sophomore in high school

Not yet even a twinkle in the old man's eye; that would be more than a year later.

I was a senior in good old Central High School, Monmouth-Independence, Oregon, Class of 1973. Ahhhhhhhh, yes! What wonderful memories I have of those years.

Lots of fun things we did back then, but perhaps most important, I was just discovering spectrums around that time. Gary Allen's spectrums of government in "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" (mailed to us by "a concerned American"). That special spectrum in "MAD" magazine they visually and satirically depicted the _styles_ of the ideologies. A spectrum questionnaire in "Senior Scholastic" magazine. The Libertarians' 2-dimensional Nolan spectrum. Seeing a reference to Samuel Brittan's 3-dimensional spectrum.

And my friend David Smith and I created our own 2-dimensional spectrum with 4 quadrants: 1) "Commie Land" (or "People's Republic"), 2) "Hippie Land", 3) "The Land of Law and Order", and 4) "Ayn Rand Land". I continue to use that spectrum in multitudinous variations. Everything seems to tie in with it in one way or another. I wrote a questionnaire for it some years ago which I plan to post on my blog as soon as I'm able. As I see it, the basic 2 dimensions of the Smith-Anderson (or "Smitty'n'Andy" as we called it) spectrum are: 1) blurring vs. glorifying differences, and 2) glorifying vs. suppressing the different. I later added a 3rd dimension of left hemisphere vs. right hemisphere dominance (i.e., rationalism vs. irrationalism).

Anyway, that 1972 election of Nixon vs. McGovern has always been one of my favorite elections ever. Liberal vs. Conservative in terms of the _styles_ of "Hippies" vs. "Squares". I always think of that election as sort of a mirror image of my favorite election of my lifetime, that of 1964, Johnson vs. Goldwater. Liberal vs. Conservative again, but in a different sense or on a different dimension of a spectrum. In both cases, the more "extreme" or ideologically consistent candidate lost by a landslide -- yet they helped to shape the subsequent ideological direction of their parties.

Our family watched the Watergate hearings on TV. I also watched those hearings with David Smith at his house. I have such fond memories of that, second only to watching the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. The _style_ of the whole Watergate imbroglio! The _style_ of President Nixon! The _style_ of the men around him: Agnew, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, MacGruder and Liddy.... The _style_ of it all! Those were the days! The _style_ of it all! I keep thinking about Nixon all the time.

I was 36 years old in '72, living in western Michigan. Watched damn near every minute of the hearings. They brought Pat Buchanan on after midnight, and he tore them apart. You could see why they didn't want to give him an audience. Pat was working for Nixon in the White House as a speech writer or clerk of some kind... Maurice Stans was the head fund-raiser for the Committee to Re-Elect Nixon, and he was a real smoothie, who could sell s--- to a pig... One thing all the re-hashes of Watergate today avoid (on the mainstream media) is the CONTEXT of it all--Nixon was up for re-election, and absurd as it was, if the liberal media could sell it in the short term they could gain the white house for the Dems. Well, they lost, and Nixon took 49 states in '72, thanks to the "cover up," which worked. When you talk about Magruder and Strahan and Colson and Emil Crough, and Herb Kalmbach,and Erlichman, Haldeman, Chapin, etc., going to jail, you have to ask yourself this question: Wouldn't I, too, have perjured myself to save America from George McGovern? The answer for many of us was, of course I would. All the tapes and hearings came after the election, and my feeling at the time was the dirty language on the tapes hurt Nixon a great deal. Also, when he got Jerry Ford in as vice-president, there was not going to be an ideological change at the top, which gave the Republicans a sporting chance in the 1976 election--which they wouldn't have had without the Nixon exit. So it wasn't too hard for GOP Senators to pile on at the end.

Very good.

Actually, it was the Committee to Re-Elect the President. I love the _sound_ of that! Its acronym was beloved by his enemies.

I have a book, "The Assassination of President Nixon" by Franklin B. Smith, a newspaperman in Vermont, consisting of columns he wrote _at the time_, giving a view quite different from that presented by the majority of the media. I found it at a used bookstore in Oakland, CA, several years ago.

He wrote proudly of the independence of Vermont, and ever since then, I have been intrigued with that state, the Green Mountain State, named after Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys. Ethan Allen wrote a book "Reason the Only Oracle of Man". Vermont, the first state to recognize civil unions for homosexual couples, and one of the first states to recognize the right of concealed carry for gun owners. Vermont, home of our friend Jeff Soyer at Alphecca. Reminds me of my own home state of Oregon in many ways, also gun friendly and with a tradition of free speech and privacy.

-7. Wow do I feel young. Thanks.