Nomination for the greatest president: Richard Nixon

The Digital Collegian ^ | July 5, 1994 | Jeff T. Gorman

[SamAdams76]

Let me make one thing perfectly clear, the greatest president and leader the United States has seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt is undoubtedly Richard M. Nixon.

A great man to be sure, Nixon is the ultimate tragic hero of American history, and like all great men and all tragic heroes, Nixon was fatally flawed. His flaw, and the driving force behind his entire life, was the quest for personal victory in an Arena where the ends always justified the means, and losers lost all.

American politics, though almost completely devoid of violence, is just as vicious as the politics of ancient Rome. Unfortunately, angels are first to be eaten.

Fortunately, Nixon was no angel. He was a fighter. As a young man in high school, he fought to support his poor family and he fought to be on the football team. He fought to get into an Ivy League law school and failed. Nixon became the president because of his vision, knowledge and character flaws which drove him so hard to win no matter what.

The belief that Watergate was only a political problem would take the White House away from Nixon. Watergate was a victory for the Constitution, but a defeat for America's view of the presidency.

For political insiders, Watergate was just business as usual, but for the American people it was unspeakeable corruption.

Kennedy used campaign fraud in Illinois, Texas and New Jersey to win the election of 1960, defeating Nixon. Kennedy used illegal bugging, as did Lyndon Baines Johnson, who actually bugged Nixon's airplane during the 1968 campaign.

We should judge Nixon along with his political rivals and not just single him out as the only president to disgrace the office. Nixon was not going to be an angel when faced with a "political" problem such as Watergate.

Kennedy and Johnson would have handled it in the same way. However, they would have burned the tapes. This does not mean that these men should not be honored for their leadership during the most troubled time for America in this century. They were not concerned with how they treated their opponents, but they all had vision and they all wanted a stronger and better America. For that I cannot condemn any of them.

Nixon corrected Johnson's mistakes in Vietnam and "did the right thing" by bombing the communists to the peace table. Nixon ended the draft, ended the Vietnam War and brought American troops back home. He accomplished peace with honor.

Nixon created the necessary arrangements with the Soviet Union during detente which abated conflict and let the totalitarian state rot from the inside. He isolated the Vietnamese communists and the U.S.S.R. by being the first American president to visit China. Nixon fully supported Israel in 1973 -- almost causing a nuclear war with the U.S.S.R. -- and kept another holocaust from happening. Nixon's diplomacy in the middle east created the framework under which the Egyptians and Israel came to a peace settlement. Nixon was a friend of both Israel and Sadat.

Nixon was a powerhouse on the domestic front using such brilliant thinkers as Patrick Moynihan. Nixon created the environmental protection agency and enacted environmental legislation which enraged many. Nixon even proposed extending the Alaskan oil pipeline. This would have prevented the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Nixon created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and made many of the same proposals for health care and welfare reform that are being debated today. Nixon created and put teeth into affirmative action programs breaking the already rusting chains of institutionalized racism. Nixon created revenue sharing for cities.

Nixon was the most intelligent president who also made the dumbest mistake. Nixon threw some cold water on many who still believed that the president could do no wrong. Nixon did not mean to spill this cold water of reality, but he did and therefore he is the hated one. Nixon was the only American leader and strategic thinker capable of staring down Kruschev, Brezhnev, Zhou Enlai and the Vietnamese communists. Only Nixon could have accomplished these great tasks. Only Nixon could destroy Nixon, and he did.

The comeback king is gone, but his spirit will live on in America, for he embodied the good and evil of a country determined to win. To the self-righteous liberals, who Hissed at Nixon because of his strong nationalist beliefs and his unrelenting determination, he was the antichrist.

To the far right Connecticut conservatives -- and the Dean of Conservatives George Will -- Nixon was a nightmare. Surely Richard Nixon died laughing at you pouting radicals. I know I do, and I know the silent majority does as well. One day they will be heard again.

[reg45]

I voted for Nixon twice and, to this day, don't give a damn about Watergate.

Ditto!

[Terpfen]

TR's definitely in the top 5, but I'm not sure if he beats out Reagan or Jefferson... well, maybe Jefferson. Jefferson's actions didn't generally outline American behavior for a century.

[My2Cents]

I think there's a biography of Geo. Washington entitled "The Indispensible Man." I'll concur with you; Washington is key. If it weren't for him, there wouldn't have been a Lincoln or a Reagan...the nation itself might not have survived into the 19th Century. And I'd put Lincoln second. He saved the union, the "last, best hope" of the world, assuring that the experiment in republican government would succeed, moving the nation to fulfill it's original promise in a "new birth of freedom." Reagan is right up there, because when you consider the abysmal condition of the nation in the '70s, it's amazing that he was elected in the first place, and he went on to transform American politics, not to mention winning the Cold War.

Washington - Lincoln - Reagan. They're all indispensible men, in all honesty.

[Mihalis]

Clinton would have given a helping hand to keep the monster alive.

Reagan is the greatest, a true hero.

[John Valentine]

SQUID is parroting the New York Times/Washington Post line that just can't manage to credit Ronald Reagan with anything.

Mr/ SQUID ought to invest a bit of time and money into a read of Ann Coulter's Treason.

