Was Richard Nixon That Bad?

[Squink]

@Curtis LeMay

Nixon was not emperor of the Republican Party

Snerk.
Nixon was a smart guy, who saw Reagan for what he was, a threat to his party.
You don’t actually think the guy who formed CREEP, would slip gracefully into the night and allow Reagan to undo all his great works, do you?
No one willingly puts their life work in the hands of a dude with “limited mental capacity”, and that’s what Nixon felt Reagan was.
Of course, he was right, but that’s another thread.

Had Nixon remained powerful we’ve probably been looking at John Connally or Harold Stassen come 1980. Heck if you revise your history far enough, maybe even Spiro T. Agnew!

[Camus]

@Starving_Artist

It was still something said in an effort to justify actions that had no other justification at the time and not a cornerstone of his actions in office.

As listed by the numerous examples throughout this thread (but particularly demonstrated by that quote), corruption was clearly a cornerstone of his actions in office.

If he was in denial about it why would he apologize? You’re accusing him of two conflicting things here, either one of which would obviate the other.

It is not contradictory to note that not only does someone not apologize for their wrongdoings but doesn’t recognize that they committed any wrongdoings in the first place. People - and politicians particularly - don’t apologize for their wrongdoings while recognizing they did something wrong all the time. Similarly, people deny they did anything wrong while still apologizing for their actions all the time as well (usually by using words like “regretful” or using the passive voice so that the word “I” is never used).

In either case, you’re not even addressing the main points in my or anyone else’s posts. In other words, you’re not debating. Can you counter or defend any of the illegal actions and/or abuses of power that were overseen and committed by Nixon?

[Starving_Artist]

Nah, I’m getting ready to bail for the night. But having said that I disagree with your characterization of my activity in this thread. The OP asks if Nixon was really “that bad”, not “Let’s debate Nixon’s actions and abuse of power”. And while I can see how they may seem the same to you, they’re really not. I’ve been trying to give a perspective on Nixon based on how I think of him and to give an alternative explanation for some of his statements and actions while in office, and to point out some of the many things he did that were good. Frankly I don’t see how my posts have been that much different than many of the negative posts that have been being made here about him which are not “debaterly” in content either but which you seem to have no objection to.

[Little_Nemo]

Nixon used government agents to influence his own re-election. That’s a direct fundamental threat to democracy. Nothing good he did could have made up for doing that.

[kidneyfailure]

Yes, Curtis, as hard as it may be for you to grasp, Nixon was really that bad. The American people are, by and large, a fairly cynical bunch who accept the fact that their presidents will probably be at least somewhat corrupt as long as said president doesn’t screw things up too much. Even with all that, Nixon still had to publicly reassure the American people that he wasn’t a crook. In other words, a people who automatically assume their leaders to be crooked were so aghast at the actions of this particular president that they actually needed to clarify whether he was just your typical corrupt president or the cartoonish supervillian he seemed to be.

[China_Guy]

@Curtis LeMay

I am merely engaging in plausible alternate history speculation posited from the trends of the '70s.

curtis, with all due respect, “plausible” alternate history speculation is not a cite, a fact or even a legitimate debating point. You’ll probably spend many a night and consume cases of beer when you’re old enough on historical speculation, but that still doesn’t make it real. It’s bar babble. I for one am getting mighty tired of the “South Viet Nam could have won except for lack of librul spine” or “Chiang Kai-shek could have driven the communists into the desert if it weren’t for that whinny democrat” ad nausem.

[adhay]

@Curtis LeMay

… George HW Bush hadn’t risen to national prominence by '76 for instance.

