Around May 1, 1974, U. S. newspapers started printing long sections of the Watergate tape transcripts. My friends and I bought a copy of the big Denver paper and the three of us sat on the lawn of the Denver Mint. We each took different characters from the transcripts and we read them aloud there, reenacting the White House machinations of Nixon and his team now revealed in fine detail to the American people.
#
- Many are frustrated by how long it's taking to get the January 6th and other investigations done. This timeline from Watergate can provide some perspective.#
- June 17, 1972. On a second visit to the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, men who later were shown to be working for Nixon’s team were arrested. Events following were known by every interested person on the planet as Watergate.#
- November 7, 1972. Richard Nixon was re-elected president of the United States in a great landslide. Early reporting on Watergate did not seem to change the course of the election.#
- March 21, 1973. Referring to the very large effort to cover up the Watergate and related events, John Dean tells Richard Nixon that there is a “cancer” on the presidency.#
- May 17, 1973. Televised Senate Watergate hearings begin.#
- July 13, 1973. Alexander Butterfield reveals that there was a taping system in Nixon’s office. On July 18, Nixon has the taping system turned off, and on July 23 Nixon refuses to hand over the tapes.#
- October 20, 1973. Senior administration officials resign when asked to fire the special prosecutor, who was making things difficult for Nixon to retain control over his image as president.#
- January, February, March of 1974. Nixon team members begin to be convicted of Watergate related crimes, or to plead guilty. On March 4, many of Nixon’s senior team members are indicted.#
- April 30, 1974. White House releases its own edited versions of Nixon tapes, but the House Committee demands the tapes themselves.#
- July 24, 1974. The Supreme Court orders Nixon to hand over the tapes. HIs presidency collapsing around him, and impeachment papers being drawn up, he steps down from the presidency on August 9, 1974.#
- Here’s the point: #
- These things take a long time.#
- A passing thought: One way to organize a longer work of nonfiction or memoir, for the writer, is to seek stories and insights about both trouble and health. Tell stories about both, talk about both, let them each shed light on the other's nature.#
- I remember, too, speaking with Carl Klaus, one of the powerful group of faculty members teaching courses in nonfiction, prose style, the essay, and related topics in the graduate Nonfiction writing program at U of Iowa. He told me in a conversation once, several years ago, that he liked to organize reading and writing classes around pairs of concepts like these:#
- The inner story and the outer story.#
- The story of thought and the story of emotion.#
- You could see new things about a classic essay works, or how a draft could be revised, if you asked the class, or yourself as a writer, questions about those pairs of terms. For example:#
- In this draft, is the outer story (of experience) clear all the way through? Does the parallel story, the inner story of a person, say, develop clearly all the way through? In revision, where might something be given more attention in either the inner or outer story?#
- In this draft, how do the two threads of thought and of emotion develop along the path of the essay? Where might one of them benefit from more attention in revision?#
- In revising, something often benefits from being presented more fully, with a finer grain, then, and terms like these help a writer pay think about making it so. For a reader, they can be a way of seeing more clearly how the greats have managed such things in the past, too.#