[John Valentine]

SQUID is parroting the New York Times/Washington Post line that just can't manage to credit Ronald Reagan with anything.

Mr. SQUID ought to invest a bit of time and money into a read of Ann Coulter's Treason.

[Pharmboy]

That is the name of one of his bigraphies...by Freeman, who also wrote a 7-volume bio of the General. He not only was the key for the Revolution, but he set the tone for the Presidency and the country with his courage, honesty, class, intelligence and compassion (among other things). There was no other like him.

Best,
PB

[SQUID]

amuzing

[SQUID]

Kennedy showed how weak

[stop_fascism]

Really. How? During his short term the following occured: Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missiles, Vietnam, withdrawing missiles from Turkey, and the Berlin Wall. Kennedy was a serious anti-communist, just not an effective one.

[laconic]

Kennedy showed how weak the Russians were? Khruschev got exactly what he wanted from Kennedy -- the complete withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. I don't call that a sign of "strength". Perhaps you forget the Bay of Pigs, the massive increase in the US forces in Vietnam, and the sanctioned murder of the Diem brothers that ensured there would never again be a stable government in South Vietnam. Why is it, by the way, that the Kennedy archives are the only presidential papers not open to the public and when bits and pieces are opened up, its at the discretion and after the review of such "distiguished neutral historians" as Arthur Schlessinger? What have they got to hide?

[SQUID]

1) In 1962, the Soviet had fewer than fifty bombers and missiles that could hit the United States. We had more than five hundred.
2) the crisis was resolved because the United States forced the Soviet Union to back down.

3)27th October – Before Kennedy could reply to the first, a second letter from Khrushchev was received demanding that USA removed their missiles from Turkey. Kennedy refused to remove the American missiles in Turkey because he felt a deal over the missiles would damage American prestige. Instead he replied to the first letter promising to lift the naval blockade and not invade Cuba as long as all the missiles in Cuba were removed and none more installed there. The presidents brother informed the Russian ambassador (evening of 27th October) that the president had considered removing the missiles from Turkey for some time.
4) So, neither the Turks nor NATO wanted them out, so action had not been taken to get them out. But in a critical meeting in the president’s office a small group of six or seven of were present -- they all agreed that they, the missiles, were a pile of junk militarily and they should get them out of there, but because of the way in which action to remove them under the threat of Soviet pressure – the way in which that would be interpreted as weakness by the Turks and by NATO, they could not make it part of the agreement.

So the president agreed, and he told Bobby to tell Dobrynin that he agreed to pledge he would not invade Cuba in return for Khrushchev taking Soviet missiles out of Cuba. And, in addition, Dobrynin could tell Khrushchev that unilaterally – not part of an agreement, but unilaterally -- he was going to take the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey and replace them, in effect, by Polaris submarines off the coast of Turkey. So that was the deal. It was not an agreement; it was a statement of unilateral action.

[laconic]

However you phrase it, its the same agreement and effect and no amount of apple polishing and semantics by the incompetent McNamara, waterboy Sorenson and the other hagiographers from the presidential staff will make it other than what it was. It is well accepted that it was a one-for-one agreement: withdraw your missiles in Cuba and we'll withdraw ours from Turkey (this by the way, was a little detail that only appeared in the public domain months after the supposed "back-down" splashed all over the media in time for the 1962 congressional elections). I don't dispute the US 10-1 missile advantage, which with the promise on removing the Turkey missiles probably spurred Khrushchev to agree and would have made any war with Russia a bit one-sided; but then again, wasn't it JFK who campaigned in 1960 on the supposed "missile gap" caused by the Soviet numerical "advantage" over the US? I grant that the overall result could have been much, much worse but it was hardly the "winner take all staredown" that the press and the JFK legacy keepers like to project.

[stop_fascism]

So, communism got a permanent base in the Western Hemisphere which it has used to foster revolution in South and Central America. You see this as a victory?

[Austin Willard Wright]

Foreign policy good? When Nixon made his deal to end the Vietanamese war in 1973, he did it on the same terms which were available to him in 1969. Meanwhile, tens of thousand of Americans died in the interim.

[SQUID]

All of this is what you were told is the truth.

[laconic]

No, its empirical fact. And just who was it that said in his inaugural address: "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, go any place ... in the defense of liberty" while his sycophants have spent the past forty years slavishly covering up for his very substantial role in making Vietnam a debacle?

[laconic]

Richard Nixon didn't PUT 525,000 troops in Vietnam; they were there when he took office from a self-described "tough guy" (LBJ who was once quoted, "these are all MY helicopters, boy", apparently ignoring the fact that the taxpayers foot the bill, not corrupt lifetime politicians) who panicked over the failure of his and McNamara's strategy in March 1968 and ran out of the White House back to Texas with his tail tucked between his legs.

[Austin Willard Wright]

I never said he "put" them there only that he passed up a deal in 1969 (on the same or even better terms than the one in 1973) which would have allowed us to withdraw then without losing additional thousands as we did between 1969 and 1973. This has been pointed out by Christopher Hitchens. If you think, Hitchens is wrong, I am all ears. If true, however, it certainly ranks as a terrible foreign policy failure.

BTW, I don't disagree that much of Nixon's other foreign policy decisions were good.

[laconic]

I stand corrected; my apologies.