Eventually, Nixon ran a very centrist presidency, not a Goldwater conservative presidency.
In many ways when Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon, in a certain way, he did speak for the country.
I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: ‘You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;’ and asked for their resignations.
In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon’s arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency.
Nixon was a crook, but he was our crook. He didn’t have the KGB do the Watergate job.
Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.
Nixon, with his mellifluous baritone, was a great politician for radio but creepy on TV.
If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.
I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.
Richard Nixon, famously, conducted his foreign policy according to the ‘madman theory’: he tried to convince enemy leaders that he was irrational and volatile in an attempt to intimidate them. But this was a potentially useful approach to foreign policy only because it was an act.
Nixon clearly broke laws. He clearly believed he needed to stay in power to protect the country. But he recognized that he was breaking the law, and he tried to cover it up.
Flattery was one of Kissinger’s principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.
He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn’t. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the ‘neocon’ description instead of calling themselves ‘The Real New Deal Democrats’ forever.
Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there’s nothing you can do about being born liberal – fish gotta swim, and hearts gotta bleed.
At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford’s constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.
I remember going through the cafeteria line and telling every kid that Nixon was in favor of school on Saturdays. It was my first political trick.
Not a season passes without new disclosures showing Nixon’s numerous attempts at criminal use of his presidential powers and in fact the scorn he held for the rule of law.
For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.
I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.
At times, President Trump has behaved far worse than Nixon did.
I cast my first vote on my father’s lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.
Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon’s own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.
Richard Dreyfuss, when we were doing ‘American Graffiti,’ was pumping me to vote for McGovern. But I think I wound up going for Nixon. I thought he could get us out of the Vietnam War quickly. Ha.
When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.
While he was president, it was popular to be a Nixon hater.
I wouldn’t trust Nixon from here to that phone.
I’m doing ‘Rock of Ages’ one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I’m advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality.
Richard Nixon was a very complex man. I don’t think he was a conservative, nor liberal, not even a moderate. He was a pragmatic politician. He loved politics.
Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him.
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon’s tapes.
Nixon probably was a nice guy.
Anyone who listens to the Nixon White House would recognize that Nixon, who was in the Navy, was no stranger to profanity.
Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
John F. Kennedy went to bed at 3:30 in the morning on November 9, 1960, uncertain whether he had defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency. He thought he had won, but six states hung in the balance, and after months of exhaustive campaigning, he was too tired to stay awake any longer.
The trouble with Nixon is that he’s a serious politics junkie. He’s totally hooked and like any other junkie, he’s a bummer to have around, especially as President.
The Nixon years were trying. They honed my judgment for everything I did later on. The experience also illustrated for me the importance of training young lawyers properly.
I think there’s been a tendency to place me in what has been characterised as the ‘moral centre’ of the film. In films like ‘The Ice Storm’ and ‘The Crucible’ and ‘Nixon,’ that’s the sort of the persona that emerged.
I greatly blame Congress, spurred on by its personal hatred of Nixon, for passing legislation in June through August of ’73 which embargoed any further U.S. help to South Vietnam.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on ‘Laugh In’ in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
I grew up in the era when Dan Rather hated Richard Nixon. He was a newsman, but you knew what his opinion was.
During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.
Call it Camelot’s revenge: the class of court scribes who made it their profession to uphold a make-believe version of America free of conflict and ruled by noble men helped Nixon get away with it for so long – because, after all, America was ruled by noble men.
Even when they don’t know who Nixon was, these shows will continue to play.
I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo – a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.
Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn’t even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty – at least in the first four years of his presidency.
Nixon is finding out there are no tails on an Eisenhower jacket.
We’ve got the NSA getting logs of every call you make. The IRS is weaponized like Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.
Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.
Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.
When you look at Kennedy and Nixon, TV played a crucial part in Kennedy’s popularity. He was incredibly photogenic, while Nixon was this scowling figure. American viewers judged him on his appearance on TV.
My mother’s brother became the undersecretary of the interior for Nixon, which did cause a little drama in my family because I was going to riots and everything, but he turned out great and gave us a nice cheque for an AIDS benefit we had for the ‘Serial Mom’ premiere.
Unlike President Obama, President Nixon was a capitalist who did not believe in ‘remaking’ the very character of America.
What would McCarthy, what would Nixon, what would Bill Clinton have done if they’d had Twitter?
Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush – just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.
