Nixon's Resignation: Forty Years Later | National Catholic Reporter

Nixon's Resignation: Forty Years Later | National Catholic Reporter by MSW.  MGB: I avoided the C-SPAN saturation coverage on Nixon this weekend, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I watched the second Nixon speech and the swearing in of Ford sitting in an arm chair on my driveway with the TV on in the garage (I plugged it back in) as I was waiting for my father to return with a moving van.  How could I forget such an experience?



Later biographers have found that Nixon did not really sleep.  He would eat dinner in OEOB and make phone calls while having a cocktail.  If that sounds like the description of a bipolar alcoholic, than you would not be alone in thinking so. (Sadly, I write this on the news of the death or Robin Williams, who also suffered the twin horrors of addition and depression).  While those who surrounded Nixon became criminals, the started out as enablers - which means their boundaries were gone when it was time to break the law.  Of course, both Nixon and Kennedy were once enablers of Joe McCarthy - who suffered the same way (as did JFK).  In a sad irony, Senator Eagleton abandoned his VP nomination because he was actually being treated for his bipolar disorder - however Senator McGovern knew what the Nixon attack machine - with Roger Ailes - would do with this knowledge.  I think a few hours watching FoxNews in the evening can probably give you a good idea (although their coverage of Robin was exemplary - they are good in crisis TV and on space shots.



I suspect the lasting legacy of Nixon is FoxNews and the current Republican attack machine, as well as the foreign policy of Vice President Dick Cheney, who was President Ford's Chief of Staff during the push-back from Watergate.  That counter-push is why we have Iraq as the top story on tonight's evening news.  We will be cleaning up that mess for a while and the GOP has been turned into a bad evening soap opera - doomed to fail one of these days.



This is not to say that Nixon's presidency did no good.  He limited arms build-up (albeit with an increase) between the U.S. and the Soviets, opened up relations with China (which helped it become a world economic power), ended the Viet Nam war and completed LBJ's work on the War on Poverty (thanks to Erlichman and Moynihan).  Except for his opposition to busing, he is arguably the most liberal President in his party and maybe any since Ike - maybe more so than Obama.



As for Ford, sadly, Cheney his his legacy, which is a shame for such a gentleman.  That, and letting history run its course in Viet Nam.  If he had tried to save the South, it might be Stalinist today rather than the best place to get Lobster in the world.