How Tricky Dicky Saved my Marriage

I was a real work-a-holic reporter when I was first married. I covered meetings day and night Monday to Friday, and chased feature stories and breaking news on weekends. It was grueling and I was getting burned out big time. After a couple of years, Joan had just about had enough, then along came Richard Nixon to save my marriage.

Prior to Nixon’s cover-up of the break in to Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel during the 1972 US Presidential Election, the news media tended to trust people in government. Relationships between public relations people and reporters were friendly, with reporters sometimes accepting invitations to go on junkets and other favours.

For instance, before the Watergate cover-up became uncovered, the Ministry of Natural Resources employed a former game warden in their PR office. This guy had the gift of the gab and would arrange for government bush planes to fly outdoors reporters to a remote lake. First, though, he arranged for the local hatchery to dump a load of tame trout into the lake. In turn, the reporters would write about the great fishing in that region. It was a tit-for-tat kind of deal and nobody got their shorts in a knot over it.

After the cover-up, newspapers and TV networks set new standards for dealing with news sources. No gifts, no free rides, none of that kind of thing. To use that same example, outdoor writers had to say “no thanks” to fishing junkets and pay their own way to remote places. Suddenly, all kinds of agencies, companies and others, who wanted to get their story told in the press, had to hire people who knew how newsrooms worked and how to write a compelling news release.

Among those organizations needing improved media relations was Lambton College, which hired me.

That 8:30-to-5 job at the college was the beginning of my varied and illustrious career in public affairs. It meant no more covering town councils arguing about building permits ‘til midnight. No more boring evenings with the board of education. No more digging for an interesting lead in the remarks of a dinner speaker at the local orchard growers’ meeting. No more getting back to the office at 10:30 at night and to write those stories for the next day’s paper.

How did that work out for me? I had breakfast with Joan again this morning.  

Thank you Richard Nixon.