Fifty years ago today, the President of the United States told an audience of 400 journalists:
I am not a crook.
On 8 August the following year, he resigned as President because he was a crook.
He also said,
in all my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice,
which again was a little light on the actualité, but obviously the more concise phrase became the more famous — and a joke about hoping Air Force One crashed so “they won’t have to impeach me” is all but forgotten.
One of the oddest things about the event, though, was that it was held at the Ballroom of the Americas at Walt Disney World in Florida:
Watergate is pretty well-documented history, though, which is why our business of the day is that this wasn’t his first visit to one of the company’s theme parks. He’d been to Disneyland in California in 1959, but that was a happier occasion — he was opening their new monorail.
Sorry, slip of the hand, there. He was opening Disneyland’s new monorail:
…an occasion on which the then Vice President was inadvertently kidnapped (or at least temporarily separated from his Secret Service agents, on the unwitting orders of Walt Disney himself).
More on that here:
…and you can see him opening the monorail here:
…and there’s a look at the afterlife of the phrase ‘I am not a crook’ here:
…but we can all rest easy, because those days are behind us: everyone learnt their lesson and no criminals or out-and-out crime families were ever let near the White House again.
