Was Richard Nixon great or terrible?

[Jonathan_Chance]

@jrock645

He’s mostly known for the Watergate scandal but accomplished a lot as a president. Which side of the fence are you on?

jrock645-

I have deleted your link at the end of the OP as juvenile and insulting. Such are not permitted in Great Debates and on the SDMB in general.

I’m also giving you a warning for it as I see you also posted it in a MPSIMS thread that Ellen took care of. Please don’t do it again.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoy your stay here.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Little_Pig

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?

One of my free range cats is named Bebe Rebozo. He doesn’t say anything to the press.

[babygoat666]

@magellan01

Agreed. What do you have that’s worse than lousy? I’ll go with that, just place the adjective “Lying” in front of it.

Bush.

[septimus]

As I’ve said before, we had three Presidents in a row (JFK, LBJ, RMN) who were “Jekyll and Hyde” Presidents. When they were good they were very very good, but when they were bad they were horrid.

Nixon seems to have been a criminal, but there were other Presidents alleged to have done things just as bad. A difference is that other Presidents were charismatic media darlings who weren’t called out for their sins. This leads to the question: How did someone as non-charismatic as Nixon rise to such high office in the first place?

@orangeapples

His was the presidency that most damaged the American people’s faith in good governance, and that hasn’t been undone since.

This is the true tragedy. After a series of great or near-great Presidents (FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ), the nation has had mediocre or bad Presidents. The change that Watergate had on criteria for candidate selection may be a big part of the reason.

[orangeapples]

@Itself

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.)

I think so, yes, that’s a bad thing. I’m not calling for blind obedience to any Dear Leader or anything, but I think the degree of cynicism that we* now possess has been damaging to the process in many, sundry ways. An example that quickly springs to mind is how often I’ve heard there’s no real difference between one party’s candidate and the other party’s candidate. That kind of apathy, in my opinion, stifles voter awareness and participation.

*I use ‘we’ in a generic sense and don’t mean to suggest it’s a universal application.

[AK84]

Nixon was the last US President who really managed to accomplish things, as opposed to reacted to events.

[spifflog]

I agree with the post up thread - he was clearly both.

Plus

EPA,
Ended the Vietnam War,
Détente with the USSR,
Relations with China

Minus

The biggie - Watergate.

But to put him in the same category as Stalin and Hitler is stupid in the extreme.

[watchwolf49]

I think history is fair to Nixon, he did great things and he did some especially poor things. Trinopus mentioned the wage and price freeze to control inflation. This in my view was the worst thing he did in terms of long term damage, as when lifted, all that inflation came back with a vengeance and the economy took years to stabilize.

I think it’s fair to say the Viet-nam war was lost during Nixon’s time in office, although there’s plenty of blame for that to go around.

Allowing the FBI to wire tap phones without a warrant, big bad thing … a thing still argued about today.

[BrainGlutton]

@spifflog

But to put him in the same category as Stalin and Hitler is stupid in the extreme.

Not Hitler-Stalin category, but still pretty nasty. Consider: In early 1968, Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks from behind the scenes (yes, even out of office he had enough influence/connections to do that; you can read the story in Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein) just so the war would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November. See also the BBC:

It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign.

He therefore set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser.

At a July meeting in Nixon’s New York apartment, the South Vietnamese ambassador was told Chennault represented Nixon and spoke for the campaign. If any message needed to be passed to the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, it would come via Chennault.

In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris - concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.

The US delegation, left, and North Vietnamese delegation at Paris peace talks The Paris peace talks may have ended years earlier, if it had not been for Nixon’s subterfuge

Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.

So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.

He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador’s phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault’s calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to “just hang on through election”.

And then he kept American troops there until 1973 – clearly he never intended to end the war on any terms that could not be considered an American victory. The war might have ended in '68, but instead, thousands more Americans and at least tens, maybe hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s lies and scheming.

My Dad was serving in 'Nam in '68 – he voted for Nixon and by mail convinced my mother to do the same, on the grounds that Nixon would end the war. They both regretted those votes.

From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson:

There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men [Nixon and McGovern], a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality – the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts – that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Nixon had in mind when he said, last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . . . At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred identical balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .

