Listening to riveting segments of the 45th president’s second impeachment hearings has reminded me of watching portions of the gavel-to-gavel Watergate hearings with my grandmother in the summer of 1973.
My grandmother was glued to the TV during much of that summer. At first she was convinced that then-President Nixon, as our duly elected leader, simply had to be above reproach.
My grandmother was a gracious woman whose rule of thumb was, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” She was a woman who could put a clean and decorous spin on a mud bath. As she watched those proceedings day after day, however, her understanding of Nixon’s capacity for wrongdoing evolved rapidly.
I remember how shocked she was at the complicity of the president and his closest advisers in the wiretapping cover-up, and how scandalized she was by his crude language, let alone by his utter disregard for a code of ethics. But she called it like it was, and was persuaded by the facts.
Most of all, what I saw that summer was that my grandmother was a woman who could see the truth, no matter how sordid the facts of the case proved to be. When Nixon growled, “I am not a crook!” my always-proper grandmother countered, “Yes you are a crook, Mr. Nixon, and a cheat and a liar too!”
I hadn’t thought about that summer until the past few days, as I, like my grandmother, have been glued to the TV. This time, what is abundantly obvious to me is that the events of the past year were no clandestine cover-up. We didn’t need a Deep Throat to let the truth trickle out. This craven misadventure was wide out in the open from the get-go. We all saw it. We all reacted to it in one polarized way or another as it unfolded.
Our Instigator in Chief set the stage for his coup over the months preceding the election, and all during its aftermath, culminating in the debacle at the Capitol on Jan. 6. In my mind’s eye I can see this sick despot seething behind closed doors, but openly grooming and whipping his hordes into a frenzy to do his bidding that day.
Before Watergate, I had thought of my grandmother as someone unshakably optimistic about our elected leadership, whoever they might be. But she was not one to cling to optimism in the face of a darker truth.
At the time of this writing I don’t know what the outcome of these hearings in the Senate will be, but I am greatly worried that fewer than the necessary majority of senators will take their blinders off. I am afraid that too many will refuse to listen to their consciences and will remain steadfastly complicit in the open assault on our democracy by one of their own. I’m sure my lovely grandmother is turning in her grave.
(Millie LaFontaine of Concord is a retired neurologist.)