There I stood, 41 years ago, at age 14, push broom in hand, surveying what I figured must be the largest slab of concrete under roof in Chemung County, N.Y.

My assigned task was to sweep it. The carpet installers were coming the following week. The carpeting would convert the massive floor into four full-sized tennis courts, plus a half-court practice area. The entire pole building needed to be swept clean of dust before the carpet went down.

I was visiting my uncle, a tennis pro who was building a tennis complex — a thriving business 41 years later, now owned and managed by my cousins.

It was a man-size job, but at 14 I was already finding my way in a man-size world. Little League’s two-thirds scale playing field was already two years behind me. In two weeks, I’d report for my first varsity football camp and, two weeks later, my freshman year of high school. Heck, I’d already helped a neighbor bale hay that summer — throwing hay was one of the hardest jobs I’d ever done.

It was a summer of scandal, too. President Nixon, in a national television broadcast, announced his intention to resign in the face of the Watergate scandal. He resigned rather than subject the nation, and himself, to a drawn-out, divisive impeachment trial.

Nixon was accused of destroying evidence linking him to a burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex. The evidence included taped telephone conversations. Some of the tapes had been erased.

“I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” Nixon said. “But as president, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time president and a full-time Congress . . . to continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the president and the Congress.”

My aunts and uncles crowded around the television, making snide comments and epithets as Nixon spoke. They’d been duped by a lying leader. It made me realize the generation that raised me trusted their parents and their presidents through the Great Depression and World War II. They fought the Vietnam War. They still grieved the deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK. Their trust of government was growing thin.

Years later I read comments by a young law professor from Little Rock, Arkansas.

“I think it’s plain that the president should resign and spare the country the agony of this impeachment and removal proceeding,” Bill Clinton told the Arkansas Gazette. “I think the country could be spared a lot of agony . . . if he’d go on and resign.”

Clinton said there was “no question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI and the CIA is an impeachable offense.”

Clinton was two weeks shy of his 26th birthday when he said that. His wedding to Hillary Rodham was still 14 months in the future.

It’s more than a little ironic that the future Mrs. Clinton worked as a congressional intern, researching the impeachment case against Nixon that eventually prompted his resignation.

Now she finds herself, a presidential candidate and former U.S. senator and Secretary of State, embroiled in an e-mail scandal that’s been likened to Watergate — that comparison made recently by none other than the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward.

“You’ve got a massive amount of data,” Woodward said in an MSNBC interview. “It, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes: thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations that Nixon thought were exclusively his.”

Woodward predicts that, like Watergate, the truth about Clinton’s home-brew e-mail server will come out slowly. “This has to go on a long, long time,” he said, “and the answers are probably not going to be pretty.”

I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since I was that 14-year-old kid pushing a broom. The Clintons sure have. So has Woodward.

But it’s evident politics hasn’t changed all that much.

Tom Harrison writes editorials for the Butler Eagle.