[BrainGlutton]

And here’s yet another Nixon break-in scandal that just came to light! Apparently the break-in never happened, but Nixon’s aides had to talk him out of doing it on a “thievery basis” – he wanted to “blow the safe and get it.”

[davida03801]

Nixon was a flawed character, but many leaders are. Perhaps all at one level or another. Yes he did some very good things, and yes he did some bad things.

His biggest mistake was getting caught doing very questionable things, both him and many who worked for him. Absolutely he and all there other deserved the punishment received.

However with all that said what he got caught doing was no more, or less, that previous Presidents did and that the Presidents since have done.

[Chronos]

A couple of posters have credited him with ending the draft. He did not. What he did was deactivate the draft, which is still a laudable action, but the draft still exists and could be re-activated at any time.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@RickJay

He was both, really.

This. Great accomplishments, but the Watergate thing is really a “other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” issue. That and his inveterate racism and bigotry. I’ve always admired him for attaining the presidency as a self-made man, though.

@PastTense

The older Presidents look good because in comparison the recent Presidents are so lousy (Bush, Jr. and Obama)

Older presidents look good because they got to be presidents without the 24-hour news cycle. George Fucking Washington would be remembered as a shithead if he was being panned for his handling of the Whisky Rebellion on Ye Olde News Network all day.

[Jonathan_Chance]

I’d like to see the discussion stay on Nixon - a fascinating case study of contradictions - and steer away from other, more recent presidents. Let’s make that happen.

[The_Second_Stone]

@davida03801

However with all that said what he got caught doing was no more, or less, that previous Presidents did and that the Presidents since have done.

What Presidents have ordered break-ins and cover ups? What Presidents have, while not yet in office or in office, dealt with the enemy to interfere with peace negotiations to hurt the nation for their own political gain? What other presidents have smeared their opponents as communists?

That is a really tiresome and bullshit trope that they all do it. It was back when Nixon was President.

Yes, the idiot Bush and his team planned war with Iraq long before 9/11 and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and they deliberately stopped pursuing bin Ladin and that is as bad as anything Nixon did.

Yes, Reagan traded arms to Iran, a terrorist state, for cash and hostages, diverting the cash to death squads in Nicaragua to murder the exact sort of people as his political opponents back at home, and that was as bad as anything Nixon did since Congress specifically had prohibited cash to Nicaragua and weapons to Iran.

These are huge betrayals of the trust of the American people. Excusing them by saying “they all do it” is an indictment, not a defense.

[Frank]

@Chronos

A couple of posters have credited him with ending the draft. He did not. What he did was deactivate the draft, which is still a laudable action, but the draft still exists and could be re-activated at any time.

While the current Act requires potential draftees to register (and not even that between 1975 and 1980, when executive orders by Ford and Carter respectively suspended and reinstated registration), the part of the law that authorized draft orders lapsed in 1973. Congress would need to pass and the President sign a new law authorizing a draft.

[Frank]

@davida03801

However with all that said what he got caught doing was no more, or less, that previous Presidents did and that the Presidents since have done.

Nonsense. If you truly believe this, you can cite all the others presidents that personally directed a criminal conspiracy from the Oval Office.

[spifflog]

@BrainGlutton

Not Hitler-Stalin category, but still pretty nasty. Consider: In early 1968, Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks from behind the scenes

Stalin killed ~20,000,000
Hitler~ 6,000,000 to 10,000,000

Is Nixon really even close enough to be in that category? To even be mentioned?

Hint: There is really only one answer.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@spifflog

Stalin killed ~20,000,000
Hitler~ 6,000,000 to 10,000,000

Is Nixon really even close enough to be in that category? To even be mentioned?

Hint: There is really only one answer.

I agree that Nixon is in no way comparable to Hitler or Stalin, but it has occured to me to wonder how much of the difference is due to the systems within which they held power, as opposed to their personal characteristics.

I agree with others in this thread that there was significant upside to a Nixon presidency, but I certainly would not have wanted a Nixon dictatorship.

[Czarcasm]

He was great…but the cost was greater.