For us DUers born after August 8, 1974, where were you?

[starroute]

63. I have no memory of it at all

And that's despite the fact that I'd been following the story obsessively, watching the hearings on TV, and so forth. After all that, the actual resignation came as something of an anticlimax.

What I do remember with crystal clarity is a few months earlier, when Butterfield revealed the existence of the White House tapes, and a friend remarked, "Nixon is now either the happiest man alive or he just shit his pants."

Of course, I'd been hating on Nixon for almost as long as I could remember -- from 1952, when I was five years old and singing "Whistle while you work, Nixon is a jerk," through years of Herblock cartoons, to 1962 when his promise that we wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more was the only thing that consoled me for the death of Eleanor Roosevelt that same week, and then the horrors of his term in office. So by 1974, it was more like, "Yeah, whatever, just go away already and let us get on with life."