Rate the Presidents, Installment #37: Richard Nixon

[JonathanSwift]

Richard Nixon, 1969-1974

Previous Results
Abraham Lincoln: 4.45 Stars
George Washington: 4.42 Stars
Chester A. Arthur: 3.8 Stars
Dwight D. Eisenhower: 3.7 Stars
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 3.67 Stars
Thomas Jefferson: 3.65 Stars
Theodore Roosevelt: 3.59 Stars
James Monroe: 3.57 Stars
John Quincy Adams: 3.5 Stars
Grover Cleveland: 3.46 Stars
Grover Cleveland: 3.46 Stars
John F. Kennedy: 3.43 Stars
Harry S. Truman: 3.38 Stars
James Madison: 3.23 Stars
William Howard Taft: 3.15 Stars
Zachary Taylor: 3.15 Stars
James A. Garfield: 3.14 Stars
Calvin Coolidge: 3.12 Stars
Ulysses S. Grant: 3.06 Stars
Martin Van Buren: 3.04 Stars
James K. Polk: 2.85 Stars
John Adams: 2.58 Stars
Lyndon B. Johnson: 2.53 Stars
Warren Harding: 2.48 Stars
William McKinley: 2.47 Stars
Andrew Jackson: 2.43 Stars
William Henry Harrison: 2.38 Stars
Woodrow Wilson: 2.36 Stars
Millard Fillmore: 2.33 Stars
Benjamin Harrison: 2.33 Stars
Rutherford B. Hayes: 2.15 Stars
Herbert Hoover: 2.11 Stars
John Tyler: 2.11 Stars
Andrew Johnson: 1.72 Stars
Franklin Pierce: 1.6 Stars
James Buchanan: 1.41 Stars

[SWE]

The last liberal president. 5 stars

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The last liberal president. 5 stars

Err, I think you mean socialist Nixon landed on the moon and created the EPA

(Seriously though, Nixon apologism is the worst. Terrible, awful man; and a terrible, awful presidency.)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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[Lief 🗽]

The closest we've ever had to a Bond villain as president. 5 stars.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Classic Atlas thread, and required reading:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=102162.0

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Classic Atlas thread, and required reading:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=102162.0

^^^

One of the best threads ever.

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

voting ✯✯✯✯✯ b/c this series is already a joke anyway

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Classic Atlas thread, and required reading:

https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=102162.0

Too bad he forgot, "Mwahaha, I'm a leftist who will destroy business by creating the EPA." That may be more egregious than any of those.

[Mr. Smith]

2 stars for the desegregation efforts, SALT, EPA, and some real theatrical antics.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

5 stars. A complex man with a vision, ambition, and drive. The most human President.

[© tweed]

5 stars. A complex man with a vision, ambition, and drive. The most human President.

then you have a fcking depressing view of humanity.  which may well be accurate.

what did RFK say about Nixon?  "he represents the dark side of the American soul", something like that?

[Maxwell]

1 Star. A horrible villain who damn near wrecked the country.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I could have seen myself voting 2 stars in light of the few genuinely good things that he's done in domestic and foreign policy (détente, SALT, and China were pretty big deals), but the disgusting apologism for him prompted me to go for 1 star.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

So horribly corrupt he makes LBJ look like a saint by comparison. One star.

[Blair]

Again, Salt, Detente and China made him a apt diplomat, and with Kissinger he was very effective.

But he always went kinda crazy towards the end, threatening to drop the bomb on Hanoi and lying about Cambodia. Let alone the fact he committed treason in 1968 to win the election by telling South Vietnam to not make a peace deal.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Reserved for a super-duper long effort post about Tricky Dicky.

[Crumpets]

Voted four stars even though that's amazingly generous, just because I knew how many one star votes there would be. In a purely utilitarian sense, Nixon did a lot of good for a lot of people by opening up China, signing SALT I, starting the EPA, reforming our currency, and not listening to the people who elected him by keeping most of the LBJ reforms intact. That being said, Nixon was a dangerous, racist, egotistical, paranoid nutjob who should never have been allowed within 100 yards of the White House.

[ScottieF]

He accomplished many good things - detente, China, the EPA, desegregation - and I almost want to give him three stars, but the drawbacks to his presidency are far too egregious to make anything more than two acceptable. Watergate wasn't even the worst of it - the wiretapping, the illegal bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the treason committed just to win the 1968 election, etc. I find him extraordinarily fascinating but the ultimate legacy he bequeathed to us was one of deep mistrust of government that has made any kind of real progressive change in this country nearly impossible.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

On the merits of policy, a top ten President who destroyed his own legacy with his paranoia and stupidity. Tragic.

