It's Official: Nixon Is the Worst - By Charles P. Pierce - Esquire

[Benton D Struckcheon]

33. Thanks, but I cheat, sort of.

Every Prez election cycle I read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, simply because it's the best book ever written on politics. (Just changed my sig line to something Martha Mitchell said that's in that book; it's the most accurate political prediction ever made by anyone, ever. On page 465 in the version I have. Pages 350 to 359, where he describes getting caught up in Nixon Youth floor demo at the Republican Convention, is probably the funniest stretch of political writing ever put to paper.)
Sometimes I throw in Ted White's Making of the President 1968 too, which is where the background on what Nixon did leading up to 1968 comes from.
Personally, I was only dimly aware of politics until 1972. I was only 15, but I had a brother who was 17, and who would be eligible for the draft very soon. Needless to say, this was a concern. It's hard for people growing up today to realize, but Vietnam was ALWAYS in the background back then, and at 15 I was old enough to start worrying about myself too. That war, by that year, had been going on for seven years, longer if you go back to when there were only "advisors", and as far as I was concerned, it was going on forever, and there was no good reason to believe it wouldn't still be dragging on when I hit 18, never mind my brother. (My brother told me a few years ago that my parents had actively planned for him to go to Canada if his number came up in the draft. Shocked me. I didn't know anything about that at all.)
When Watergate happened, I thought the Prez had to be in on it, and I was amazed no one was paying much attention to it. Thompson's book barely mentions it, which shows you that when it happened, it was considered a minor incident. Like they say, it wasn't the crime, it was the cover-up.
For some reason I don't remember anymore, I was home when a lot of the Watergate hearings were televised, and I watched as many of them as I could. I figured it was inevitable they'd get to Nixon, it was so obvious to me that he was at the center of all of it.
In the end, my brother got lucky with the draft, and the war ended the year I turned 18. I wound up falling into that short stretch of years where you didn't even have to register with the Secret Service. The most surreal thing I remember from back then is the advertisements on TV for kids my age to enlist in the now all-volunteer army. Who the heck would ever actually volunteer, I remember thinking?