Joe Biden, and Letting Politics Take Over Your Life

Maybe the central question of our time.

President Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974, 14 months and one day before I was born. When I have read about his resignation over the years, the sense of the moment I’ve gathered is one of total shock, a terrifying realization of weightlessness, a perilous sense of no one being in charge — of the world revealing itself not to be ordered and stable but in fact teetering on the edge, relying only on the frailties of flawed and fragile men. The President of the United States, standing in front of the whole world, walking away. What do we do now? Where do we turn?

Nixon’s resignation is now framed as one of those collective experiences, one where every American sat down around the television and hung on his every word, in which citizens, as one, all shuddered and fretted together. But the more you dig into the archives and add context to the story, the more you realize this was not in fact the case. The New York Times ran a piece the next day about how low the television ratings were for the…