After this toast with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972, it was all downhill for Nixon. (Wikimedia Commons)
Most of those holdouts, which include four county legislators, are claiming their rights of privacy are being violated by the county comptroller’s request for personal information. Comptroller Elliott Auerbach, in compiling his report, asked for input from recipients such as the last four digits on their Social Security cards, birth certificates and the like.
The administration, in correspondence with the comptroller, has said essentially: you raised the red flags, you verify them. But that’s not the comptroller’s job. It’s the administration’s.
Has this been the opportunity for the administration to once again pull the watchdog’s chain? I seriously doubt whether 160 county workers, most of them in the sheriff’s department, are hiding dependents under their beds. The actual number, if the county Personnel Department under its new director Sheree Cross chooses to look, could be just a handful. But probe they should. Kudos to the watchdog for barking at this one.
Hats off to Richard Nixon
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 40 years since Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation as president to a stunned nation.
I was covering the county legislature for the beat reporter that night when Republican legislature Chairman Pete Savago announced the president’s speech would be piped into the chamber shortly after 9 p.m. What for? That seemed the general reaction. Who knew what he what he was going to say? And why interrupt a legislative session with more blah-blah from Washington?
Savago’s attitude was that everybody else was doing it, so what’s the big deal? The look on Savago’s face when Nixon finally got to the punch line fell somewhere between amazement and disgust.
There was the sense in these parts, reflected in Savago, that the Watergate scandal had nothing to do with local politics. Some benighted Republicans rode around with bumper stickers that read “Proud to be a Republican.”
But it did. The November elections that year showed a significant decline in Republican
turnout. Former Republican state Sen. Charlie Cook, after barely winning re-election, told us Republicans had told him they wouldn’t vote at all that year. Democrat Maurice Hinchey eked out a 1700-vote victory over incumbent Assemblyman Clark Bell, after losing to Bell by over 9,000 in 1972.
I had a unique window on the Watergate story. Every weekday morning around 7 a.m. I would call Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr. in Washington for an update. Fish was a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a Nixon ally. Nixon had campaigned for him in 1966.
There were a lot of things Fish wouldn’t talk about, but gradually it became apparent that his attitude toward Nixon was changing. Ultimately, Fish, a moderate Republican, was one of the members of the committee who voted for impeachment proceedings against the president.
Lots of things have changed since then, obviously, and some things haven’t. Nixon in that farewell speech spoke of building on the peace effort in the Middle East, of increasing trade to China. How are those working out?
But give Tricky Dick his due. As an aide to Fish once declared at a candidates’ night, “Say what you will about Richard Nixon. He kept us out of Northern Ireland.”
