So I was in downtown DC the other day, emerging from the Gallery Place Metro station. There were half a dozen National Guardsmen standing around looking at their phones and looking bored. Welcome to the semiquincentennial in the nation’s capital in the land of the “occupied” and the home of the not so brave bravado president.

This was the Trumpian delusionary prelude to the nation’s 250th anniversary. His 50-state fair on the Mall was drawing sparse crowds, there were problems with electricity, delays on security lines and food concessions running out of refrigerant. Many states had opted out of the whole affair along with many entertainers, once they learned of its partisan rather than patriotic nature.

Trump had declared himself as always the main attraction: He would give the major speech to rally his MAGA followers if not the country at large. The whole affair stood in sharp contrast to prior Fourths of July and even to the beleaguered Bicentennial of 1976, in which, as a Washington Post reporter, I had a role.

Looking back

Some commentators have recalled the 200th anniversary as a downbeat affair, coming in the wake of Watergate, Nixon’s resignation and the humiliating defeat and withdrawal from the ill-conceived war in Vietnam. But having covered the roller coaster ride that preceded the actual anniversary, I have a different take.

A few weeks after the June 1972 Watergate break in, the Post was the recipience of boxes of internal documents from the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, and I was assigned to sort it all out. What emerged was a series of articles documenting politics, corruption and commercialism in the ARBC. The series ran in August 1972, in the midst of George McGovern’s ill-fated presidential campaign. Though it was front page news, it seemed to have little impact. McGovern and his campaign took note, but very passively. It did not move his needle.

I was, frankly, disappointed at the time that my stories seemed not to “have legs,” as we say in the news business. But a little under the radar it did. There was bipartisan criticism of the commission, and Congress replaced it with a far less political American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. Appropriated Bicentennial funds would then be distributed to state and local groups across the country. Sure, there were regional differences, and biases, but it was as close to a grass-roots commemoration as could happen during the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period.

The People’s Bicentennial Commission, the source of the document dump, held a small rally at the Capitol, headlined by Jane Fonda, and attracting far fewer than its organizers had predicted or claimed. Similarly, the National Socialist White People’s Party, with a permit for 1,000, turned out about 50 brown-shirted, helmeted members for its Lafayette Park “Bicentennial rally.” It was my job to cover both.

The fireworks, of course, were the main event. From parked cars lined up on the George Washington Parkway and from a flotilla of boats on the Potomac, and, at the Washington Monument and the Mall, thousands enjoyed the fireworks display. My main memory from the evening was of post-fireworks crowded buses and traffic jams, and walking with hundreds of others from the downtown up 16th Street seven miles to where I was then living in the Shepherd Park neighborhood of Northwest DC.

A celebration to remember

It was indeed a celebration. The Republic had survived the Watergate scandal and a presidential resignation. An unelected President Ford had declared “our long national nightmare” over. Vietnam was also in the rear view mirror, though its legacy would linger on. There would be difficult times and challenges ahead we could not then foresee. But for a brief time, the country was not deeply divided, and there was an era of good feelings, when the state of the nation for the moment at least seemed secure.