His name may not have been a household word but he was the Bush family Capo di tutti capi and had been a been a powerful second tier player for decades. In the wake of Watergate in which he as a Nixon insider had been somewhat tarnished, HW managed to jockey himself into the directorship of the CIA, more or less by threatening to run for Vice-President in '76. Find the whole story here http://www.the7thfire.com/bush15.htm

The Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones crowd counterattacked in favor of Bush, mobilizing some significant resources. One was none other than Leon Jaworski, the former Watergate special prosecutor. Jaworski’s mission for the Bush network appears to have been to get the Townhouse and related Nixon slushfund issues off the table of the public debate and confirmation hearings. Jaworski, speaking at a convention of former FBI Special Agents meeting in Houston, defended Bush against charges that he had accepted illegal or improper payments from Nixon and CREEP operatives. “This was investigated by me when I served as Watergate special prosecutor. I found no involvement of George Bush and gave him full clearance. I hope that in the interest of fairness, the matter will not be bandied about unless something new has appeared on the horizon.” Jaworski, who by then was back in Houston working for his law firm of Fulbright and Jaworski, sent a copy of the Houston Post article reporting this statement to Ford’s White House counselor Philip Buchen.

Note that Leon Jaworski was the replacement for Archibald Cox who it seems took his job a little too seriously.

I will say no more other than, Curtis, this is not the place to have adults do your homework for you. But when we do, at least have the decency to look it over before you hand it in.

[adhay]

I’d hoped to hear from you by now but you’ve given me some time to speculate. You’re fond of speculatin’ so you say. While I was waiting for you to get back to me, i speculated that there was more in that book, George Bush - The Unauthorized Biography http://www.kmf.org/williams/bushbook.html from which my quote above was excerpted other than “HW was a Nixon insider”. On spec, I’d say now that Nixon was Bush’s insider. Another mistake, SA. Moi. My battle’s won. How about yours?

Nixon was born brilliant, made passionate by Quaker values, and for his entire life was subjected to the shit (classism) that’s made us what we are. He was among the best and brightest Middle-America (remove your hats) ever produced. Nixon’s only problem is he was born into the Bush Family Pockets.

Nixon had his rat side, that would be his political brilliance. A wounded guy willing to do anything to anybody to bring his version of Quaker to the world including take the fall for the Bad Guys and then living out his life in relative rehabilitation and, in immature minds, as not so bad.

Now, this is all speculatin’. Ya think?

Back to the OP.

Was W really bad? Not if his dad was good.Who’s in the wings?That not so bad Bush, Jeb.You heard it here.

Bush = Bad, Obama = Bush in Blackface,

For the literates here.

Chapter -VIII- The Permian Basin Gang, 1948-59

Pecunia non olet.

– Vespasian

During the years following the Second World War, the patrician families of the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment sent numbers of their offspring to colonize those geographic regions of the United States which, the families estimated, were likely to prosper in the postwar period. On the surface, this appears as a simple reflex of greed: cadet sons were despatched to those areas of the provinces where their instinctive methods of speculation and usury could be employed to parasitize emerging wealth. More fundamentally, this migration of young patrician bankers answered the necessity of political control. The Eastern Establishment, understood as an agglomeration of financier factions headquartered in Wall Street, had been the dominant force in American politics since J.P. Morgan had bailed out the Grover Cleveland regime in the 1890’s. Since the assassination of William McKinley and the advent of Theodore Roosevelt, the power of the Wall Street group had grown continuously. The Eastern Establishment may have had its earliest roots north of Boston and in the Hudson River Valley, but it was determined to be, not a mere regional financier faction, but the undisputed ruling elite of the United States as a whole, from Boston to Bohemian Grove and from Palm Beach to the Pacific Northwest. It was thus imperative that the constant tendency towards the formation of regional factions be pre-empted by the pervasive presence of men bound by blood loyalty to the dominant cliques of Washington, New York, and the “mother country,” the City of London.

If the Eastern Liberal Establishment were thought of as a cancer, then after 1945 that cancer went into a new phase of malignant metastasis, infecting every part of the American body politic. George Bush was one of those motile, malignant cells. He was not alone; Robert Mosbacher also made the journey from New York to Texas, in Mosbacher’s case directly to Houston.

The various sycophant mythographers who have spun their yarns about the life of George Bush have always attempted to present this phase of Bush’s life as the case of a fiercely independent young man who could have gone straight to the top in Wall Street by trading on father Prescott’s name and connections, but who chose instead to strike out for the new frontier among the wildcatters and roughnecks of the west Texas oil fields and become a self-made man.

