Curtis LeMay, for starting a thread about Nixon’s accomplishments and misdeeds, you seem pre-occupied with JFK’s (alleged) misdeeds. You haven’t offered much, if any, real defense of Nixon’s abuses of power. Saying “so what?” or “somebody else did it too” are not defenses.
Agreed. For instance, certainly LBJ was deeply corrupt, and often abused the power of his office for political advantage, as well documented in the recent GD thread on him, and in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, also by Rick Perlstein (that and Nixonland are companion volumes in a nonfiction trilogy; the third, The Invisible Bridge: the 1970 and the Rise of Ronald Reagan, is planned for 2014). But he still was not “that bad” compared to Nixon, for reasons thoroughly covered in this thread; and, even if he had been “that bad” or worse, that would be irrelevant to the discussion herein.
Well people rank Nixon low because of Watergate-than they ought to be consistent and rank other Presidents low for corruption or abuse of power.
You didn’t ask how he ranked. You asked if his accomplishments outweighed his crimes.
It doesn’t matter how he stacks up against other Presidents. What matters is whether his crimes were, as you ask, ‘that bad’.
I’ll give the Devil his due; he did do several things that were Good. But they do not change the fact that he ‘committed high crimes and misdemeanors’.
And other things. See post #100. See also his Southern Strategy, which poisoned the electoral atmosphere in 1972 and in the long run made the GOP, originally the Party of Lincoln, the default-party for white racists. This, and his inflation and exploitation of the school-busing issue, was purely opportunistic and cynical on Nixon’s part, BTW. Nixon was the most vulgar kind of racist by habit, but not on principle; he had no emotional investment at all on either side of the civil rights struggle.
Here’s another reason Nixon was That Bad: It is well documented that he saw very clearly, early in the Johnson Administration, that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. He beat Humphrey in 1968 mainly by running on a promise (never clearly stated, but very strongly implied) to end America’s involvement in the war. He could had ended it in his first term and the end-result for Vietnam, in all likelihood, would have been the same but with less blood shed. But, in the event, he was unwilling to end it on any terms that could not plausibly be presented as an American victory. Instead, he not only kept it going into his second term, but expanded it into Cambodia. Much loss of life, American and Vietnamese and Cambodian, is on his account. In fact, it is possible, though by no means certain, that the Khmer Rouge never would have won power in Cambodia, if Nixon’s actions had not weakened the government there.
There’s also what the Nixon Admin did in Chile. I’d still like to see Kissinger put on trial for that, one day.
Certainly.
Curtis’ claim that Nixon’s evil rep is all “because of Watergate” is a cartoonish simplification. It makes it easier for him to believe that his opinion is correct and everyone else is wrong.
-Regards
An evil Libruhl who campaigned for Nixon in 68, but decided he was a Dick by 72.
My Dad, serving in Vietnam in 1968, wrote my Mom and persuaded her to vote for Nixon because he would end the war. After that, neither of them ever voted for another Republican.
There was some chance South Vietnam could have survived after the Paris Peace Accords had America kept up funding and provided air support but since by than Nixon had resigned and Ford was not strong as Nixon against Congress Vietnam become doomed.
Allende was a Marxist-indeed he was receiving Soviet support (indeed won only very narrowly and much of the credit goes to the USSR sheparding of Communist and communist front organizations) and like Zelaya widely condemned by the Chilean legislature which resulted in Allende planning a plesbiscite to manipulate the populace in supporting him.
More ponies.
I guess you are talking about the legislature that “rubber stamped” the regime of Pinochet? As in the case of Honduras, I guess many in the US still swallow the lie that they unanimously approved of the dictator.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Chile_9_11_73.html
Which is worse - a democratically elected left-wing government or a right-wing dictatorship? In my opinion, democratic governments are less likely to screw up - they’re restrained by having to face the people on a regular basis. Hard to win elections if you’re sending out death squads.
But other people disagree. They think the important thing is the correct idealogy is in power and how it gets there is a secondary issue.
:rolleyes: Curtis, we’ve been over the Vietnam what-ifs in this forum many times before. There is no way South Vietnam could ever have become stable and successful the way South Korea did. SK never had to deal with an analogue of the Viet Cong – the important thing about which was not that it was invincible, but simply that it existed, and kept finding new recruits among the people no matter how many battles it lost and how many of its men got killed. Quite simply, the people of SV did not want the government they had.
