On Hating Nixon |
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I started hating Nixon when I was eight years old and saw the kind of campaign his people ran in my home state of Oregon. My mother was active in the Young Democrats and brought home some of the crudely produced anti-Kennedy material that helped Nixon win Oregon while losing the nation. As I grew older and became a student of American history, I learned that his slimy trail covered nearly every awful moment in American politics during the second half of the century. He red-baited Jerry Vorhees to win a house seat in 1946. He didn't just win. He personally destroyed Vorhees. But destroying one fine public servant wasn't enough for Nixon. He then went on to end the public career of Sen. Helen Gahagan Douglas by dubbing her "The Pink Lady." As if his introduction of serious red-baiting into American politics wasn't sin enough, Nixon was also an active precursor of the McCarthy era, as a blind, rabid, partisan red-hunter on the House Un-American Activities Committee, the most un-American activity in which the U.S. Congress has ever engaged. That was all history to me. But I was in high school and college when Nixon was elected in 1968 and 1972. On the one hand, we figured he was better than George Wallace. But it soon became clear he'd lied about having a plan to end the Vietnam War. In fact, his venality was limitless: every many who died in Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 was a double victim, of the war and of Nixon's perfidy, since he ended the war on terms he could have gotten on day one if he had not been a political coward. It was this very cowardice that let to his repeated attempts to shred the U.S. Constitution, for which he was finally and justly impeached. He rehabilitated himself for some, but never for me. His death resulted in the funniest spontaneous remark my wife Vicki has ever made. We don't watch the news on television, so on Saturday morning we didn't know he was dead until we saw the paper first. I saw the headlines and asked her, "What do you think of Nixon dying," to which she replied, "Seems like a good idea." Kind of says it all. |