Watergate and the Washingtonian

  After a day of work at  the news  desk of The Wall Street Journal  in Lower Manhattan hearing about Richard Nixon's pending resignation, I climbed the stairs from the platform at the Montague Street subway station, in Brooklyn Heights, and saw at the newsstand at the top the huge block letters on the first edition (still wet) of The New York Times: "Nixon Resigns''.

Unlike the fresh, cool air this morning, the air  that evening was warm, fetid, and sticky as I walked to my apartment in Cobble Hill, through one of the few pro-Palestinian neighborhoods in New York City. (This meant that the neighborhood had  some good Mideast restaurants that did wonderful things with apricots.)

The Watergate drama, or melodrama, about which I had been writing, and editing others'  writing  on, for more than two years was mostly over. But we  still had to be subjected to the controversy over President Ford's pardon of Nixon.

Then a few weeks later I was in the WSJ's Washington Bureau (with its lovely oriental rugs) filling in as a copy editor of Washington-based stories, of  which Nelson A.  Rockefeller's nomination to be  vice president was the biggest. Those were hot, humid but energizing weeks, topped off with drinks in the tropical air on the terrace  at the top of the Washingtonian Hotel, which seemed as exotic as a bar in  a Graham Greene novel.

-- Robert Whitcomb