Hard to believe that it is forty-two years since the infamous “I am not a crook” news conference of President Nixon. The video clip gives a taste of the surreal quality of those times. For the sake of attempting to cover up a politically inspired burglary in a presidential election that the Democrats were busily throwing away, Nixon in 1972 embarked on a cover-up that eventually destroyed his Presidency, with his resignation in disgrace coming in August of 1974.
Greek tragedy is too mild a term to apply when discussing the presidency of Nixon. Dealt a bad hand in Vietnam, he extricated the country from Vietnam while building up the South Vietnamese military to the extent that they could hold their own against the North Vietnamese, as long as supplies kept flowing from the US and their ground forces were supported by American air power. His diplomatic opening to Red China was a masterful, if fairly obvious, strategic win over the Soviets. Talks with the Soviets helped lower the temperature of the Cold War. Domestically Nixon was the liberal Republican he always was, with wage and price controls and an expansion of the Federal government.
The ironic thing about Nixon is that he was hated by liberals and the elite media, yet on domestic policy questions he was in virtual lockstep with them, including on abortion which he was privately in favor of, although he publicly opposed it. The intense hatred went back to Nixon’s early political career where he used anti-communism to win both his House seat and his Senate seat. Nixon also committed the unforgivable sin of being right about Alger Hiss being a Soviet agent.
Getting Nixon’s scalp was a pyrrhic victory for his foes. His destruction weakened his wing of the Republican party and paved the way for the rise of Ronald Reagan and a much more conservative GOP which has proven a much more successful adversary against the Democrats than the party that Nixon led.
Yes, wage and price controls. And under his watch and with his approval we saw the passage of the Environmental Protection Act, which was a marked expansion of federal power. The opening to China served a strategic purpose at the time. But with the diplomatic recognition that came later under Carter, it gave a major communist power a platform they wouldn’t have otherwise had. In hindsight, maybe we should have stuck it out with Taiwan.
Said almost every politician in Washington today.
As I said to my liberal daughter ( hey. Two out of three ain’t bad) when she was railing about how Trump’s policies were to make him richer, I pointed out that almost all recent Democrat presidents went to Washington poor and we’re rich almost immediately. But they’re not Crooks. Give me a break.
And Nixon’s resignation gave Michigan it’s only president, although obviously never elected to either the presidency or the vice presidency, so I’ll chalk that up as a win.
Nixon, never one of my favorites, was a saint compared to LBJ who successfully bugged the Goldwater campaign headquarters in 64. Beautiful thing to have the media covering for you. If you want to see what our contemporary politics grew out of, take a long look at the 64 campaign, and almost all of it is there.
Nixon was a foreign policy expert. Chck out his interviews on YouTube. The man was smarter than the entire foreign policy establishment past and present.
Bashing Nixon for the EPA is de rigeur. However, place yourself in the 1960s for a moment. Big V8 powered cars belching exhaust….try driving behind a classic car today and the odor of the exhaust will make you ill. The steel companies spent hundreds of millions on pollution control equipment instead of modernization, partially leading to the collapse of Big Steel. Detroit was forced to downsize and to use computer technology to get more horsepower out of smaller engines and it took them more than a decade to get it right. While Nixon left in 1974, I remember going on the Goodtime II boat/yacht/pleasure craft that sails the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie in Cleveland in 1976. US Steel was discharging polluted reddish water directly into the Cuyahoga. I don’t like big government and like all federal agencies abuse their power, but…air and water pollution were big issues when Nixon was president. Near my mom:s hometown of Charleroi, Pennsylvania was…and is ..a coke battery, in Nixon’s time it was Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel Monessen Works. The raw smell of coke gases isn’t something you ever forget.
Nixon got the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese sued for peace. Has the US maintained based in South Vietnam, it would have never fallen to the North.
Unlike Reagan and Trump, Nixon was deeply hurt by official Washington and that led to Watergate. Reagan laughed it off and ignored official Washington and Trump has treated official Washington as something to be handled by controlled demolition.
Talking to Beijing was not a bad thing. Moving American manufacturing to China was a bad thing.
I’m not aware of any Democratic President since 1905 who grew up poor or grew up in the wage earner strata. IIRC, Truman’s father and Johnson’s father had suffered business reversals which left the family déclassé. Johnson married money; note also, at the midpoint of his time in Congress, members were paid a salary 4x the national mean for annual compensation per worker. At the midpoint of Truman’s time therein, they were paid 11x the national mean.
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Woodrow Wilson was the son of a clergyman professor who was able to finance a long run as a perpetual student; he did not earn a regular living until he was past 30. Franklin Roosevelt was an old school patrician with a handsome private income. John Kennedy was not patrician; his family was plutocratic. Jimmy Carter and his siblings had a combined net worth of $6 million in 1976; interest, dividend, and proprietors income from these assets would likely have yielded a distribution to each (on average) of 4x personal income per capita per year at that time. Bill Clinton’s stepfather worked in the Clinton families many businesses and his mother was a nurse-anaesthetist, a well-paid occupation that (then as now) required tertiary schooling. Have a gander at pictures of the homes Virginia Dell Cassidy [Blythe, Clinton, Dwire, Kelly] lived in in Hope and Hot Springs. They were comfortable financially. Barack Obama’s custodial grandmother was a VP at the Bank of Hawaii and had the wherewithal to give him and Mooch a condo for a wedding present. Joseph Biden’s father earned an agreeable living selling cars and real estate.
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