As George Bush himself recounted in a 1983 interview, “If I were a psychoanalyzer, I might conclude that I was trying to, not compete with my father, but do something on my own. My stay in Texas was no Horatio Alger thing, but moving from New Haven to Odessa just about the day I graduated was quite a shift in lifestyle.” [fn 1]

These fairy tales from the “red Studebaker” school seek to obscure the facts: that Bush’s transfer to Texas was arranged from the top by Prescott’s Brown Brothers, Harriman cronies, and that every step forward made by Bush in the oil business was assisted by the capital resources of our hero’s maternal uncle, George Herbert Walker, Jr., “Uncle Herbie,” the boss of G.H. Walker & Co. investment firm of Wall Street. Uncle Herbie had graduated from Yale in 1927, where he had been a member of Skull and Bones. This is the Uncle Herbie who will show up as lead investor and member of the board of Bush-Overbey oil, of Zapata Petroleum, and of Zapata Offshore after 1959. If we assume that the Bush-Walker clan as an extended oligarchical family decided to send cadet son George Bush into the Texas and Oklahoma oilfields, we will not be far wrong.

[kidneyfailure]

@adhay

Obama = Bush in Blackface

Dude, you gotta be shittin’ me…

[adhay]

@kidneyfailure

Dude, you gotta be shittin’ me…

Remember, I’m the guy who thought no one would be stupid enough to re-elect Nixon.

[Starving_Artist]

So, given that he carried 49 out of fifty states at the end of his first term in office, how smart did that make you feel? Too bad you weren’t smart enough to figure out the realities of the situation. When a politician wins a landslide like that he has to be doing something right, and you missed it. Claiming people were stupid for doing so only highlights your own inability to accurately assess what was important to them.

I’ve heard it said that a primary human motivation is to seek out a perch from which to look down upon everyone else. How’s it feel up there in that tree?

[42fish]

@Starving_Artist

When a politician wins a landslide like that he has to be doing something right, and you missed it.

True. For example, in '72 Nixon and the dirty tricks squad did a hell of job sabotaging the campaigns of everyone except McGovern to ensure he could run against the weakest of the Democratic candidates.

[adhay]

@Starving_Artist

… How’s it feel up there in that tree?

My feet are dry so far. And you?

[Mr.Excellent]

@Curtis LeMay

In light of similar threads relating to George W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson I will ask: was Richard M. Nixon that bad a President as some people claim. If you look at Richard Nixon’s presidency objectively (without the “Watergate EVIL EVIL EVIL” bias) he was not that bad a President and even a good or (dare I say this) a great President who issued forth far more concrete improvements than JFK or Bill Clinton.

A quick look at the Wikipedia article on Richard Nixon shows the following accomplishments:

-He withdrew the US from Vietnam while still trying to secure a peace where South Vietnam could fight on and survive
-He took the US off the gold standard and his economic policies helped allevate the '70s recession.
-He established the EPA, OSHA, Office of Management and Budget, and Consumer Safety Product Commission.
-He signed the Clean Air Act of 1970
-He oversaw the final desegregation of schools in the South.
-He opened up China and established diplomatic relations.
-He pursued detente with the Soviet Union

All in all Richard Nixon had an overwhelming number of accomplishments which easily exceed whatever mistakes Nixon made in Watergate. He is a President liberals ought to admire (he supported UHC for instance) yet liberals hate his guts for not being a radical like McGovern.

Speaking as a liberal, I actually do admire Nixon for all the reasons you mention, save only Vietnam - and even there, I’ll concede that he did no worse than Johnson or Kennedy before him. I agree that in exploiting the Sino-Soviet split, and pursuing detente, he made the world a genuinely safer place. And of course, you’re correct to note that he deserves credit for much of the modern administrative state. Were it not for Watergate, he’d probably be one of my favorite Republican presidents - and I don’t think that’s an uncommon view among Democrats, actually. To the extent we dislike him, it’s because Watergate was such a flagrant, staggering abuse of power - and many Republicans dislike him for the same reason.

