#probably thinks the hope of the hijacker was battling against the hope of the passengers wanting to live

[abbabagel]

Sobbing and throwing up thinking about how Nagito genuinely blames his luck and by proxy himself for his parents dying

[everythingtimeless]

Historical Hour With Hilary: 1x06

As ever, catch up on any installments you missed or want to re-read here (or if you just need more of my Historian Facepalms of Despair in your life). Otherwise, I swear the time machine worked, and we headed to Washington D.C. in June 1972, rather than, say, August 2017. Join us as our team investigates... uh.... Watergate. That’s definitely it. Watergate.

We already touched a bit on the weird, weird world of the sixties in our investigation of the real-life history of Atomic City, but hold on, it gets weirder. Almost fifty years ago might not seem like that much in the scheme of things, but it’s still half a century, and if you want a microcosm of just how much the early twenty-first sees things differently from the late twentieth, and how much our collective mindset has changed, try this on for size: between 1968 and 1972, airplane hijackings were at an all-time high. Over 130 planes were commandeered in just under five years, a rate of one hijacking on average every 13 days, and usually ordered to divert to Cuba, where the hijackers hoped the new Castro regime would receive them favorably (they were very wrong). Did the airlines immediately pull together and try to stop this scourge? At a July 1968 hearing to address the problem, a Federal Aviation Administration representative, Irving Ripp, thought it was impossible to fix:

Senator George Smathers of Florida countered Ripp’s gloom by raising the possibility of using metal detectors or X-ray machines to screen all passengers. He noted that these relatively new technologies were already in place at several maximum-security prisons and sensitive military facilities, where they were performing admirably. “I see no reason why similar devices couldn’t be installed at airport check-in gates to determine whether passengers are carrying guns or other weapons just prior to emplaning,” Smathers said. But Ripp dismissed the senator’s suggestion as certain to have “a bad psychological effect on passengers … It would scare the pants off people. Plus people would complain about invasion of privacy.” None of the senators made any further inquiries about electronic screening.

Yep. The government figured it was way too much trouble to set up metal detectors and screen everyone, and worried about invading passenger privacy (ha), so they... just let them go on. They equipped planes with Spanish translation books to communicate with presumably Spanish-speaking hijackers, maps of Cuba and landing protocols for Jose Marti International Airport, and figured they’d get any ransom money back when the plane and passengers were released. One hijacking these days is major news. Now imagine that happening every two weeks and that every time you got on a plane, there was as much chance that a wacko with a gun would order you to go to Cuba, as you would get to your destination, and nobody giving that much of a shit about it. Funnily enough, all these procedures to make hijackings as easy and painless as possible did squat to stop hijackings, and it finally took the November 1972 hijacking of Southern Airways Flight 49, where the hijackers threatened to crash the plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor in Tennessee if their demands weren’t met, to impel American airports to implement large-scale passenger screening in January 1973. 

So. Something to think about next time you complain about having to take off your shoes and throw away your water bottles at the airport.

Of course, if you weren’t shrugging off the constant hijackings, you were probably shrugging off the constant pipe bombings. Protest bombings in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco were completely common, done by groups such as Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and between 1971-1972, there were up to 2,500 bombings on American soil. Since most of these took place late at night and with few injuries or casualties (the biggest attack killed four people), America just... kind of ignored them and went about their day. This was well before the internet and social media, of course, so there was no instant publicity, but imagine if this happened today. We’d be living under martial law and convinced the end times were at hand. Between the hijackings and bombings, the 1970s represented a golden age of domestic terrorism, and one which is not considered that much of an issue today. It’s a miracle we survived the 60s or the 70s, apparently (and yes, I’m aware the present doesn’t have much room to point fingers).

Which brings us to... Watergate.

The break-in of June 17, 1972 (you can read the FBI’s full vault of Watergate documents here) was in of itself, not that major of an event. It was quickly dismissed as a “third-rate burglary” and not given much play, but two young reporters at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (if you’re wondering why the Post goes so hard at Captain Cheeto, they have practice with this) felt that something wasn’t quite right. They started to dig deeper, and the result of their investigation meant that Nixon.... won one of the most overwhelming presidential re-election victories of all time against Democratic challenger George McGovern in November 1972, taking 49 of 50 states and 520 electoral votes. Welp?

(Patience, grasshopper.)

As the investigation continued into 1973, it began to put more and more pressure on the White House, and in case you’re wondering, yes, Nixon was also a crackpot about nuclear weapons. He is reported to have once said at a party, “I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead.” Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, second-in-command on the nuclear hierarchy, was so worried about Nixon in this regard that anyone who received “unusual orders” from the president was supposed to check with him first before they carried them out. The investigation was also complicated by the fact that the FBI was run by one of the biggest bastards in American political history, J. Edgar Hoover, who Nixon was (probably rightfully) afraid of, and the wiretap files reveal that Nixon and his associates felt that Hoover would “pull down the temple” (see page 7) if they tried to remove him. (Hoover died in May 1972, before the scandal broke, but fear of him had been a major influence in their planning of the operation.) Finally, the “smoking gun” tape, released in July 1974, proved Nixon’s guilt beyond all doubt, and led to the drafting of the articles of impeachment. They included:

1. making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

2. withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States; 

3. approving, condoning, acquiescing in, and counselling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States and false or misleading testimony...

4. interfering or endeavouring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the office of Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and Congressional Committees;

5. approving, condoning, and acquiescing in, the surreptitious payment of substantial sums of money for the purpose of obtaining the silence or influencing the testimony of witnesses, potential witnesses or individuals who participated in such unlawful entry and other illegal activities;

6. endeavouring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States;

7. disseminating information received from officers of the Department of Justice of the United States [...] for the purpose of aiding and assisting such subjects in their attempts to avoid criminal liability;

8. making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a thorough and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct....

9. endeavouring to cause prospective defendants, and individuals duly tried and convicted, to expect favoured treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony...

Oh yeah, and Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in October 1973 to avoid charges of corruption and... wait for it... tax evasion.

I’m sorry, can we take a quick break? My neck is getting sore from all this staring into the camera as if I’m on The Office.

Anyway. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, rather than be almost certainly found guilty (you can read the full procedures of the House Judiciary Committee here). (And I haven’t even mentioned the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, where he fired the special prosecutor investigating the case). The archive for the 1974 booklet outlining constitutional grounds for the impeachment of a president notes that it is “suddenly of possible relevance again.” I see no connection here. None.

In any event, the Time Team (and Rufus) also meet up with the Black Panthers, which major props to Timeless for a) including in a mainstream television episode, and b) not treating them immediately as the “bad” black people in the civil rights struggle. The group, founded in 1966, wrote a ten-point program in October of that year that makes for frankly depressing reading, because we’re fighting the exact battle today, over forty years later. Among the Panthers’ demands included really terrible, outrageous things like equitable access to housing, employment, healthcare, accurate historical education (all together now: HA) and an exemption for black men from having to serve in the military. (It’s no surprise that Hoover fucking hated them and labeled them the “greatest threat to internal security in the country,” promising to stamp them out by 1969.) Remember, 1972 was only four years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and while we think simplistically of the 1960s as the “civil rights decade,” this was very much an ongoing, live-wire issue. So in sum: terrorism, a crazy president guilty of high treason, and rampant racial tension and discrimination.

/looks back into the camera as if I’m on The Office

/keeps looking

/KEEPS LOOKING

Okay, I think you get it.

Next week: The team gets stuck in 1754, and we take another long, hard look at something else this country doesn’t want to talk about, when we meet the real-life Shawnee chieftainess Nonhelema.