:dubious: Certainly. In a republic, the people get to choose that if they want it and, wise choice or unwise, it is as legitimate a choice as any other. Right?
Our involvement in Vietnam was longer than WWI and WWII combined. “Any day now” is not a military strategy. The whole thing was a clusterfuck. It was started by Kennedy, escalated by Johnson, and prolonged by Nixon. Nixon just used Vietnam as a wedge issue to show that liberals were soft on defense, and as a proxy to show the Soviets that we were not going to allow communism to spread. Of course the USSR cared fuck-all about Vietnam and hated China, North Vietnams’s ally.
After he beat Humphrey by running as the peace candidate. The amazing thing is that he got away with it and was re-elected in 1972 – which he might not have been, if CREEP had not been entirely successful in sabotaging the nomination campaign of every Dem contender but McGovern.
Something of a hijack…but it’s very interesting to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War while thinking about the Vietnam War. It’s like the military and the politicians decided to do everything completely the opposite of what Sun Tzu advises.
Starting with “know your enemy”.
This from an old geezer who lived through it:
Of the four former Army JAGs mentioned in the Washington Post article, I served with two and was a law school classmate and friend of a third. I was at the JAG school on temporary duty as a reservist when Nixon resigned. The activities of the Nixon’s Plumbers and Dirty Tricks operatives were pretty well known within the Corps – after all there weren’t very many us and we all knew of each other through the active duty network and rotating attendance at the school at Charlottesville. The general feeling when Nixon resigned, even among the staunch Republicans and the Nixon loyalists, was one of relief verging on celebration.
The general public was willing to accept the idea advanced by some of our friend here that the Watergate break-in and the other black bag stuff and the dirty tricks, and the enemies list and siccing the IRS on political opponents was just the way the political game was played, a bit rougher and with more body contact than was usual but still part of the game. It was the release of the transcripts of the White House tapes that lost Nixon the support of the general public. They were just not ready to accept the level of obscenity and profanity in his speech (remember in the early 1970’s that sort of language was acceptable in locker rooms and barracks but not in polite society) and the general pettiness and maliciousness of his personality and view of government.
You may Nixon compare to Macbeth if you like, but once the transcripts were made public he became Richard III with a mouth like a stevedore. He lost the public then and there. It was just a matter of waiting until Congress screwed its courage to the sticking point before he would be gone.
Nixon was a man to whom much was given, who did considerable good but who wanted more and chose to do evil when he found it expedient. He betrayed the nation. Let his rotten corpse and his rotten reputation serve as an example. The man was a villain. The somewhat simple minded President Regan and the not quite smart enough President Bush (II) can’t hold a candle for him in terms of down-right deliberate, premeditated and calculated villainy.
The language may have offended people but I still say the real damage was the tapes proved that Nixon had been lying to his own supporters. It was the equivalent of a tape from early 2003 with Bush telling Cheney “Sure, Dick, we all know Saddam doesn’t have shit but a war will make our friends billions. So have Limbaugh tell his dittoheads this is a national security issue and they’ll buy anything we tell them.”
No, people hate his guts for trying to subvert the Constitution and consolidate all federal power in the executive branch, thereby deliberately ignoring his oath of office and committing treason against the very country and population he was elected to serve.
He also was a huge proponent of McCarthyism in the 1950s.
Richard Nixon was the most self-serving megalomaniacal fucking evil man this country has ever elected to high office. And for the sake of everyone on the planet, I hope that it stays that way, because someone worse than Nixon would get us all killed, or enslaved, or some combination of the two.
:eek:
What are you reading? What are you smoking?
GHW Bush was a US Rep. from Texas, first elected in 1966 and re-elected in 1968. In 1970 he was appointed US Ambassador to the UN, serving from 1971-1973. He then became head of the RNC, and it was his formal request for Nixon to step down that prompted Nixon’s resignation. In 1976 he was confirmed as head of the CIA.
He was well known nationally by 1976, having been a contender for the VP nomination that eventually went to Nelson Rockefeller.
How in the world is it that you think he wasn’t nationally prominent by 1976?