Excellent rlmorel, and I would like to point out two items about Nixon that still put him in a “leftist” box. One, he opened up trading with China, even though they were communists at that point. He actually created China’s economy. Secondly, he took the US off the gold standard, which meant that the dollar had practically nothing backing up its value. I’m one of those that still detests tricky Dick and the enhancement of the DS to cover up illegalities in the name of “national security”.
I understand we may disagree on Nixon-I don’t put him in a “Leftist box” for several reasons, though I suspect you and I will fully agree that the creation of the EPA and Price Controls were two things that otherwise would wholly put him in that box.
I am inclined to give Nixon a pass on his policy with China. I understand why people don’t, but my view is (having read his rationale) that he was opening a door with Communist China to drive a wedge between the ChiComs and the Soviets.
We forget that Reagan’s approach to the Soviets was radically different (his view that the Soviets should be defeated, rather than “lived with” with things like “detente”) than what had been practiced by the Free World since 1945.
I recall how the Left (and the Right, too) had the vapors because Reagan called them “The Evil Empire” and advocated facing them down and destroying their support system rather than living with them.
So, in my view, Nixon could not have foreseen what we have today with Communist China, which the Left (with help from many on the Right) handed our entire industrial base to them, lock, stock, and barrel. I forgive him that. Heck, I sure didn’t see that coming. And he had Kissinger advising him, someone I distrusted from the start, and as the years went on, distrusted even less, so that today, I view him fully as a globalist, and as a Conservative, that isn’t a great thing to view people as.
Also, I will always be grateful to Richard Nixon for two things in particular: his role in the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury, and his bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, and the mining of the Haiphong Harbor in 1972. We should have done that in 1966. He was the one who finally brought our POW’s home, and I was at Andrews AFB to greet a planeload of them in 1973 when they arrived after being released, so I do view him differently.
And, in the end, Richard Nixon did love his country.
I never, ever saw him as a grifter like the Clintons, Obamas, and Bidens.
If he made mistakes (and he did) he did it because he was the first President to deal with Leftists who were unashamedly coming out of the closet to fight dirty. (I don’t count LBJ, because they hadn’t yet begun to fully surface by 1968, IMO)
So I am less harsh on Nixon than many might be. But we can disagree on these points, I think.