Nixon lost to JFK in 1960. Two Kennedy murders later, in 1968, he won.

[ucrdem]

Hmm. Nixon started out in California as a red-baiting GOP attack rat à la Atwater-Rove, and as Eisenhower's veep, ran the military industrial complex Ike warned us about in his hand-off to Kennedy. As president Nixon ran one dirty operation after another while he and Kissinger carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia to atoms. And when he finally pulled the plug on Vietnam as he'd promised to repeatedly to get elected and reelected in 1972, an FBI agent ratted him out and that was the end of Tricky Dick.

Watch Nixon lie -- Nixon vs. Kennedy 11/8/1960

Nixon didn't have a liberal bone in his crooked body and doesn't deserve the time of day on DU. He is certainly not to the left of any Democratic president and that nonsense holds about as much water as an Alex Jones podcast.

Just an F.Y.I.

[First Speaker]

1. He was a total bastard...but he also had a streak of Tory Reformer in him...

...and domestically, he had his points. He proposed a Health Care law that Ted Kennedy rejected, one that was slightly to the "left" of Obamacare, and Teddy regretted turning it down the rest of his life. He proposed a Guaranteed Annual Income for every American, described himself as a "Keynesian", was something of an environmentalist, and his Justice Department actually desegregated more Southern schools than either JFK or LBJ. Tom Wicker's book, "One of Us", makes the case for Nixon as a domestic President. Yes, he was a prick, and his motives were bad--but motives don't matter; actions do.

[rurallib]

2. I think it is long past time that the Guaranteed Annual Income

get another look.

[ucrdem]

4. Yes, I suppose the bar had been raised by the Kennedys, and Nixon and LBJ tried to meet it

but both failed miserably as far as I can tell. Johnson's bungled Great Society gave us a decade of race riots and urban destruction and Nixon's China initiative paved the road for WalMart and NAFTA. If Nixon happened to sign some good legislation, fine, but I think the credit goes to Congress and its leaders. Nixon's real legacy is the destruction of SE Asia and the end of American idealism.

[Art_from_Ark]

6. The Great Society gave us a decade of race riots?

Really?

Race riots were happening long before the Great Society. For example, there was an infamous race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 that is considered to be the worst race riot in American history. There was also a race riot that occurred in Detroit in 1943. The Little Rock Central High crisis of 1957 could be considered to be a kind of race riot, and that occurred 6 years before Johnson became President. The March 1965 race riots in Selma, Alabama actually helped to spur one of the Great Society's greatest achievements, the Voting Rights Act.

[ucrdem]

9. Watts, Detroit, and Newark all happened under LBJ.

There were probably lesser ones but those are notorious. M.L. King, Jr. was also assassinated during LBJ's presidency.

[Art_from_Ark]

12. Watts was the 1960s version of the Rodney King riots

The 1967 Detroit riots began when police raided a coming home party for two African-American Vietnam vets in an unlicensed establishment. The 1967 Newark riots were started by police brutality. They had nothing to do with the Great Society.

[Archae]

14. And...how many black leaders like Medgar Evers were killed prior to that?

LBJ was not to blame for the 60's race riots, anymore than Nixon was to blame for Kent State.

[ucrdem]

16. Yes and no.

No he wasn't directly responsible, but he lacked the finesse or attention to detail or let's call it leadership that might have prevented those powder kegs from exploding, though I have no doubt that he would have preferred that they hadn't. This is only my opinion of course.

[LeftInTX]

20. It seems that way, but it isn't

The riots didn't last a decade - only a sporadically for a few years. (In the summer it seems)

I saw the American Experience documentary on LBJ and they explained it.

It was something I can't write in a few sentences.
Something about how oppression and empowerment.
The Civil Rights Act didn't change things over night, so maybe that was part of the issue.

[Dreamer Tatum]

3. So Nixon killed Kennedys? nt

[ucrdem]

5. Call it a fortuitous circumstance.

But for the record, no, I'm not suggesting that Richard Nixon assassinated either John or Robert Kennedy.

[Art_from_Ark]

15. Actually, there were three presidential contenders against Nixon who were shot

JFK, RFK, and George Wallace. That must be some kind of record.

[hedda_foil]

28. And it was certainly fortuitous for Nixon that Wallace was removed from contention.

His Southern Strategy would never have been successful with a died in the wool racist Dixiecrat running as a third party candidate.

Wallace ran for President in the 1968 election as the American Independent Party candidate, with Curtis LeMay as his candidate for Vice President. Wallace hoped to force the House of Representatives to decide the election with one vote per state if he could obtain sufficient electoral votes to make him a power broker. Wallace hoped that southern states could use their clout to end federal efforts at desegregation. His platform contained generous increases for beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare. Wallace's foreign policy positions set him apart from the other candidates in the field. "If the Vietnam War was not winnable within 90 days of his taking office, Wallace pledged an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops ... Wallace described foreign aid as money 'poured down a rat hole' and demanded that European and Asian allies pay more for their defense."[35]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace#1968_third_party_presidential_run

[unrepentant progress]

7. I quite admire Nixon. There's a lot to like about the man.

To my mind he could have been among our top five Presidents. And yeah, unlike Obama who is a neoliberal technocrat, Nixon was a true liberal.