Do Nixon’s accomplishments outweigh Watergate? It’s a meaningless question. He did what he did. We can acknowledge the good and bad of it alike.

[Starving_Artist]

@42fish

True. For example, in '72 Nixon and the dirty tricks squad did a hell of job sabotaging the campaigns of everyone except McGovern to ensure he could run against the weakest of the Democratic candidates.

And just how did he sabotage their campaigns? Can you show that anything he or people working on his behalf did that had the effect of costing them the election?

And is it your belief that none of his opponents were using dirty tricks to defeat him?

And how did you feel about Bill Clinton trying to draw an equivalence between Obama and Jesse Jackson? I’d call that a pretty dirty trick, wouldn’t you? And yet Clinton is a rock star.

[elucidator]

Liberal hypocrisy, only possible answer. Damn, he got us again. Curses.

[adhay]

@Starving_Artist

And just how did he sabotage their campaigns?

Try this.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Squink

Snerk.
Nixon was a smart guy, who saw Reagan for what he was, a threat to his party.
You don’t actually think the guy who formed CREEP, would slip gracefully into the night and allow Reagan to undo all his great works, do you?
No one willingly puts their life work in the hands of a dude with “limited mental capacity”, and that’s what Nixon felt Reagan was.
Of course, he was right, but that’s another thread.

Had Nixon remained powerful we’ve probably been looking at John Connally or Harold Stassen come 1980. Heck if you revise your history far enough, maybe even Spiro T. Agnew!

They’d be better than Jimmy Carter and possibly get rid of the corruptions of the welfare and social system like Reagan and Clinton did while not deregulating excessively thus avoiding the current recession.

@kidneyfailure

Yes, Curtis, as hard as it may be for you to grasp, Nixon was really that bad. The American people are, by and large, a fairly cynical bunch who accept the fact that their presidents will probably be at least somewhat corrupt as long as said president doesn’t screw things up too much. Even with all that, Nixon still had to publicly reassure the American people that he wasn’t a crook. In other words, a people who automatically assume their leaders to be crooked were so aghast at the actions of this particular president that they actually needed to clarify whether he was just your typical corrupt president or the cartoonish supervillian he seemed to be.

I think he was more of a tragic Shakespearean character like Macbeth or Richard III. In fact I think America needs a Richard Nixon society like Britain has a King Richard III Society.

@Mr.Excellent

Speaking as a liberal, I actually do admire Nixon for all the reasons you mention, save only Vietnam - and even there, I’ll concede that he did no worse than Johnson or Kennedy before him. I agree that in exploiting the Sino-Soviet split, and pursuing detente, he made the world a genuinely safer place. And of course, you’re correct to note that he deserves credit for much of the modern administrative state. Were it not for Watergate, he’d probably be one of my favorite Republican presidents - and I don’t think that’s an uncommon view among Democrats, actually. To the extent we dislike him, it’s because Watergate was such a flagrant, staggering abuse of power - and many Republicans dislike him for the same reason.

Do Nixon’s accomplishments outweigh Watergate? It’s a meaningless question. He did what he did. We can acknowledge the good and bad of it alike.

Indeed Noam Chomsky has called him the last liberal President.

Also an alternative view regarding Watergate http://www.johnreilly.info/ahap.htm ( I’m not convinced exactly of it’s truth but it is fascinating)

Johnson’s assessment of Richard Nixon and his Administration is almost wholly positive. He credits President Nixon with negotiating a respectable exit from Vietnam and with strategic vision in making the opening to China. He also credits him with saving Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The economy did well during those years, and Nixon was for the most part fairly popular. Johnson describes the Watergate scandal, which eventually forced Nixon to resign, as essentially a coup organized by the press and liberal members of Congress.

