ABSTRACT
In mid-August my family and I traveled from Amherst to the DC area in a rented truck and our family car, arriving two weeks after President Nixon resigned his office. I was not unhappy to see Nixon gone, having long distrusted the man and the people around him. His departure before formal impeachment also simplified my fellowship year a great deal-before his resignation I was concerned that Congress would spend most of the following Congressional session in impeachment proceedings and my chance to get involved in policy issues was going to be limited if not eliminated. His departure from DC allowed Congress to return to its normal activities and begin to address the impacts of the Oil Embargo that had been imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the preceding months. It had been imposed in response to U.S. assistance to Israel in the 1973 Middle East War and quickly reduced U.S. imports of oil from OPEC nations by approximately 30%. This created a bit of panic in the United States, which had not experienced anything like this before, caused gasoline prices to rise (from about 20 cents to 39 cents a gallon), and saw the imposition of alternate day access to gasoline stations based on your license plate number. It even led to fistfights when anxious and frustrated drivers tried to cut ahead into long lines at the pumps and those in line objected.
