Manhattan Contrarian ping
Was a kid during Watergate.
Lived it.
Visted his place in Yorba Linda two years ago. Very nice and interesting with lovely gardens and his boyhood home on the grounds.
Nixon was railroaded out of office. He was also the only man in history to make a phone call to the Moon and have someone answer!
Adored Nixon. Worked for him when he ran against Kennedy - probably the only Republican in my Chicago Catholic girls’ school. Cried when he left office. Have maybe 2 of his books. Sat thru all of Watergate, each and every day, and bought multiple copies of Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy and gave them out to everyone. For a long while, it was my “purse book”. Still believe Nixon was a great president who brought the quality of unexpectedness to foreign relations, to our advantage. Wonderful wife.
Having said that Nixon for sure got hit hard and often, the press loved JFK and after the assassination Johnson, Nixon and Ford caught much of the rebound flack. The press eased up on Carter but his policies (especially Iran) haunt us much more to this day than anything Nixon did.
They’re just now getting around to discovering Nixon and by their enthusiasm, you’d think that nobody else has ever heard of him.
I liked Nixon, especially since beginning with Clinton the democrat communists were actual criminals and I never believed Nixon was. Regardless of how bad the democrats were, Nixon was their number one hated person. Then came Trump, who I believe is hated more.
I don’t know Dick.
They hated Nixon because of his history with House Committee on Un-American Activities and his work in the Alger Hiss case.
His trying to get communist out of government was more than enough reason for the press to hate Nixon.
Because of wage and price controls butchers invented new cuts of steak without a previous price history.
Nixon. The GW Bush of the 1970’s.
I noxious nixonmaxed out when he was in office.
They’ll name the dog checkers.
Taking us off the gold standard. Wage and price controls.
Yeah…those were the days.
Since the day Nixon was forced from the Presidency, I have never had even the smallest decrease of him in the measure of what he was as a man and what he tried to do in office.
He earned a great reservoir of tolerance from me for his actions in ending the Vietnam War, particularly the mining of Haiphong harbor and the December bombing of North Vietnam by B-52s, particularly Hanoi and Haiphong.
And that esteem I held him in only grew as I learned his role in his defense of Whittaker Chambers and against the likes of the scumbag Communist spy Alger Hiss that eventually landed him in in jail for the milquetoast charge of perjury instead of espionage, something he was wholly guilty of and should have been executed for.
I have always held Nixon in high esteem because he was so hated by people I despised, particularly on the Left, and in particular, the Hippie Left, whom I particularly disliked. I felt a particular need to defend Nixon because I had such contempt and dislike for those who were persecuting him.
But I admit that as I became more intellectually conservative as I grew older, I readily accepted that Nixon was not what I would consider a “Large ‘C’ Conservative”.
Too many things he had done were, as I learned more about governance and economic policy, disqualifiers that would ever after keep me from being able to view him as a Conservative in the light we define them in today.
I will keep this great and accurate article by Manhattan Contrarian to remind me of the fuller list of things that Nixon was wholly deficient in as a Conservative (in addition to the ones I fully realized and remembered) because to me, it is important to remember his faults, all of them, and remind myself, Nixon was not persecuted for those faults in his time.
Nixon was persecuted and crucified by the Left because he loved his country and didn’t have his own self-interest at heart, but his country’s interest. And that is in complete contradiction to the Left, whose interests have not changed a whit since the end of WWII, and who have done all in their power to destroy people like Whittaker Chambers, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and of course, Richard Nixon.
Times have changed, technologies have changed, but the tactics and end goals of the Left have not, and they still pursue those same ends with the same hypocritical and anti-American tactics.
That said, I still hold Nixon in high esteem, and always have, since I view Nixon as a man of his time, in that time. He DID love his country more than power, and the Left has not a single person, not one, of whom that can be said.
Nixon would not be considered a conservative by todays standards...He put Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court for the express purpose of legalizing abortion throughout the entire country
Uh, kids. Nixon brought you price freezes, racial preferences in hiring and the EPA. He also ramped up the War on Drugs, which a lot of young people think is a heavy-handed disaster. He proposed (but it ultimately did not pass) federalizing Medicare and forcing a private employer mandate for health insurance that would make Obama blush. Those to stupid to understand history are doomed to . . . . whatever.