Certainly not “liberal” by today’s standards -— but Nixon did all sorts of big government things -— the EPA being the worst mistake.
Yep. Encapsulating history gets confusing at times! Case in point, the EPA itself: don't forget that the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland caught on fire in 1967, the skies over Buffalo and Los Angeles were orange and rank with the stench of chemicals, Lake Erie was deader than a doorknob. We were in the death-throes of laissez-faire with regard to our pollutants, and the national disgrace of it was a daily reality. The EPA may have been an over-reach, but the laws EPA was supposed to enforce were the cure. Within 10 years of those laws, the problems began to be ameliorated. The problem with the EPA, like every bureaucracy, is that it never goes away -- and starts looking for superfluous targets to justify its existence. A date should have been set for dissolving the agency; but of course it wasn't.
To your point, Nixon also tried wage/price controls to deal with inflation. That was a liberal response if ever there was one. The only good from it was seeing what would happen -- and we learned that wage/price controls actually produced horrible results -- namely, shortages and higher prices.