I have always admired him. As a foreigner he seems the last US President who was i) willing to take unpopular but necessary decisions, and ii) he was the last President who could put his personal beliefs aside to exersize his best judgement. With the slight exception of the elder Bush, none of his successors has had the same.
Read Stephan Ambrose’s biography of him. He was a man of enormoius political and physical (as he showed in S America) courage. As President, I think it would be fair to say, many of hos decisions, engaging China, getting off the Gold Standard are some of the most influential for the past 60 years. As was detante and Nuclear Arms control.
The Vietcong and other communist groups were hiding in those areas plus after the US withdrew like the Domino Effect predicted both went communist and Cambodia came under a psychopath.
Well had we done what liberals advocated and withdrawn immediatly from Vietnam the same thing would have happened. Had Nixon remained President and forcefully intervened in South Vietnam than South Vietnam would have survived and lasted to this day.
The world might have been a better place had Watergate been revealed say twenty years later when people could treat it more objectively and less emotionally. Certainly Nixon would have been a stronger President than Ford who might have blunted the worst effects of the '70s recession and malaise and saved South Vietnam.
I don’t think there were that many experienced women or non-whites back than.
from the same party that just had spent eight years escalating our war involvement.
And while Nizon may have surreptitiously sabotaged the peace talks, he was running on a platform of a negotiated peace and multilateral decision making…that’s that whole “we will sincerely and vigorously pursue peace negotiations as long as they offer any reasonable prospect for a just peace”
Nixon was a good president hounded out of office by a news media that hated his guts and had been out to get him ever since the Alger Hiss case in the forties.
He had his flaws but most never came to light until after he’d left office; they weren’t apparent in his day to day governance of the country. And too much has been made of his enemy list; I doubt there has ever been a president who didn’t maintain one, even if only in his own mind. I’m sure Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been on the lists of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to name but two), and like AK84 said, he was a man who did what he thought was the right thing to do even if it was politically unpopular.
He was a brilliant man, very highly thought of in most places around the world and by a sizable majority of America’s own populace, having won reelection in a landslide in 1972.
And contrary to what someone said upthread, he didn’t instigate the Watergate break-in; he tried to keep the people involved in it from getting into trouble. These were people acting on his behalf and he tried to protect them out of a sense of a misguided sense of loyalty.
But like I said, he had his faults too, and they were considerable. It’s a shame because he really could have been one of the best presidents this country has ever had…and he was for a while.
By the end of his presidency he had been driven somewhat out of his mind by the strain of trying to govern the country and contend with Watergate and its consequenses, but he wasn’t mad during all but the last few days or weeks of his presidency.
And then there’s the fact that by hounding Nixon from office and creating an atmosphere focused on the perception of integrity more than competence, the U.S. media is directly responsible for the infliction of James Earl Carter upon this country. This is something I’ve never forgiven them for.
Well, to be fair my old friend I don’t believe there were many women or non-white men in Kennedy’s or Johnson’s administrations either.
It seems that you are saying that the death of about 2 million Vietnamese and 47,000 American US soldiers was even less than just an statistic. No, the same thing would not have happened.
The pentagon papers showed that the US government was aware that the communists would win if the Vietnamese would had given the chance to vote for reunification, the USA supported the leader of South Vietnam when he decided to dump the reunification vote that was recommended by the same Geneva Accords that created South Vietnam.
It’s one thing to say you want information on where an opponent is getting their financing; it’s another entirely to say “Break into their offices and rifle their filing cabinets looking for financial info and report back to me what you find.”
It isn’t Nixon’s fault that his lackeys took his request too far. What did Nixon in was his attempt to protect them once they were caught.
Nixon was aware of the “Break into their offices and rifle their filing cabinets” in the early plumber action. He never took the lackeys to task, or told them that what they did was criminal. Nixon allowed it to continue.
He ordered them to find out more about other people’s finances. Call me crazy but I would think there would be legitimate (or at least legal) ways to do that.
Nixon did do a few good things during his career, and yes, he was possessed of great personal courage. At the same time, from his first election (where he fraudulently blackened his opposent’s repotation intentionally and by repeated lies) until the day he resigned, he was an amoral crook much more interested in power than in what good hings it could be used for. If invading Red China rather than recognizing it would have advanced him politically, I have little doubt he would have invaded. His “secret plan to win the war” is probably in the Library of Congress right next to the book detailing the locations of Iraqi W.M.D.'s.
To make my repeated posts, check out the Fourth Amendment. If there had been legitimate governmental reasons to obtain this information, he, or his Attorney General or White House Counsel or their staff, could have gone to a judge giving him probable cause for issuance of a search warrant.
Also, read up on why men from Robert Taft to Earl Warren, from Roman Hruska to Hubert Humphrey, distrusted and despised him well before the 1960s.
Back in '71, I returned to earth after dropping out and moving to the mountains 5 yrs before. I saw Nixon on tv for the first time as he addressed who knows but I see this guy checking out the audience reaction every time he says something, looking sideways, back and forth like (I suppose) a cornered rat and I said to myself, he’s a crook.
I voted for the first time in '72 against Nixon (who did he run against?) and when he won 49 states, I decided that they either didn’t count the votes or I was living with idiots. Didn’t vote again until I voted for Obama and I’ve come to think that I’m just another idiot. :o