It's Official: Nixon Is the Worst - By Charles P. Pierce - Esquire

[WillyT]

It's Official: Nixon Is the Worst
By Charles P. Pierce - Esquire
June 10, 2014

My buddy Jack Farrell, whose Tip O'Neill and Clarence Darrow bios are both more than worth your time, especially the latter, in which I learned that Darrow's ashes were simply scattered unceremoniously into the Chicago River, is presently at work on a biography of Richard Nixon, aka History's Yard Waste. Jack's got a piece in the magazine version of Tiger Beat On The Potomac that is enough to make you want to dig up that scrimey old bastard and conduct a new Cadaver Synod that ends up with Nixon's remains floating down the Potomac in a sack.

For years now, it has been accepted as one of those historical facts that we don't like to think about much that, in 1968, working through anti-Communist extremist Anna Chennault, the Nixon campaign actively sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks, convincing the South Vietnamese to bail on them in the hopes of getting a better deal from a President Nixon, and to avoid an "October Surprise" peace deal that might have benefitted his vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. Johnson found out about this treasonous double-dealing and, infuriated as only he could be, ordered the wiretapping of (among other things) the Nixon campaign plane. For reasons known only to him, LBJ declined to share this information with poor Humphrey, who lost that fall's election to Nixon by .7 percent of the popular vote. Nixon kept the war going long enough to get re-elected in 1972, tearing the country apart in the process, and eventually adding 22,000 names to that black wall in Washington, before agreeing to virtually the same deal Johnson nearly cut four years earlier.

And...

Anyway, Jack's found even more evidence that Nixon was guilty of complicity in at least 22,000 American deaths.

Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says "there is no question" that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected. Nixon's campaign manager, John Mitchell, "was directly involved," Huston tells interviewer Timothy Naftali. And while "there is no evidence that I found" that Nixon participated, it is "inconceivable to me," says Huston, that Mitchell "acted on his own initiative."

More: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Huston_Plan_Is_Back

[indepat]

1. Gotta believe some will do absolutely anything to gain/retain power

[Uncle Joe]

2. Nixon of course would also go on to pardon war criminal Calley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley


William Laws Calley, Jr.[1] (born June 8, 1943) is a former United States U.S. Army officer found guilty of murdering hundreds of unarmed, innocent South Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai Massacre on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War. After several reductions, Calley’s original sentence of life in prison was turned into an order of house arrest, but after three years, President Nixon reduced his sentence with a presidential pardon. [2][3]

(snip)

The events in My Lai had initially been covered up by the U.S. Army. [8] In April 1969, nearly thirteen months after the massacre, Ron Ridenhour, a G.I. who had been with the 11th Brigade, wrote letters to the President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense. In these letters Ridenhour described some of the atrocities by the soldiers at My Lai that he had been told about.

Calley was charged on September 5, 1969 with six specifications of premeditated murder for the deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians near the village of My Lai, at a hamlet called Son My, more commonly called My Lai in the U.S. press. As many as 500 villagers--mostly women, children, infants, and the elderly--had been systematically killed by American soldiers during a bloody rampage on March 16, 1968. Upon conviction, Calley could have faced the death penalty.

On November 12, 1969, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story[9] and revealed that Calley was charged with murdering 109 Vietnamese.[10]

Thanks for the thread, WillyT.

[HughBeaumont]

34. I don't know what's more despicable . . . .

. . . Calley, his actions or the fact that those actions later received 5000 telegrams to the White House . . . IN SUPPORT OF THEM.

[young_at_heart]

3. Just finished watching "All the President's Men".....worth revisiting!

The corruption was on quite an enormous scale.....and they got away with it for a long time.

[lpbk2713]

4. He had an equally corrupt VP in Spiro T Agnew

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Agnew#Resignation

Although admittedly Agnew was a small timer compared to Darth Cheney.

[rhett o rick]

5. Nixon was a small timer compared to Darth Cheney's Iraqi War deaths. nm

[lpbk2713]

6. Certainly

Cheney could make them all look like amateurs.

[lakercub]

13. Sure, but...

Cheney and Rumsfeld were some of those that got their start under Nixon. The Nixon administration gave birth to what became Reagan's incredibly criminal administration and then the two Bush administrations.

