Before the global impact of immediate reaction to events through social networks, the U.S. media was known to send reporters to interview men and women “on the street” to gauge the pulse of their communities.
That’s how a young journalist ended up in the electronics department of the Sears at Hawthorn Center in Vernon Hills the evening of Aug. 8, 1974. The assignment was to interview folks watching the nationally televised resignation speech of President Richard Nixon and get their reaction.
The editors sent me because I knew how to get to Vernon Hills from Waukegan. Most of The News-Sun staffers were unfamiliar with what existed west beyond the old Lakehurst Mall because the overwhelming number lived within the city limits.
In truth, they didn’t have to venture far from their neighborhoods. Everything they needed was available to them.
Genesee Street was where clothing, shoe, camera and luggage stores, and a downtown Sears at Washington and West streets, vied for customers with late hours on Fridays; restaurants and movie theaters were crowded on weekends. The street was filled with Loop scoopers Fridays and Saturdays.
Another reporter was sent to a neighborhood tavern in Waukegan to get the pub crowd’s reaction to the historic moment when the first president of the United States resigned his office midway through his four-year term. Tipsy bar visitors might provide good quotes.
Nixon’s resignation was unlike Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson announcing they would not seek second presidential terms. Or the tumult following President Joe Biden passing the torch last month to Vice President Kamala Harris and her November running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Here was a president in office for five-and-a-half years actually quitting in mid-stride of his second term after being overwhelmingly re-elected in 1972, when he crushed South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. It was a dozen years after the assassination of President John Kennedy; four years after his running mate LBJ opted out of seeking another presidential term due to our deepening involvement in Southeast Asia.
So into the mammoth Sears store, then occupying most of the east end of Hawthorn Center, I went. The Sears is long gone, redeveloped with a mix of various uses these past few years.
But on that August night, it was where parents were shopping for back-to-school clothes, including the durable Sears, Roebuck brand of Toughskin jeans, and migrating to the tiers of television sets. Before the late Circuit City and Best Buy, there were stacks of RCAs, Motorolas and Zeniths (which offered the first TV remote control, Space Command) in the electronics corner, just north of the candy counter.
It is difficult today to find those once-dominant American TV brands or candy counters.
With only four national over-the-air channels, all the TVs were turned to the president speaking live from the Oval Office for the 37th time, telling Americans he was resigning his presidency at noon Aug. 9, 1974, due to the increasing fallout from his involvement with the Watergate scandal. Vice President Gerald Ford, in office for 10 months, would take his place in a peaceful transition of power.
For Nixon, it was a mea culpa after two years of dodging the inevitable. That fateful night, he acknowledged that “some of my judgments were wrong,” but “they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the nation.”
Nobody interviewed in the Sears electronics department bought that argument. They knew “Tricky Dick” Nixon from the more than quarter-century he was in public office.
While many admitted to voting for his re-election, they were over the political drama from Watergate. They were ready to move on and see how President Ford and a new administration would engage the nation and take on rising inflation, which was affecting their pocketbooks.
Expressing contrition, Nixon said: “I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision.” He had to resign from the nation’s highest political office, he said, to “put the interest of America first.” He ignored the articles of impeachment which were hanging over his head.
Making deadline was easy, as The News-Sun in 1974 was an afternoon newspaper. The newsstand edition hit the street at 11 a.m.
A month later, on Sept. 8, President Ford granted Nixon a full unconditional pardon for any crimes he may have committed during his presidency. Those included actions during and following the break-in of Democratic headquarters housed in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., in June 1972.
That pardon and continued economic troubles led to Ford’s defeat in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, who expects to turn 100 this fall, just prior to another election, a half-century from the tempestuous times when America switched presidents and saw a vice president take up the mantle of his respective party.
As is Kamala Harris, in the eye of another history-making moment, has been tasked.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
sellenews@gmail.com
X: @sellenews
