How American Radio Once Resurrected the Most Hated
President in the Country
Imagine: you're driving to work, the radio is on, and
suddenly you hear the voice of the man the entire country despises. He's
announcing he's running for president again. His campaign slogan?
"I never did anything wrong — and I won't do it
again."
That's exactly what happened on April 1, 1992, in the United
States. And thousands of people believed it. Genuinely, completely believed it.
First — Who Was Nixon, and Why Did Everyone Hate Him?
For those who don't obsessively track American political
history, a brief primer. Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United
States, and he managed to enter history as the only president who voluntarily
resigned from office. He didn't die in the job. He didn't lose an election. He
simply left — because the alternative was being thrown out.
The reason was Watergate. In 1972, during the election
campaign, operatives from Nixon's circle broke into the Democratic Party
headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The goal was political
espionage. When the story unraveled, it emerged that Nixon himself had been
involved in covering up the crime. For two years the country watched the
hearings, the taped recordings, the congressional testimony. In 1974, Nixon
delivered a farewell address to the nation and flew off from the White House
lawn by presidential helicopter — for good.
The line he'd uttered not long before his resignation became
the epitaph of his era:
"I am not a crook."
He said it — and instantly became, in the public memory, the
crook to end all crooks. His name became a synonym for political dishonesty,
paranoia, and the abuse of power. Cartoonists, comedians, and satirists gave
him no peace for years after he left office.
The Man Who Could Be Nixon
Among those who became especially celebrated for their Nixon
impressions was the Canadian-American comedian Rich Little. He possessed a rare
gift: he could reproduce the voices and mannerisms of famous people with almost
photographic precision. His Nixon was legendary — the same gravelly voice with
its characteristic pauses, the same awkward gestures, the same peculiar blend
of arrogance and self-justification. Many performers tackled Nixon — Dan
Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live among them — but Rich Little was the undisputed
master of the impression.
April 1, 1992: The Day Nixon "Returned"
National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation program
announced that former President Richard Nixon had unexpectedly declared his
candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.
That alone would have been extraordinary. But it went
further.
Audio clips were aired of Nixon delivering his candidacy
speech and declaring, "I never did anything wrong, and I won't do it
again." Harvard professor Laurence Tribe and Newsweek reporter Howard
Fineman then came on air to offer their perfectly earnest analysis of Nixon's
decision and its possible impact on the 1992 presidential race.
For good measure, a clip from Torrie Clarke, press secretary
of the Bush-Quayle campaign, was also played, in which she declared: "We
are stunned and think it's an obvious attempt by Nixon to upstage our foreign
policy announcement today."
Detail by detail, the hoax was building into something that
felt disturbingly real.
The Reaction: The Phones Melted
Americans responded immediately — and volcanically.
Listeners flooded NPR with calls. People rushed out to tell
their mailmen. Some were crying. The emotions were off the charts.
Host John Hockenberry deliberately put through only those
callers who had swallowed the story whole. This only poured fuel on the fire:
the airwaves filled with the outraged, bewildered, furious voices of real
Americans who were absolutely certain that Nixon was coming back.
Only during the second half of the program did Hockenberry reveal
that it had all been an April Fools' Day joke, and that Nixon's voice had been
impersonated by comedian Rich Little.
Why It Was So Funny — and So Painful
The humor of this prank operated on several levels
simultaneously.
Level one: the sheer absurdity of the premise. Nixon
had resigned in 1974 — in disgrace, under threat of impeachment. The idea that
he would want to return to public life in the White House seemed like delirium.
And yet that absurdity is precisely what made the joke plausible: "Well,
it's Nixon. He'd do it."
Level two: the slogan. "I never did anything
wrong, and I won't do it again" is a phrase of genius in its construction.
Technically it confesses to nothing. And yet its very existence sounds like an
indirect admission. Anyone who remembered the famous "I am not a
crook" heard the rhyme immediately. It was the perfect Nixonian
campaign slogan — written as if Nixon himself had come up with it.
Level three: Rich Little. Little, playing Nixon, also
delivered the line: "I would not boast of a career in which so many
tragedies and setbacks have occurred." A perfect bulls-eye. Nixon really
did speak precisely like that — wounded, with a tinge of martyrdom, carefully
sidestepping direct language.
Level four: the context of 1992. It was a
presidential election year. The Republican primaries were underway. George H.W.
Bush was already vulnerable. The idea that someone — even Nixon — might
challenge him wasn't entirely fantastic. In popular culture, a T-shirt had been
circulating that read: "He's Tanned, Rested and Ready — Nixon in
'92." The cultural soil had already been tilled for exactly this kind of
joke.
Nixon in Eternity
The NPR prank became one of the most celebrated April Fools'
hoaxes in American broadcasting history — in the same conversation as Orson
Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.
Sadly, the audio recording of the show is not readily
available, as NPR has said it is in the process of converting old audio files
to digital format. Only eyewitness accounts and the next-day newspaper stories
remain.
Nixon died in 1994, having made no actual attempt to
re-enter politics. But the image that comedians and satirists had built around
him proved immortal. Fans of the animated series Futurama know that
Nixon eventually does regain the presidency — of Earth, that is — with his head
preserved in a glass jar, mounted on the robot Bender's body, running for
office in the distant future.
Some characters are simply too large to just go away.
The Moral
The best pranks are the ones you want to believe. Not
because they're technically convincing, but because they contain a truth about
a person or an era. Nixon returning with the slogan "I never did anything
wrong" is absurd. But it's a Nixonian absurdity. And that is
precisely why thousands of intelligent, educated Americans believed it — for a
few minutes, at least.
April 1st is that rare day when reality yields to the carnival.
And sometimes, the carnival tells the truth more precisely than the news ever
could.