Three stars, much like LBJ. Greatness and disaster in one.

[PJ]

1 star. He was an absolutely terrible human being, and his few accomplishments don't outweigh that.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Nixon was our most complex, interesting, and human President. I said before, and I will say it again.

Nixon said in his farewell speech to the White House staff “always give your best. Never be discouraged. And never be petty. Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” Yet, Nixon was all of these things-petty, hateful, and discouraged at various points in his career. And he most certainly destroyed himself. Yet, for all of his faults-including a dangerous drinking problem, deeply engrained anti-Semitism, paranoia, and a deep resentment of the “elites” dating back to his childhood. He had greatness in his grasp. And he lost it all, due to one third rate burglary.

What Nixon managed to accomplish during his presidency, however you feel about the man or his accomplishments, are to be admired. He was the most successful President of the 20th century, and his political genius cannot be ignored. He virtually co-opted the Democratic Party’s domestic policies and made them his own. He did this strategically to embellish his own domestic record-as he was first and foremost a foreign policy President-as well as to weaken the Democratic Party ahead of the crucial 1972 elections. His actions, however, exposed the vein of hypocrisy and deceit that ran deep in the bodies of the Washington elite. Take, for example, the Nixon proposal that ultimately became what we know today as Obamacare. Kennedy walked away from a deal, feeling pressure from the liberal wing of the party to push for single payer. The party could not simply allow Nixon to take credit for one of their oldest causes. Likewise, Nixon was well to the left of his Republican Party in regards to fiscal and domestic policy. He took America off Breton-Woods and established the EPA. He desegregated schools and enforced rather absurd policies like bussing, all the while playing on racial tensions in the south in order to win the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections.

Then, of course, there was Nixon the contrarian. The cold war crusader, who boldly took on Khrushchev in the kitchen debates and told him that his grandchildren would eventually live in freedom, was himself unsure if his prediction would be true in the long run. His actions towards the Soviet Union certainly prove that to be so; that is why he signed the first SALT treaty with Brezhnev, having seen just how dangerously close to Armageddon we came under Kennedy. He not only engaged the Soviets, but also the Chinese. It was under Eisenhower’s administration that nuclear weapons were almost used Red China. It was under Nixon, however, that Red China was opened up, which ultimately led to the reforms after Mao died and the Gang of Four was crushed. Without the achievement of Sino-American relations, the moderate faction would have likely failed to hold on to power and the nightmarish Gang of Four would have seized control, plunging China into decades of darkness.

Nixon’s Vietnam policy is a paradox. He pushed for peace by force of arms. And yet, the strategy succeeded. He bombed the Vietnamese to the table, and ultimately allowed South Vietnam to survive for as long as it possibly could. Kissinger and Nixon were well aware that they were delaying the inevitable. Love or hate the Vietnam War, and I certainly fall with the majority of Americans in believing that Vietnam was a ghastly atrocity that should have never happened to begin with, you definitely cannot say we lost in Vietnam. We won by withdrawing. South Vietnam was bound to fall, and fortunately President Ford was aware of that.

Nixon’s so called “treason” is a rather annoying argument that comes up all too often. He had a better deal for the Vietnamese and he gave it to them, and I have still not seen any definitive proof that links Nixon himself to Anna Chennault. His campaign, certainly, but as Watergate proves, Nixon wasn’t always in control of what went on around him. Very much like JFK, though at least Nixon’s goons were purely political and didn’t have their hands on the button.

Don’t mistake this post as a Nixon love fest. There was Cambodia. And there was the wiretapping. And then of course there was Watergate…..

[Clark Kent]

Terrible. Passed socialist economic policies and abused the power of the White House. One star.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Terrible. Passed socialist economic policies and abused the power of the White House. One star.

You really need to quit embarrassing actual Atlasian registered Republicans who actually work to advance Republican causes.

[Clark Kent]

Terrible. Passed socialist economic policies and abused the power of the White House. One star.

You really need to quit embarrassing actual Atlasian registered Republicans who actually work to advance Republican causes.

Nixon may not have been an actual socialist, but he sure didn't do anything to end the Great Society programs. By modern standards, he was an economic conservative.