Expletive Deleted
Expletive Deleted
It’s one of the fun parts of having been around long enough to have
watched the pendulum swing back and forth a couple times. At least you
get an idea of what that pendulum means even if you can’t see the damned
thing. Sometimes things swing back and forth but in the meantime things
have spun around a bit so the point it returns to isn’t quite exactly
the same point. Along the way, we learn new words. In the last few
years, we’ve become familiar with words that were around but nobody used
them… evildoers.. redaction.. every age has its own set of words that
seem to take on new meanings because of the circumstances around them.
In 1974, the new word on everyone’s vocabulary list was “expletive”. I
know I’d never heard it before I read the Nixon transcripts. The
transcripts were a compromise that a beleagured president made with the
Justice Department. It had come out that Nixon had a system recording
all of what happened in his office while he was president, including
meetings in which he discussed the Watergate thing with his closest
advisors. Once the existence of the tapes was revealed, of course the
DoJ wanted to hear them, but the President refused, citing “executive
privilege” or some such horseshit. Nixon was my favorite president when
I was growing up. I was too young to have any real experience of
Kennedy, Johnson wasn’t anyone that I knew too much about (my parents
are, and probably were, pretty dedicated Republicans). I sent Nixon
letters asking him what he was doing about the “energy crisis”, and his
aides sent me form letters and speech transcripts. But when Nixon’s
world started unraveling after the 1972 election (which he won in a
landslide), I paid particular attention. I read the articles in the
paper, I watched the congressional hearings when I got home from school.
Of course mom was watching them - they preempted her soaps, so there
really wasn’t anything else on. There was no CNN, you had to get your
news from the same 3 TV networks that brought your comedy, movies, soap
operas, etc. So eventually the Nixon administration made a deal - they
would make the contents of the tapes available as transcripts.
Apparently there was some concern about the president’s voice being
heard in its full potty-mouthed glory. When the transcripts were
presented to Congress, they were in a stack of nice books that looked
like dark blue school yearbooks. 
In the text,
whenever someone used profane language, the phrase “expletive deleted” was inserted in its
place. What elicited this memory from me was seeing a trailer for a new
movie coming out soonish called “Frost/Nixon”, a movie about a series of
interviews Nixon did with British talk show host David Frost. In the
trailer, there is a part where Nixon asserts that when something is
illegal, it is not against the law if the President does it. This is a
paraphrase, but does accurately represent how that administration viewed
itself. I remember, in one of those moments that is etched in memory, my
father’s explanation of what was happening in Washington. Dad assured me
that the only difference between this president and any other president
is that this one got caught. Those words never left me, and they
sustained me during some dark times in the 1990’s. In this age of energy
price shakiness, a Republican administration that, while certainly in no
real danger of imploding has certainly earned a level of distrust not
seen since 1973 or 1974, I think about that pendulum thingie, and wonder
what lies ahead.