Yeah, great catch about 72, thank you Kevon. I just ran out of space and brain cells, lol. Ford should have won easily in '76 in a landslide, but he didn’t win at all. Also, since you’ve been to the Nixon library, you know how he came out of poverty and put himself through law school, which was a huge thing to accomplish. He lost that law license too, after Watergate.
But what I was really hoping to convey, and did not, was that the days of 15-minute fame and 5-minute shame had not yet arrived. Just being outed as gay, for example, didn’t just kill your career, it got you glared at and mothers pulling their children away from you in the street (this happened to the original Ronald McDonald, IIRC) for years after the fact, and this kind of thing was life-destroying. Imagine if you fucked up something so badly and so publicly that anytime you left your house you were glared at, spat at, had people shout at you – and this went on for years. Because Nixon was never charged or sentenced, because there was no public reckoning, it never really ended for him personally.
At least at Club Fed he’d have been respected, and had a chance at post-prison life. I read Chuck Colson’s book; prison was very difficult for these men who had never known anything but comfort and deference, not a free ride at all, but it was still a FAR cry from gen pop. It might actually have been better for Nixon personally had he gone to prison with Colson and Liddy and the rest, but we’ll never know.
Yeah, great catch about 72, thank you Kevon. I just ran out of space and brain cells, lol. Ford should have won easily in '76 in a landslide, but he didn’t win at all. Also, since you’ve been to the Nixon library, you know how he came out of poverty and put himself through law school, which was a huge thing to accomplish. He lost that law license too, after Watergate.
But what I was really hoping to convey, and did not, was that the days of 15-minute fame and 5-minute shame had not yet arrived. Just being outed as gay, for example, didn’t just kill your career, it got you glared at and mothers pulling their children away from you in the street (this happened to the original Ronald McDonald, IIRC) for years after the fact, and this kind of thing was life-destroying. Imagine if you fucked up something so badly and so publicly that anytime you left your house you were glared at, spat at, had people shout at you – and this went on for years. Because Nixon was never charged or sentenced, because there was no public reckoning, it never really ended for him personally.
At least at Club Fed he’d have been respected, and had a chance at post-prison life. I read Chuck Colson’s book; prison was very difficult for these men who had never known anything but comfort and deference, not a free ride at all, but it was still a FAR cry from gen pop. It might actually have been better for Nixon personally had he gone to prison with Colson and Liddy and the rest, but we’ll never know.