He’s mostly known for the Watergate scandal but accomplished a lot as a president. Which side of the fence are you on?
Why can’t he be both?
“He did terrible things… but great…”
Nixon was the last Republican president who actually cared about the good of the country.
Terrible. His willingness to abuse his position, the acute paranoia, the corruption, the criminality.
His was the presidency that most damaged the American people’s faith in good governance, and that hasn’t been undone since.
The older Presidents look good because in comparison the recent Presidents are so lousy (Bush, Jr. and Obama)
Looking it up I see Nixon:
- Created the Environmental Protection Agency and other environmental legislation
- Ended the draft
- Signed into law Title IX of the Education Act (most importantly known for vastly increasing girls participation in school athletics)
- Normalized U.S. relations with China (before that the China we recognized was Taiwan)
- Started the process of getting out of Vietnam
- Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (S.A.L.T.) to limit nuclear weapons with Russia
- His Supreme Court appointee Harry Blackmun authored Roe v. Wade (1973)
In the greater scheme of things that’s probably true. Nixon was paranoid, vindictive, unethical, socially awkward, and probably not a very happy man, but I believe he felt that his legacy would be his one crowning achievement that would secure his place in history. By the standards of today’s Republicans, many of Nixon’s policies make him look like a thoughtful liberal. This is the guy who opened up relations with China, ended the war in Vietnam, proposed a health care reform package that in some ways outclassed Obamacare, and created the EPA.
Watergate was a kind of Shakespearean tragedy where his own weaknesses destroyed everything, not only cutting short his Presidency but completely overshadowing his accomplishments. I’m sure it hit him harder than we’ll ever know. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did. But this is seeing things through the mists of time. It’s also a fact that the man who famously declared “I am not a crook” indisputably was a crook.
Ashley Montagu listed him among the worst well-known people in history–along with Hitler, Stalin, and Himmler.
That’s interesting dougie. Never having heard of Montagu before I wikipedia-ed him. Link. I’m not saying Montagu was wrong about Tricky Dick, but judging from that entry (which we all know can be suspect) it looks like such an opinion may have been outside of his expertise.
He was a really effective leader who was totally undone by some pretty serious emotional/mental issues. Even at his worst, he was still pretty good at getting his people to go along with his more unethical behavior.
Watched C-SPAN over weekend. Had segment claiming he delayed getting out of Vietnam until after the election.
He was both, really.
Post # 5 above details the more positive things he did. Thank God he ended that fucking Draft. (Happy 18th birthday from Uncle Sam. You get to goto Vietnam.)
Nixon really did excel on foreign policy, especially with Kissinger. His playing the China card came out of nowhere. I don’t think the Soviets ever had a clue. On the other hand there was Cambodia with disastrous results.
He had a real prick for a vice president, who got busted too. These were the days of the great silent majority bullshit. The times were very divisive. Nixon campaigned as being a law and order president. I always viewed him as a Jekyll and Hyde type of character. Very interesting times to live through and on occasion, very paranoid times.
Also, I seem to remember a lot of the campaign financing reforms (currently being dismantled) came out of Watergate - Who out there remembers “Bebe” Rebozo?
Not to hijack, but Obama isn’t lousy.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? While Nixon’s administration was the most egregious, government was and has been much more corrupt, cynical, and underhanded than I think it was commonly believed at the time. It’s not a good thing to have faith in good governance if you’re not actually getting good governance. (Or maybe you mean that people’s faith that good governance could exist, but that has the same issue.)
This. He was both great and lousy, but he was fighting, most of the time, to do the right thing.
His economic policy – wage and price controls – wasn’t the best approach to inflation and stagnation, but it was an honest effort, and it did some good.
He was vastly more willing to negotiate and compromise than Reagan or GW Bush were, although Ford and GHW Bush were both more bipartisan.
(Obama would very happily be bipartisan, but today’s Republicans would vote to feed shit sandwiches to schoolkids if Obama, for some reason, suggested that shouldn’t happen.)
Agreed. What do you have that’s worse than lousy? I’ll go with that, just place the adjective “Lying” in front of it.
Hunter Thompson correctly noted that he was so crooked that he had to have his pants screwed on. His bugging of himself shows what a venal and foul mouthed creep he was. He was constantly swearing and showing his true colors in the oval office. A nasty, nasty man.
More to the point – based on my reading of Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein – he was not an honest man. He had a sincere dedication to public service and he had a kind of integrity, but his integrity never included honesty. And specifically he never accepted, in practice nor in theory, any notion at all that a politician is obliged to tell the truth to the public. His attitude was always that those in-the-know will make the decisions and “the public will be told what the public needs to be told.”
When Nixon was in the Navy he made a lot of money playing poker. He was a very good poker player. He had the all-important skill of dissembling his true position/intentions to other players, bluffing, keeping the poker face – which is not exactly a dishonest thing within the setting of that game, but he seems to have assumed it would be as appropriate and would serve him as well in political life.
“The Jewish cabal is out to get me.”
“You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.”
“Many Jews in the Communist conspiracy. Chambers and Hiss were the only non-Jews. Many thought that Hiss was. He could have been a half. Every other one was a Jew–and it raised hell for us. But in this case, I hope to God he’s not a Jew.”
“The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.”
“I’m not for women, frankly, in any job. I don’t want any of them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the Cabinet.”
“I don’t think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don’t. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional.”
“As long as I’m sitting in the chair, there’s not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. [No Jew] can be right on the criminal-law issue.”
“We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family. Let people like Pat Moynihan and [special consultant] Leonard Garment and others believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work–throw 'em off the rolls. That’s the key.”
“I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”
““Archie’s Guys.” Archie is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law, married to the screwball daughter. The son-in-law apparently goes both ways. This guy. He’s obviously queer–wears an ascot–but not offensively so. Very clever. Uses nice language. Shows pictures of his parents. And so Arch goes down to the bar. Sees his best friend, who used to play professional football. Virile, strong, this and that. Then the fairy comes into the bar. I don’t mind the homosexuality. I understand it. Nevertheless, goddamn, I don’t think you glorify it on public television, homosexuality, even more than you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But, goddammit, what do you think that does to kids? You know what happened to the Greeks! Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates.”
“You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. Neither in a public way. You know what happened to the popes? They were layin’ the nuns; that’s been goin’ on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out. That’s what’s happened to Britain. It happened earlier to France. Let’s look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn, they root 'em out. They don’t let 'em around at all. I don’t know what they do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow dope? Homosexuality, dope, immorality, are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and left-wingers are clinging to one another. They’re trying to destroy us. I know Moynihan will disagree with this, [Attorney General John] Mitchell will, and Garment will. But, goddamn, we have to stand up to this.”
“But it’s not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time — it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco. Decorators. They got to do something. But we don’t have to glorify it. You know one of the reasons fashions have made women look so terrible is because the goddamned designers hate women. Designers taking it out on the women. Now they’re trying to get some more sexy things coming on again.”
“The only place where you [Henry Kissinger] and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”
“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.”
Remember Professor Laurence J. Peter (The Peter Principle)? In that same book, there was a list of people who rose to their level of incompetence. It included George A. Custer, Julius Caesar, --and Nixon: “Author of a successful book, * Six Crises, * was later unable to communicate convincingly a simple sentence such as ‘I am not a crook.’”