Frank Wills: The Man President Nixon Wishes Had Taken The Day Off

What you talkin’ bout Wills?

I’m talkin’ bout Frank Wills….

The man I would guess Richard Nixon wishes he would have seen coming…

Nixon

The fly in the oinment, so to speak.

Could he have been so important to the world making $80 bucks a week back in 1972…?

I don’t think he knew that he was the key to a scandal rivaling that only of President Bill Clinton’s sexy situation with Monica Lewinsky.

If someone should have…or at least could have been out to lunch or called in sick, it could have been this guy.

What’d he do? Read on!

Security guard Frank Wills had no early warning either. With a hefty paycheck of $80 a week, Wills might have had good reason to believe he was well out of History’s high beams. But in 1972, while patrolling the offices where the Democratic National Headquarters was, Frank noticed that little strips of tape was holding a few doors open. He tore them off. Coming back later, he saw that the tape had been replaced and, deciding that shenanigans were afoot, he called the police.

You all pretty much know the rest of the story. The burglars were arrested, tied to Nixon’s re-election campaign and eventually, to the President himself. Amidst charges of massively illegal behavior, Nixon finally resigned in 1974…

Frank Wills

Wills, the hard working American who was just doing his job, managed to disintegrate into obscurity almost as quickly as he’d emerged. He played himself in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, but he didn’t even get a raise for bringing down the government. In fact, when he left the job because they apparently refused to pay for vacation time, he found he couldn’t get work anywhere else. One university told him that they didn’t want the government to withhold funding because they’d hired him as a security guard.Money went fast, and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of it to begin with. He couldn’t pay his electricity bill, couldn’t afford to bury his mother, and had to wash his clothes in a goddamn bucket. And not one of those fancy golden buckets. In 1983, he was sentenced to a year in prison for shoplifting a pair of $13 shoes. And that was pretty much it until he died in 2000.

Without This Person, We Might Not Have: Watergate! Whee!

The desire to add “-gate” to every scandal that makes the news. That, and an executive branch that wasn’t totally corrupt. For most of the 20th century the media had a crush on the president. Teddy Roosevelt made racist jokes, JFK chased tail, and the press blushed and wondered if the president ever thought of them when they weren’t around. Frank Wills showed the world how important accountability can be, especially when the president is a paranoid lunatic.

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Posted in Black America, Black People, culture, Irony, life, people, Political Humor, Politics, Pop Culture, thoughts, urban legend   Tagged: Frank Wills, Nixon, Watergate