Where were you 40 years ago this evening when President Richard M. Nixon resigned?

[Ken Burch]

112. It was the summer between seventh and eighth grade...

I watched with my mother and step-father in our home in the West Salem hills in Oregon. I still remember the news anchor reporting that large crowds were outside the White House chanting "Jail To The Chief".

And I still remember the rage we all felt when, days later, Gerald Ford announced the pardon. Ford cost himself the '76 election by doing that(Carter ran a horrible fall campaign and managed to nearly do the impossible and blow a thirty-point lead). If Ford had told everyone, in the pardon announcement, that Nixon had refused to resign UNLESS he was guaranteed a pardon, he probably would have won.

And if he had, the Democrats would likely have won a HUGE victory in 1980, given that it would have been a Republican administration that would have had to deal with the late Seventies recession, the second oil crisis, and the situations in Iran and Nicaragua.