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A note of outrage for a fallen Nixon

Posted in Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history

The huge family Bible was a testament of one family’s desire to ensure that their history lived beyond their own years. But here it was, abandoned on an auction table with other stuff much less worthy.

The thick padded cover bore the name “Margaret B. Dalton,” and I knew instantly that it held a family’s recorded history. Nobody goes to the trouble of inscribing their name in gilt on a Bible as heavy as a doorstop unless they listed births and deaths and marriages with the hope that someone would venture inside.

So, I did, and saw family names in elegant 19th-century script and simple unadorned 20th-century penmanship.

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Edna Donahue Uffner’s harsh note about Richard Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974. She says she had it framed and hung on the wall.

There were several Margaret Daltons, starting in the 19th century, so I can only assume the Bible belonged to the earliest of them. One Margaret was born in 1915, and beside her name was written “grandmother” in parenthesis. The Bible also listed the name of Edna R. Donahue, born around 1899 or 1900, who would marry Martin D. Uffner in 1922.

As I turned the pages looking for other biographical tidbits, I came across a typed letter with the signature of President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s letter congratulated the couple on their 50th wedding anniversary “as a blessing to be cherished by all who are fortunate to reach this milestone.”

It was dated November 8, 1972, typed on White House stationery, which included the couple’s Fifth Avenue address (an elite Art Deco apartment building designed in the 1940s by Emery Roth) located near the Frick Museum on the Upper East Side of New York City.

I had done a blog post about a woman whose father had received a letter signed by President Kennedy.

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Magaret B. Dalton’s family Bible, along with a page of family births dating to the mid-1800s.

I wasn’t sure if the signature was authentic. I knew that presidential staffs routinely signed and sent letters with their boss’ signature. Some presidents have even used an autopen – which has been around since the days of President Eisenhower in the 1950s – to mechanically sign their names.

Besides, I wasn’t particularly interested in a Nixon signature. Moving on, I found a handwritten note of sorts signed by Edna Uffner. It was an outcry of her disillusionment with Nixon after Watergate became public.

Mr. Richard M. Nixon –

He was forced to resign on Friday, August 9, 1974

He was a liar and a thief

He was an ego-maniac

He lusted for Power and money.

He resigned to forestall the constitutional procedure

which would impeach him & the Senate would

find him guilty –

With all the agony the American people suffered

it proved at last the strength of the

United States and the structure of the

American Democracy!

Edna Donahue Uffner
August 9, 1974

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Edna Donahue Uffner’s full note about her feelings toward Nixon, 1974.

In a nationally televised speech on the night of Aug. 8, 1974, Nixon announced that he would resign the next day. He admitted no wrongdoing or complicity in Watergate, a burglary aimed at bugging the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex in Washington two years earlier. The House Judiciary Committee had charged him in a bill of impeachment, including a cover-up of the break-in, which had been linked to his re-election committee. Nixon went on to become an elder statesman.

He was the first U.S president to resign from office. I’m sure Uffner was among the millions of people who watched Nixon’s speech from the Oval Office that night.

At the bottom of the letter, she wrote:

P.S. I had this framed and on our wall –

I removed it when he resigned

disgraced as he should be –

He was an evil man.

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Richard Nixon’s letter to Edna Donahue Uffner and her husband Martin on their 50th wedding anniversary.

 

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