Unfortunately, then there's Nixon's dark side which just totally obliterates all the good he tried to do. The worst of it was deliberately interfering with the Paris peace talks in 1968.

[ucrdem]

13. Well . . . I've never come across any evidence of Nixon's liberality.

He's well remembered in Calif which has a sorry tradition of left-leaning politicians being taken out by red-baiters and that's how Nixon cut his chops.

Do you know the story?

[niyad]

18. helen gahagan douglas ring a bell?

[jtuck004]

25. Wanna see what happens to populists? Especially a strong woman?

...
In 1950, Gahagan Douglas ran for the United States Senate even though the incumbent Democrat Sheridan H. Downey was seeking a third term. William Malone, the Democratic state chairman in California, had advised Douglas to wait until 1952 to run for the Senate, rather than split the party in a fight with Downey. Gahagan Douglas, however, told Malone that Downey had neglected veterans and small growers and must be unseated. Downey withdrew from the race in the primary campaign and supported a third candidate, Manchester Boddy, the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News. When Gahagan Douglas defeated Boddy for the nomination, Downey endorsed the Republican U.S. Representative Richard M. Nixon.[9] Nixon's fellow Congressman John F. Kennedy quietly donated money to Nixon's campaign against Gahagan Douglas.[10]

In the primary race, Boddy had referred to Gahagan Douglas as "the Pink Lady" and said that she was "pink right down to her underwear", a suggestion that she sympathized with the Soviet Union. During the general election, Nixon reprised this line of attack. His campaign manager, Murray Chotiner, had flyers printed on sheets of pink paper. Nixon implied that she was a Communist fellow traveler by comparing her votes to those of the far-left, pro-Soviet Rep. Vito Marcantonio. Gahagan Douglas, in return, popularized a nickname for Nixon which became one of the most enduring nicknames in American politics: "Tricky Dick."

Nixon won the election with more than 59 percent of the vote, and Gahagan Douglas' political career hence came to an end. The conservative Democrat Samuel W. Yorty (later a Republican convert) succeeded her in Congress.
...

Been going on for a long, long time. Gotta love it when the people who say they are on your side stab you in the back.

[upaloopa]

26. I seems strange to read what you posted

Most of us alive back then who were what we call progressive today hated Nixon.

[unrepentant progress]

29. It seems strange to me that most people on DU don't know what a liberal is.

But then both liberal and progressive as terms of art have become corrupt as hell.

LBJ was a liberal too but did horrible things as well. Whether or not Nixon's crimes were worse than LBJ's immoral acts is debatable, but neither man was a saint. And yet both were liberals.

FWIW, I admire LBJ too, and think him a better President than Nixon.

[Bluenorthwest]

31. That's absurd. Nixon was a conservative, a red baiting commie hunter who destroyed liberal people

for sport. Not only was I alive at that time, which you clearly were not, but my family had direct experiences with both Richard and his brother Donald Nixon that mark them both as right wing, immoral and in the end very pathetic in a very satisfying way.
In my Democratic and Californian household, Nixon was the worst of the conservatives and his criminality just the proof of his wretched nature.

[niyad]

32. perhaps you could give us your definitions of liberal and progressive. might help us to

understand your post. and would you comment on his treatment of helen gahagan douglas as an example of his "liberalism".

[upaloopa]

34. Well looks like some people have their own

definition of liberal.

[SidDithers]

8. DU rec...

the "Nixon was liberal" schtick was laughably stupid.

Sid

[ucrdem]

11. Thanks Sid...

[99th_Monkey]

10. I wasn't aware that Nixon was being lauded on DU. Who knew? nt

[love_katz]

17. Nixon a liberal?!? Tricky Dick?

Ye gods, now I've lived to hear the height of crazy statements.

Sorry, but that commenter must not have been alive or old enough to know what went on back in the days of "I am not a crook" Nixon.

[The Wizard]

22. He was an anti Semite

In Republican code, liberal means Jew or educated.

[niyad]

19. apparently I have missed some supreme idiocy. care to provide a link? I need the laugh.

[Dreamer Tatum]

24. It's typical CTer bullshit. Imply something and run for the hills when called on it. nt

[Beowulf42]

21. Coincidence? I think not.

Don't forget George Wallace. He would have destroyed Nixon's Southern Strategy.

[zappaman]

23. Kick and rec.

That OP was easily one if the stupidest fucking things I have ever read on this site.
ODS...it's not just for right wingers!

[stopbush]

27. It's OPs like this one that make me want to give up on DU.

childish drivel.

[Scuba]

30. Nixon was no liberal. That's why it's so painful when a twice-elected Democratic President ...

... admits that “In a lot of ways Richard Nixon was more liberal than I".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025800385

[mylye2222]

33. Nixon was only a fascist

And a paranoid who spent his tenure harassing everyone who dared to diss him.
Nothing liberal in those behaviour.

[LondonReign2]

35. "Nixon didn't have a liberal bone in his crooked body...not to the left of any Democratic President"

You mean except for that part where Obama says Nixon was more liberal than he is?