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

[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.