Happy Anniversary Watergate Break-In...

[vision63]

I take part of that back. Republicans would like for him to die one day after January 20, 2025.

[Speedy]

pdq wrote:
[quote=vision63]

Tho Nixon actually governed. "Hey, lets do something that can improve American lives."

When he was campaigning, he said he had “a secret plan to end the war”, while he was secretly twisting South Vietnamese arms to not end the war (as Johnson was belatedly trying to), so that the Dems would lose the ‘68 election. Twenty thousand more US soldiers died after he took over; God only knows how many Vietnamese. It’s hard to imagine the eventual outcome could have been worse.

He helped foster the coup against Chile’s democratically elected Allende. His military replacement, Pinochet, ruled that country with an iron fist for nearly 20 years.

Many people have forgotten, but the 60’s were also a time of solid economic growth, which by the end of Nixon/Ford had been transformed into stagflation. Nixon plus Ford had the worst 2-term market returns since the Great Depression (only to be surpassed by Dubya).
And yet he swamped the Democrat. BTW, my first ever mark on a ballot was for McGovern.

[RgrF]

Back then I lived in the Democratic Republic of Nixonphobia, otherwise known as Massachusetts. We were quite proud of ourselves.

[Speedy]

RgrF wrote:
Back then I lived in the Democratic Republic of Nixonphobia, otherwise known as Massachusetts. We were quite proud of ourselves.

It was close in Minnesota. If one vote in each precinct had gone the other way my state would have gone for McGovern. We have tried to make amends by not voting for a Republican for president since then. Only DC has a prouder record.

[$tevie]

People may be forgetting how despised LBJ was in 1968, and how the stink of LBJ clung to Hubert Humphrey. My father voted for Dick Gregory, which was a vote for Nixon, but he refused to entertain any notion of voting for the Democratic candidate after that convention. Then McGovern came along and won the hearts of many who had turned away from the Democrats, but lost more because they found him too "radical". Our perceptions of "left" and "right" have changed so much since back then that it's tough to figure out how it all happened if you weren't there.

Gary Wills wrote a great book about Richard Nixon, called Nixon Agonistes, in which he posits that the seeds of Nixon's self-destruction were there from the git-go and that the power of the Presidency enabled his paranoia to engulf him.

[RgrF]

I'll never forget, we swapped LBJ for getting Clean for Gene in a heartbeat - of course I was draft age.