Big anniversary today, so I’m sure everybody my age has a favorite Watergate memory. Here’s mine: In March 1973, I had a work-study job with Indiana University’s newspaper. We had UPI and AP teletype machines in the city room, and late one afternoon both machines started clanging away -- three warning bells each. One or two bells meant average wire stories coming in. Four bells meant something akin to Pearl harbor or an invasion from Mars; three bells meant “don’t lock up the front page until you read this.” I asked one of the reporters what was happening, and they said that McCord, one of the Watergate burglers, had just spilled the beans and implicated the Nixon White House. Everybody in the room fought and jostled to read the teletypes, some shrieking with delight. We couldn’t believe it: Nixon was going down. Hard. After we put the paper to bed, many of us retired to Nick’s bar (still there!) and got happily shitfaced. billmoyers/2014/08/08/richard-nixon-honk-if-you-think-he-was-guilty/
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 23:16:54 +0000
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