I'm Right Again Dot ComA New Commentary Each Wednesday August 13, 2014
REMEMBERING RICHARD NIXON
There he is once again—turning on the top step of the presidential helicopter and throwing his arms out wide, giving us another two-handed "V for Victory," farewell sign. After 40 years: the late Richard Milhous Nixon, the only president (Number 37) to resign rather than suffer the ignominy of removal by impeachment. One can only say that Nixon did not go silently into the night, for the scene on the White Lawn returns every ten years.
It is so "Nixon." Few men suffered defeat as sharply has he did, but there he is again, in the posture of the conquering hero, flashing the victory sign for staff, family and the TV audience in the midst of his greatest travail.
Television did not treat Nixon kindly. After he had served a term as VP to Eisenhower, questions were raised about some of his funding sources and a possible conflict of interest. He responded with a melodramatic tale about his wife's "plain cloth coat," and a refusal to return a cocker spaniel puppy (Checkers) to the giver.
Then, he was badly beaten in a televised debate by the charismatic heir to the Kennedy fortune and failed to win the ultimate prize for American politicians: the presidency. Nixon blamed his loss on poor makeup. Throughout his long and prominent career, he could never lay claim to being a gracious loser.
When he later ran for governor of California, and lost, he became the poster child of disappointed politicians, bitterly proclaiming to the press that "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore."
Yet, when he later won the seat in the oval office, someone labeled him "The Comeback Kid."
It was what Washington police termed a "second-rate burglary" that finally did him in: the botched raid on Democratic Headquarters where a batch of bungling White House employees attempted to bug some phones in the posh Watergate hotel. The true story soon came to light—due to the information leaked to two Washington Post reporters by an assistant head of the CIA, the proverbial "Deep Throat."
Instead of revealing the true facts of the matter and firing the loose canons on his payroll, Nixon, though he may not have initiated the break-in, led a failed attempt at a cover-up. Much later, he admitted in a TV interview with a British reporter that doing so "was a mistake" — one that led some of his minions to do prison time for refusing to be forthcoming to a judge, and the end of all of the co-conspirators' political careers, as well as his own.
Nixon was so bent on history remembering him favorably, narcissism stoked his every action. After he was forced to give up recordings he had secretly made of every word spoken in the oval office, his very words revealed the extent of his paranoia and his strong desire for revenge against those whom he considered to be his enemies.
Despite his accomplishments, one of which was finally ending the fruitless and fantastically wasteful war in southeast Asia, and another, his success with the Chinese communist overlords, Richard Nixon became the most maligned U.S. president of the 20th Century.
Even after four decades, during which he made a minor comeback as an elder statesman, the fountain of suppressed revelations has not gone entirely dry. John Dean, a white House legal adviser, who claims he attempted to thwart the cover-up by advising against it, has written yet another book, and through it, "Tricky Dick," as his left-wing detractors called him, has gained another moment, however sad, of immortality.
-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller
Sample "Water Dream," an Amazon eBook novel in which al-Qaeda operatives smuggle an atomic bomb into the USA. http://www.al-qaedajihad.com
Phil's
current post can be read at: http://www.imrightagain.com
If you wish to comment, Phil
can be reached at:
k7os (at) comcast (dot) net
Shop Amazon Fire TV - Say it. Watch it.
Our unending thanks to Jim Bromley, who programs our Archive of Prior Commentaries
Learn About the Savings with
"AgainRight"