"I am not a crook"

It was on this day in 1973 that Richard Nixon qualified for Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Just five words. Five words everybody knew were not true. "I am not a crook." It happened in Orlando, Florida in front of a few hundred AP editors, which made it hard to retract or clarify. By then he didn't have anybody skilled enough to clarify him out of his situation. He hung on for another ten months. He was 60 years-old.

It's hard to correct the habits of a lifetime. What I remember, watching as ...