Many people on the Left had long-standing grudges against Nixon. One reason was his successful red-baiting Senatorial campaign 1950 against Helen Gahagan Douglas, for instance. Nixon greatest sin, however, may have been his role in the espionage investigation of Alger Hiss, a respected East Coast establishment figure with a promising career in the State Department. Thanks in large part to Nixon, he was eventually convicted of perjury. (The underlying charges against him were pretty much proven when Soviet intelligence information became available in the 1990s.) Besides, Nixon had run against Kennedy and lost in 1960, and many progressive people still cherished the contrast.

I was in college during the Watergate investigations, and I cannot tell you what it was about. There was some minor political espionage against the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC, during the presidential campaign of 1972. The White House tried to hush it up, and then to hush up the fact that it had hushed it up. In a normal context, all this would probably have been beneath the notice of a prosecuting attorney, but presidents are subject to impeachment rather than indictment by a prosecutor. The Constitution does not say what an impeachable offense might be, except for treason and bribery. The matter is left to the political discretion of Congress.

Richard Nixon at every point made the worst of the business. He had his strong points, but he was often petty and self-pitying about personal slights. A reprimand from Congress might well have been in order for some of his behavior. Nevertheless, I am increasingly coming to accept Johnson’s position that the fall of the Nixon Administration was in fact a kind of coup.

Watergate was payback for Alger Hiss, and an expression of the fury that the liberal establishment felt for having been deprived of their fantasy of the Kennedy Administration. Johnson is probably right that the pursuit of Richard Nixon almost destroyed Israel and may, perhaps, have been a necessary precondition to Communist victory in Vietnam. Certainly it began a corrosive period of national politics, in which the ordinary processes of politics are increasingly criminalized and political ambition is expressed by official investigation and counter-investigation.

[Squink]

@Curtis LeMay

They’d be better than Jimmy Carter

Only in some future-tense fantasy world. Here where we all happen to live, Carter is deserving of the same credit you seem so eager to extend to Nixon.
Did you know that Jimmy was our most Christian president of the past 50 years?
Is that why you won’t cut him no slack?

_As a candidate in 1976 who introduced the term “born again” into the political lexicon, as a president who was criticized for witnessing to world leaders, as a goodwill ambassador through his work with Habitat for Humanity and as a Sunday school teacher at his small church in Plains, Ga., Carter has been one of the most visible and respected Southern Baptists for 25 years.
But in a letter and press statement released Oct. 19, Carter lamented the new “creedal” direction taken by the SBC. He said the recent changes in the Baptist Faith & Message doctrinal statement are “profound and revolutionary” and reflect “an increasingly rigid SBC creed.”
“I had never been involved in the political struggle for control of the SBC and have no desire to do so,” Carter wrote in the letter, which was mailed to 75,000 Baptists nationwide by the moderate group Texas Baptists Committed. He said he was disappointed that his effort two years ago to promote dialogue between SBC factions failed. "My hope was that, as a traditional Baptist layman, I could find some channel through which I could help fulfill our Christian commitments.

Jimmy Carter says he can ‘no longer be associated’ with the SBC

[Camus]

@Curtis LeMay

I think he was more of a tragic Shakespearean character like Macbeth or Richard III. In fact I think America needs a Richard Nixon society like Britain has a King Richard III Society.

Nixon’s downfall wasn’t exactly tragic. Particularly since unlike Macbeth or Richard III, he lived after his fall from grace.

@Curtis LeMay's last link

I was in college during the Watergate investigations, and I cannot tell you what it was about. There was some minor political espionage against the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC, during the presidential campaign of 1972. The White House tried to hush it up, and then to hush up the fact that it had hushed it up.

So, John Reilly, however the hell he is, is basically saying, “I have no idea what Watergate was about. So, let me tell you what Watergate was about.” Not exactly a great foundation for starting a historical analysis. Particularly when he then makes sweeping statements that Nixon’s actions wouldn’t even have been worth the time of a prosecutor. I’ve been a prosecutor, albeit not a federal one, and detailed information about someone committing a crime (especially when that someone is the chief executive of a country) is not the sort of thing any prosecutor regards as beneath them.