W and Reagan were far worse...but Nixon's administration was the beginning of the modern awful republican party.

[rhett o rick]

16. Yes I will give you that. Let's agree that they are all a bunch of "crooks". nm

[Uncle Joe]

18. Precisely, Nixon was the toxic swamp from which all those that came to follow, slithered from. n/t

[truebluegreen]

19. Not if you add in the deaths on the Vietnamese side.

Between Darth Cheney and that rat bastard Nixon it is really hard to judge which was more evil.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

29. Tru dat, but Cheney was a minor leaguer compared to Reagan & the evil that a-hole brought to bear.

[dirtydickcheney]

7. Never can tire of this one regarding Nixon:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

[rhett o rick]

21. Thank you. I have never seen that. nm

[malaise]

23. Thanks for this

Welcome to DU

[WI_DEM]

8. Didn't Reagan sabatoge Carter's efforts to get the Iranian hostages home?

before the 1980 election?

[yellowcanine]

10. There was suspicion of that and a lot of talk but could never be proven.

But who knows what might turn up in another 20 years or so.

[catbyte]

20. And let's not forget the Challenger explosion because Reagan's people wanted the launch

to coincide with the SOTU speech that night. Just one despicable act out of many. Then there was not uttering the word "AIDS" for years. Or creating the genesis of today's income inequality. Or taking credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or ketchup is a vegetable. Or union busting. There were so many egregious acts to choose from during the 8 years we had to suffer that happy horror.

[kairos12]

26. Or getting all those Marines killed in Beirut.

[Octafish]

15. Big Time: The October Surprise

Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
May 6, 2010

A Russian government report, which corroborated allegations that Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980, was apparently kept from the Democratic chairman of a congressional task force that investigated the charges a dozen years later.

Lee Hamilton, then a congressman from Indiana in charge of the task force, told me in a recent interview, “I don’t recall seeing it,” although he was the one who had requested Moscow’s cooperation in the first place and the extraordinary Russian report was addressed to him.

The Russian report, which was dropped off at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Jan. 11, 1993, contradicted the task force’s findings – which were released two days later – of “no credible evidence” showing that Republicans contacted Iranian intermediaries behind President Carter’s back regarding 52 American hostages held by Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government, the so-called October Surprise case.

I was surprised by Hamilton’s unfamiliarity with the Russian report, so I e-mailed him a PDF copy. I then contacted the task force’s former chief counsel, attorney Lawrence Barcella, who acknowledged in an e-mail that he doesn’t “recall whether I showed the Russian report or not.”

In other words, the Russian report – possibly representing Moscow’s first post-Cold War collaboration with the United States on an intelligence mystery – was not only kept from the American public but apparently from the chairman of the task force responsible for the investigation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/050610.html

MORE:

http://consortiumnews.com/the-new-october-surprise-series/

[rhett o rick]

17. Thanks for posting Mr. O. nm

[MrScorpio]

9. I'm a lefty Dem lover because of Tricky Dick

He taught me to be suspicious of all Republicans.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. Dick Nixon before Nixon dicks you. nt

[Octafish]

12. Truth that held until Reagan...then Poppy Bush...then Smirko Bush.

Each of whom was successively much, much worse than his, or its, predecessor.



Traitors, all.

[eridani]

25. Don't change Dicks in the middle of a screw

Vote for Nixon in '72. Actual bumpersticker commissioned to a print shop where I was employed that year.

[Octafish]

30. That's a great bumpersticker, eridani.

The sexiest man in the USA.

[JackRiddler]

22. So in another dozen years do we get the same for Papa Bush?

and the October Surprise plot of 1980?

[Octafish]

31. We got all that now.

Robert Parry covered it. Frontline broadcast it. PBS got the re-boot. And investigative reporting in the USA, the ziggy.

