they threw their arms around me

 In the series titled Tricky Dick, in Episode 4, there's a sequence that begins with words on-screen:

-------------- Seven days after the Watergate hearings begin, the President hosts former prisoners of war at the White House.

______________________

        And then there's a recorded phone call with Pres. Nixon talking about the event.  You don't know with whom he is speaking - it doesn't say, but you hear Nixon:

------------- "My God, the White House has never seen a party like this.  Believe me.

You should have seen the women.  

Negro girls and others.

Good God they threw their arms around me, kissed me.

[a little laugh]

The damnedest thing I ever saw!"

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        He was unaccustomed to the "rock star treatment."

        The young wives, of course, must have been overjoyed to have their husbands return home alive, and once somebody spontaneously hugged and kissed the president, others followed.

The tone of Nixon's voice in that conversation was so amusing, and kind of warms the heart, because he sounds like he was startled, taken aback by the effusive display of emotion, also astonished, and unexpectedly delighted, though a little shy about it, too.

(This happened in the spring of 1973.  Nixon was born in 1913, so he had turned 60 years old, that January.  In the early 1970s, people were starting to say "black" instead of "Negro" - but for a person of Nixon's generation, it isn't surprising that he was still saying "Negro."  And that was never a "bad word," it was not a racial epithet, it was a gentle, polite, civilized word.

        Language evolves, and that word was simply going out of style.

        Now, it doesn't seem like "black" has really gone out of style, but a lot of people have replaced it with "African American.")

------------------------ "Good God, they threw their arms around me, kissed me...."

He was clearly amazed.

-30-