Richard Nixon Resigned in My Parents' Living Room
Nixon Resigned in My Parents’ Living Room
Text and Photograph © Mark Petty
The date is August 8, 1974. I am preparing to return to the University of Missouri where I am a senior studying photojournalism. As an aspiring photojournalist I wonder if I’ll ever cover an event as monumental as Nixon resigning the presidency of the United States?
Then I realize the Nixon-Kennedy 1960 debates thrust television into presidential politics. Now, ironically, 14 years later, Nixon’s presidency will literally be terminated on the TV in my parents’ living room in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I can cover the event live.
I put my camera on a tripod and take this photograph as Nixon resigns beneath the high school graduation portraits of me and my brother that sit on top of our Curtis Mathes console color TV. In the photo a few vinyl record albums are leaning against the wall on the right.
I make a contact sheet of the roll of film and file the negatives, but I never make a print. I see it every year or so when looking for old negatives, but never think twice about it because I wasn’t there to photograph him getting on the helicopter behind the White House as he left Washington, D.C.
Fast forward 30 years. It’s 2005. I own a photography gallery exhibiting my own work in downtown St. Petersburg, FL. The Museum of Fine Arts is several blocks away. At the time its photography collection specializes in 20th century photographers (the breadth of its 16,000-print collection is much wider today). I decide to make a print of Nixon resigning in my parents’ living room and hang it in my gallery. I call Dr. Jennifer Hardin who curates the museum’s photography collection at the time and tell her I just printed a photograph she might be interested in for the museum.
On May 31, 2005, 31 years after Nixon resigned, Dr. Hardin enters my gallery. She walks past all my other images hanging on the walls and stops in front of Nixon. “Is this is the one?” she asks, smiling at me inquisitively.
“Yes, it is.”
That evening we are both dumbstruck by the national news: Vanity Fair magazine has published an article revealing the identity of Deep Throat, the code name for the anonymous source who provided Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information for articles that ultimately leads to Nixon’s resignation and their Pulitzer Prize. Deep Throat is Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI.
By the end of the year a 16” x 20” print of Nixon Resigned In My Parents’ Living Room is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. Since that time the museum has exhibited the photo twice.
The first time was in an exhibit entitled Witness to the Moment: Images by Photojournalists. A brochure printed for the exhibit ended with these words: “The Museum . . . would especially like to express its gratitude to Mark Petty whose gift of his poignant Nixon Resigned In My Parents’ Living Room inspired this exhibit.”
I am shocked when I walk into a gallery at the museum and see my print of Nixon hanging among work by Alfred Eisenstadt, Robert Capa, Arnold Newman, Elliot Erwitt, Burk Uzzle, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, not to mention Sam Shere’s photograph of the Hindenburg exploding. The show runs from November 2006 to February 2007.
Years later, during the Covid crisis, a friend sends me a text. He’s just seen my Nixon image. It’s in an another exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts entitled More Than Retro Art Photography from the 1970s displaying my Nixon print among images by Andy Warhol, Garry Winogrand, Dianora Niccolini, and Jerry Uelsmann. It runs from October 2021 to April 2022. Dr. Hardin no longer works at the museum. A different curator picked the image for this show.
