Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery. Share In the first week of August 1974, President Nixon was talking to the wallpaper. Not the whole wall. Just specific portraits of dead presidents. He preferred Lincoln. Lincoln was a good listener. Lincoln did not have a tape collection that the Supreme Court was about to make public. Nixon was also drinking. A lot. The First Lady Pat Nixon was also drinking. A lot. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was not drinking. On the night of August 7, Kissinger was kneeling on the floor of the Lincoln Sitting Room, praying with the president, which is generally not something cabinet members do when things are going well. Staffers, Secret Service agents, and even Kissinger cried openly in hallways.…