Best-Ever Nixon Document

Remarks from the Fray:

He was a horrible human being, but he is such a riveting character that I hardly even think of him as a real person--more like a fictitious character from an alternative history book written by Philip K. Dick. We all know that history had to have turned out differently. Nixon was voted out of office after making a fool out of himself with Alger Hiss, Helen Gahagan Douglas won election to the Senate in '50, Ike picked Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate in '52, and Humphrey was elected president in 1968, right? Maybe not, but for a man so unstable on several levels and obsessed with power and the adoration of the masses, his accomplishments are not trivial. Having read about the man for a very long time, I still have no idea what drove him. Lust for power, sure, but it was far more complicated than that, I believe.

I just loved those memos, though. I especially liked the line about how Nixon visited sick people "that nobody even cares about." Well, it doesn't make you a great humanitarian to visit sick people that nobody cares about, then trumpet said acts to the masses as being evidence of your superior enlightenment. I also loved the part about how he was such a good guy that he wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey after beating him. It wasn't like 1968 was the most vicious campaign ever (the Democratic primaries and convention were far more brutal than the general election), but writing the man a letter doesn't make up for secretly colluding with South Vietnam to boycott the Paris peace talks, preventing progress from being made and thus keeping said Senator from becoming President. In Nixon's world, though, he comes out the good guy on that one. The most impressive thing about that whole ordeal was that Humphrey actually knew what Nixon was doing and didn't say anything about it, for fear of destroying the nation's faith in government. That's a decent, upright man for you. Think of what might have happened if he had won in 1968? In the end, Nixon's great humanism seems like little more than a catalogue of things to be put on a memo trumpeting RMN's greatness. I doubt he ever did anything that didn't directly benefit himself--if he did, I certainly am unaware of it.

Ultimately, I don't feel too sorry that people didn't see Nixon's human side, because he hasn't quite convinced me that it exists...

--the_lev

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(7/17)

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