The first place I remember hearing the expression “tanned, rested and ready” was not long after the David Frost interviews. SNL had a sketch where Dan Ackroyd played on Nixon’s re-emergence into public life with an absurdly clueless Nixon plotting a political comeback. He had two bumper stickers printed up. One read, “Tanned rested and ready”; the other, “Is it really a free country when a man can only be elected president twice?” I remember people quoting the first one, but it was always ironically.
So no, Nixon had no serious plans for a political comeback. He was politically dead. But he did sort of get the last laugh by getting taken seriously as an elder statesman, and making good money to write those 700-page books that no one read.
He deliberately forgot that, during that brief interval between the revealing of the June 23, 1972 ‘Smoking Gun’ tape and Nixon’s resignation, (a) Rep. Charles Wiggins, who had been Nixon’s leading defender in the House Judiciary Committee, said that if there was a re-vote of the Committee based on the new evidence, the vote would be 38-0, and (b) the only Congressperson in either house of Congress who was still willing to publicly defend Nixon was an obscure Representative from Indiana named Earl Landgrebe.
I still think they should have finished the deal with Nixon: debate and vote impeachment in the House, and debate and vote on conviction in the Senate, so that there wouldn’t have been any question about these things. And if Trump resigns in the face of almost certain impeachment, that’s how it should play out then as well.
Look, I’m not saying they were right, or that they were smart, or even that they fully understood the situation. But Nixon had a very real core of support among the young Republicans and the Reagan Republicans.
There was an April fools prank about it, (with Rich Little as Nixon, I think?) and as these things sometimes do, it grew legs. It didn’t go too far because in those days the GOP leadership still held a core of dignity and responsibility.
But the OPs question was whether there really were such people, and the answer is that there definitely were and are.
Beginning with Clinton? What Washington experience did Reagan have? Eisenhower? FDR was undersecretary of the Navy, which I don’t think really counts.
A term or two as the governor of a state is usually considered as reasonable preparation for the presidency.
Yes GHWB was extremely qualified, but I don’t think you can credit his limiting Gulf War I on that. Cheney was pretty qualified also, remember.