Flashback Shocker: Was Reston Part of Nixon's Silent Majority?

Part of Reston's grand ur-creation myth involves the notion that the community's early settlers were an idealistic, progressive-minded people, willing to move to the nation's first townhomes that weren't anywhere near a town in search of a new way of living, one free from the "square" constraints of lamestream suburbia that instead embraced a "mod" style of architecture modeled after the finest in socialist European design -- with an equally enlightened outlook on life to boot.

So, even as the RA is presumably tabulating the results of its recent survey, imagine our surprise when a Confidential Restonian Operative forwarded us the results from the last time they ran a survey round these here parts, which appears to have been ca. 1973. Sock it to us, fancy survey results with inappropriately skinny headline font!

Only Nixon could go to China, but only Reston could support him 89-2 percent in the waning days of his presidency. Guess even then, as is the case now, lots of people worked in the lucrative dolphin bomb-strapping defense sector. And who knows? Maybe this unreserved show of support is precisely what convinced Tricky Dick to stay in office for almost another full year. Forget about how things play in Peoria -- the real question is how they sell in Southgate.

But some things haven't changed -- among them, opposition to fancy high-rise buildings in less-than-ideal locations:

Of course, that development -- and the idea of a series of Heron House-scale high rises ringing Lake Anne -- was stopped. So maybe our predecessors were a bit more civic-minded than we give them credit for.



Update: Commenter "Bob Woodward"* has won the Internet:

I have it on good authority that CREEP was actually a covert effort to influence the DRB's early decisions. It really stood for the Committee for Reston Eradicating Ecru Palettes.

*Probably not THAT Bob Woodward. Sounds more like something Carl Bernstein would say.