It's Tuesday, August 8, a date which in the years 1968, 1973, and 1974 demarcated the rise and fall of Richard Milhous Nixon. Next summer, the nation's two dominant political parties will hold their presidential nominating conventions. It's a process most Americans are dreading.
I mean that literally: As James Thurber (and Casey Stengel) liked to say, "You could look it up." Not in the Bible (a.k.a. The Baseball Almanac), but in RealClearPolitics poll averages: Majorities of Americans do not want Joe Biden or Donald Trump to run again. So far, the two men don't seem to be listening. But I digress. Where was I? Oh, yes, Richard Nixon.
On August 8, 1968, Nixon accepted the GOP's presidential nomination in Miami Beach. In his acceptance speech, Nixon tipped his cap to three governors who had opposed him in the Republican primaries -- Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, and George Romney -- and invoked the iconic name of Dwight Eisenhower, who was hospitalized that night, and under whom he'd served as vice president.
Nixon noted that he'd received such nominations before: 16 years earlier as Ike's running mate, and eight years prior as the GOP standard bearer against John Kennedy. "This time there is a difference," Nixon told the cheering delegates. "This time we are going to win. ... I say let's win this one for Ike."
Nixon also promised to bring "an honorable end" to the war in Vietnam, return power from Washington to the cities and states, and restore respect for the United States around the world. "My fellow Americans," Nixon intoned, "the long dark night for America is about to end."
Things didn't end well for the Nixon presidency, as I've written before in this space, although his long forgotten "dark night" quote presaged a more famous line by his successor. I'll reprise Gerald Ford's reassuring words in a moment.
At the 1968 Republican convention, delegates loyal to George Romney chanted "Spiro Who?" as Richard Nixon forces put the name of obscure Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew in nomination as Nixon's running mate. "Ted" Agnew, as he liked to be called, was shocked, too. "I am stunned," he said. "It's like a bolt from the blue."
Once in office, Agnew found that in the Nixon White House the job of trying to keep the press honest fell to the vice president. The former Maryland governor wasn't the ideal man for this task. For one thing, he proved comically over-the-top as a media critic. Worse, Agnew wasn't an honest man himself.
Five summers after the "bolt from the blue" put him a heartbeat from the presidency (a presidency suddenly threatened by the Watergate scandal), Agnew was informed by the Justice Department that he was under investigation by a grand jury probing kickbacks by Baltimore County real estate developers to government officials in Maryland.
"That's a pack of lies, all nonsense," Agnew told Attorney General Elliot Richardson. "I am not going to take this fall."
In a press conference on this date -- Aug. 8, 1973 -- Agnew was equally defiant, calling the allegations against him "damned lies" and vowing to remain in office.
It was not to be, however, and by the time Nixon announced exactly one year later, on Aug. 8, 1974, that he was resigning from office, Spiro Agnew was long gone. In a prudent plea bargain, Agnew was spared a prison sentence, and the America people were spared the trauma of a prolonged constitutional crisis. I wonder if anyone at today's Justice Department remembers that precedent, and how well it turned out.
Into the breach in 1974 strode confident and honest Gerald R. Ford. Rhetorically harking back to Richard Nixon's Aug. 8, 1968 acceptance speech, Ford uttered his famous and reassuring phrase after being sworn in as the nation's 38th president on Aug. 9:
"My fellow Americans," Jerry Ford said, "our long national nightmare is over."
But these things come and go, don't they?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
