My Father's Favorite Holiday

My 83-year-old father doesn't send me many unsolicited e-mails, but I got this one today:

i don't know if you are aware that today

is the 40th anniversary of the
resignation of richard nixon.

can you believe that it is so long 
since that glorious day?

i am feeling  better just with that thought.

Nixon resigned the summer I was thirteen, my family's first summer after my mother left; a summer my father spent in our darkened living room watching senate hearings on Watergate; and the summer before I started high school, coming home after school every afternoon to watch Star Trek on our little b&w TV.

While my father felt nothing but satisfaction at the departure of a man he despised, a man who had desecrated the Constitution, I remember feeling embarrassed at the man's public humiliation. (But how could I have known the man would re-present himself successfully as a senior statesman so relatively quickly?)

Weird to think Nixon was elected president while Star Trek was running (1966 –1969)--or not so weird, really---you can see a lot of the era's issues in the show itself.

From the time of Nixon's resignation, 1974, by Karen Flanery [here]:

 And a decade later, from Doug Little [here], we get

And, using lines from the next generation (1992), I put this together:                                                                       scroll right   >   >   >   >

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth. It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. And if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform.

--Picard to Wesley Crusher in the episode "The First Duty," but best seen in the Picard Song