When You Think of Nixon

Watergate, right? Maybe the end of Vietnam? If you’re old enough to remember the Nixon era, from 1968-1974, or if you know your history, you might throw in a few other points of reference, like the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency, or those unprecedented trips to China and Russia. But in the end, when you think of Nixon, you’d still probably hang onto Watergate, however little or much you know about his life and times.

Since I recently visited his grave, I’d like to argue that such a diabolical politician ought to be remembered for more than the one thing he tried to cover up. Below are ten of the not-so-good, maybe-and-probably-for-sure-corrupt things that Nixon did, without mentioning Watergate at all. My guess is that a few of them will give you pause, especially after the last few years.

Number 1: In 1960, Nixon argued that Kennedy stole the election from him. He was supported by a party that insisted there was voter fraud and urged him to contest the results. There wasn’t any fraud and Nixon did concede, eventually, for the good of the nation.

Number 2: In 1968, Nixon accepted foreign contributions to his presidential campaign, most notably from Greece, from those who supported his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, a man who eventually resigned for, well, accepting illegal gifts.

Number 3: In 1968, near the end of the campaign, at a time when Vietnam could have come to an end, Nixon sabotaged a peace deal that Lyndon Johnson was in the process of arranging that October. He was concerned that if Johnson’s party managed to make any actual peace, then Johnson’s party might get more votes that November. He told foreign entities that they should wait until after the election, so they walked away from the possibility of a brokered deal, thus leading to five more years of escalating, more brutal war than anything that had come before.

Number 4: In 1969, Nixon insisted that the former president, Lyndon Johnson, had tapped his phones with the help of American intelligence agencies, eavesdropping on his calls. Johnson had done no such thing. Instead, Nixon himself installed his own secret taping system throughout the White House and increased the illegal creation of an NSA watchlist that included more than 750K Americans, often because they were public about their political disagreements with the president. He also ordered two retired police officers from NYC to tail his political opponents, most notably, Ted Kennedy.

Number 5: In 1970, Nixon ordered the dropping of nearly 3,000,000 bombs on Cambodia, a neutral nation that bordered Vietnam, an order that violated international human rights and accelerated the Vietnam War, along with the deaths of thousands more soldiers for another four years. He even threatened to use nuclear weapons and openly considered drowning 200,000 people in North Vietnam, women and children included, in order to starve their food chain.

Number 6: In 1971, Nixon endorsed some of the first “no knock” warrants that allowed members of law enforcement to freely enter the homes and properties of anyone they presumed guilty of a crime, literally without a warrant, contrary to the Bill of Rights, leading to a disproportionate weight on the black community. Subsequently, Nixon asked his attorney general to arrest and indict leaders of the antiwar movement and the Black Power movement, even when they were no threat and had never committed a crime.

Number 7: In 1973, Nixon ordered the assassination/coup of a democratically elected president in Chile as well as the leaders of other South American nations. Though to be fair, Nixon wasn’t the first.

Number 8: Throughout his tenure, after a 1968 campaign that he probably would have lost had he not interfered with the peace negotiations in Vietnam, Nixon appointed four justices to the Supreme Court, tipping it conservative for decades to come, but when the court ruled against his interests, he still said, “Screw the Court.” Ironically, even with the scales tipped conservative, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Roe v Wade. Think about that for a second.

Number 9: Throughout his tenure, Nixon frequently lashed out at the press, at college students, at professors, at protestors, believing that everyone opposed to him was part of a big conspiracy, that everyone who opposed him was the enemy, that any means necessary to deal with the enemy was acceptable, because he was the president. He even joked about dropping a White House aide out of a plane when it was discovered that he had leaked information.

Number 10: Throughout his tenure, Nixon more than quadrupled the sale of weapons/arms and advanced fighter jets to the Iranian government, every sophisticated bomb short of the atomic bomb, military contracts that involved kickbacks and crooked government officials between both nations.

It wouldn’t take much to lay out another 50 indictments of Nixon for additional acts of war, known misuses of the law, the undermining of our allies, paranoid and narcissistic attacks on the American people and the press, efforts to dismantle social justice agencies put together during the 1960s, the favoring of dictators and tyrants, the selling of ambassadorships at the absurd price of $250K, a bevy of incoherent words that forced aides to refuse certain actions, the active suppression of the Pentagon Papers, and so on. My point is that when we think of Nixon, we tend to think of the thing he didn’t actually have much to do with, the thing he was obsessed with covering up in an effort to obstruct the process of American justice as laid out in the Preamble to the US Constitution.

Three years ago, I read every available, non-redacted word of the Mueller Report, a report that found no credible evidence of Mr. Trump’s “known” involvement with Russia during the 2016 Campaign, and yet all of us watched, and Mueller reported, an obscene level of obstruction, attempts to shut down the investigation, rather than letting it take its natural, judicial course, a level of obstruction that never even came close to being a cause for an article of impeachment, even if it probably should have been.

Nixon didn’t go down for breaking the law or pushing the edge of the law. He went down for grossly abusing the trust of the American people. I’d say that should always be sufficient reason for ending a presidency. And to that end, one might argue that Nixon, and others, probably should have had their presidencies brought to an end long before they actually came to an end.

Alas, when you think of Nixon, remember that it was more than Watergate. Much, much more.