I was on an oceanographic vessel off the coast of South America trying to figure out what was going on from static filled shortwave broadcasts. We really didn't know what was happening. Things seemed to be chaotic. Did he resign? not resign? were there riots, were things stable? Remember these were pretty turbulent times, market falling, oil embargo, abolishing convertibility of dollar to gold, wage and price controls, political polarization (I think even more than today). So we really were worried if there would be a peaceful transition of power since this kind of transfer had never happened before. No sat phones back then, just some small short wave radios set out on the deck, with a lot of worried people sitting around trying to figure out what was happening and what kind of country we would be returning to. BTW, we had just been in Valparaiso, Chile not long before. Where we had to walk past 50 caliber sand bagged machine gun emplacements to get to our ship, and talking to fearful Chilean oceanographers who would not dare talk about the situation, only that some of their friends had disappeared. We could see they were afraid for their lives. And now the president of the U.S. was resigning, possibly unstable, controlling nuclear weapons, and for those critical hours all we had were those damn shortwave radios.