and, if so, whether he could still dream.