[IkeRepublican]

24. True, Nixon was a small timer comparitively

But, you can't deny he was the big kick start to a lot of the bullshit we're stuck with today - politically and economically.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

27. Ah, Nixon.

Where to begin?
I rated him the worst in my lifetime in a poll someone had up a while back. As I said then, "You never forget your first Republican."
He was originally a "Rockefeller Republican", which stood, at that time, for a moderate, along the lines of, say, Jacob Javits. After being in the wilderness for a while after losing, he came back by assisting the Republicans in the Congressional races of 1966, and was credited with a much better than expected showing for them that year.
In 1968, George Romney was the man for Rockefeller (father of Mitt). But he said one too many stupid things and his candidacy imploded. Nixon stepped into the vacuum and did Rockefeller the favor of running.
He birthed the "Southern Strategy". He figured out the South was up for grabs in a way it had never been before because of LBJ's backing of civil rights. "Law and Order"; that was the dog whistle that year.
He was right about that, and what Wallace didn't take that year, he did. Either way it was unavailable to the Democrats, and has never been available to them again.
You've already covered his obstruction of the peace talks that year.
Once in office, he expanded the war, carpet bombing Cambodia and destabilizing it, ousting Sihanouk and his despised neutrality, and putting in Lon Nol, thereby energizing what had up to then been only a desultory rebellion in the jungle by the Khmer Rouge. We lost the war anyway, and as a direct result of his carpet bombing fueled destabilization, the savages who ran the Khmer Rouge came into power and did what they did to that country. Their only sin was being in the way of Nixon's "honorable peace".
In Chile, he destabilized the Allende government, bringing in Pinochet.
At home, Mitchell instituted "no-knock", the infamous policy of making it legal for the police to barge in on a house they had a warrant for, guns blazing if they felt like it. Fred Hampton was murdered in Chicago by the police there, in a raid that took place under that policy.
Then there was Watergate and all that.
I'm sure there's lots more, but it's been a long time, can't remember everything.

[Octafish]

32. Mitt's dad imploded because he said the Pentagon had ''brainwashed'' him re Vietnam.

Michigan Governor George Romney toured South Vietnam in 1968 and returned to the USA convinced the war was completely different from what had been pictured on the tee vee and in the noosepapers. Moreover, it was totally unwinnable. He dropped out of the front-runner status to dropped out of the race the same day it hit, the media firestorm was so big, centered, strangely, not on what he found in Vietnam, at such variance with what Washington and the media were reporting; rather coverage focused upon his mental stability for claiming to have been "brainwashed." For a guy to tell the truth was crazy.

PS: Great post, Benton D Struckcheon. Outstanding memory, yours!

[Benton D Struckcheon]

33. Thanks, but I cheat, sort of.

Every Prez election cycle I read Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, simply because it's the best book ever written on politics. (Just changed my sig line to something Martha Mitchell said that's in that book; it's the most accurate political prediction ever made by anyone, ever. On page 465 in the version I have. Pages 350 to 359, where he describes getting caught up in Nixon Youth floor demo at the Republican Convention, is probably the funniest stretch of political writing ever put to paper.)
Sometimes I throw in Ted White's Making of the President 1968 too, which is where the background on what Nixon did leading up to 1968 comes from.
Personally, I was only dimly aware of politics until 1972. I was only 15, but I had a brother who was 17, and who would be eligible for the draft very soon. Needless to say, this was a concern. It's hard for people growing up today to realize, but Vietnam was ALWAYS in the background back then, and at 15 I was old enough to start worrying about myself too. That war, by that year, had been going on for seven years, longer if you go back to when there were only "advisors", and as far as I was concerned, it was going on forever, and there was no good reason to believe it wouldn't still be dragging on when I hit 18, never mind my brother. (My brother told me a few years ago that my parents had actively planned for him to go to Canada if his number came up in the draft. Shocked me. I didn't know anything about that at all.)
When Watergate happened, I thought the Prez had to be in on it, and I was amazed no one was paying much attention to it. Thompson's book barely mentions it, which shows you that when it happened, it was considered a minor incident. Like they say, it wasn't the crime, it was the cover-up.
For some reason I don't remember anymore, I was home when a lot of the Watergate hearings were televised, and I watched as many of them as I could. I figured it was inevitable they'd get to Nixon, it was so obvious to me that he was at the center of all of it.
In the end, my brother got lucky with the draft, and the war ended the year I turned 18. I wound up falling into that short stretch of years where you didn't even have to register with the Secret Service. The most surreal thing I remember from back then is the advertisements on TV for kids my age to enlist in the now all-volunteer army. Who the heck would ever actually volunteer, I remember thinking?

[Initech]

28. "Nixon with charisma? I could rule the universe!"

[NBachers]

35. A Monster from the Id is still mocking us from the abyss . . .