esrosedotblog

CENTURY updated

Today is Richard Nixon's 100th Birthday.

This man dominated most or much of my life, politically speaking.

I first saw him when I worked in Philadelphia and he and Kennedy were touring/trolling for votes.

In those days there were street parades. None of this is really done now. Security.

Even then, he was the most awkward of men, physically. He slouched and waved funny. His eye contact was weird.

You could feel his own discomfort with himself. Palpable.

The five oclock shadow was a real thing.

I also saw Kennedy in the flesh. He was not as "heroic" as he tended to look in the photos as the camera was quite kind to him. The camera hated Dick Nixon. So that Nixon looked shifty even in real life was probable proof that he was and not the camera's fault.

This was not the beginning of Nixon.

We knew he was a red baiter from the beginning as a Congressman. 1946. I was 11 or 12.

In my house, a rock solid Roosevelt Democratic household, Nixon was thought to be a menace to society. My Dad. And he was right about the man.

So, look. It is 22 years from that time until he is President and then another 17 years after he was impeached in 1974.

A weasel of a man.

He tried to reclaim himself but not many of us would have any of it.

The thing that is funny is that Nixon won by a landslide in 1972. Did you know that? He started the EPA, he went to China and ended the years of our isolating them, launched initiatives to fight cancer and illegal drugs, imposed wage and price controls, enforced desegregation of some Southern schools and generally did a number of things that were good. Things that today would probably disqualify him from the Republican Party.

Tim Stanley says:

There was a Nixon for every season: anticommunist hawk, peacemaker, liberal, conservative demagogue, race baiter, civil rights reformer. The second half of the 20th century was the Age of Nixon because no politician was better at adapting to suit its whims. Were he alive today, he’d be both a Tea Party favourite and Obama’s nominee for Secretary of State.

Labels: Republicans