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Conventional wisdom, as expressed in the acres of admiring prose published during the past week, holds that the late Richard Nixon was brilliant at foreign affairs and a failure at domestic affairs.
But where are these triumphs in foreign policy? The war in Vietnam dragged on and on through Nixon's presidency, and when it finally ended, the terms were substantially the same as Nixon could have obtained in 1969.
The opening to China? Suppose Hubert Humphrey had won in
1968 and then gone to China the way Nixon did. Patriots
would still be denouncing Humphrey in the VFW posts and
American Legion halls of this great republic for cozying
up to the Red butchers and betraying our faithful allies on
Taiwan.
A generation later, it's still a matter of
argument as to whether we should be doing business with the
people who brought us the Tianamen Square Massacre.
Detente? If that was so successful, why the need for a the immense arms build-up that began in the Carter years and continued through the Reagan regime?
Meanwhile, the Nixon-Kissinger Realpolitik often consisted of betraying people they had earlier encouraged -- ask the Kurds.
If those represent triumphs in foreign policy, what could possibly constitute a defeat?
On the domestic side, much of his legacy is not that of the small-government conservative he sometimes claimed to be, but instead a list that a big-government pork-barrel tax-and-spend Democrat could point to with pride: Amtrak, the Environmental Protection Agency, wage and price controls, Harry Blackmun's appointment to the Supreme Court, and a guaranteed-income welfare-reform proposal far more generous than anything Bill Clinton would dare to propose.
Of course there were Watergate, and the Enemies List, and the phone taps, and Kent State and Jackson State, the first round of the War on Drugs -- Nixon practiced a savage politics of exclusion. Either you sported a flag on your lapel and belonged to the Silent Majority, or you were an un-American traitor to be denounced and maybe killed.
He campaigned on the theme of Bring us together,
and then did more to drive us apart than any politician
since Jefferson Davis.
Besides, I've always hated him because he drafted me in
1972. People told me not to take it personally. But the
letter was addressed to me personally, and it contained
Greetings from the President of the United States.
It sure seemed personal to me?
Anyway, all non-essential
federal offices will be
closed tomorrow. In essence, it's a national holiday, and
perhaps we should make Richard Nixon Day an annual
event.
After all, when I was a schoolchild, we learned about Valley Forge and Yorktown every Feb. 22. On Feb. 12, we learned about Fort Sumter and Appomatox.
So why not a Richard Nixon Day? A day set aside to ponder opportunism, hypocrisy, campaign shake-downs, brutal suppression of dissent -- a day that would give schoolchildren a better idea of the real America than any dozen homilies about young Abe Lincoln trudging barefoot through three miles of snow to return a book.
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