Last edited Tue Jan 24, 2017, 02:38 PM - Edit history (1)
But he was never called to account for his crimes. The lies, stealing, break-in, CREEP slush fund, smearing of enemies; it was all swept under the rug when he voluntarily stepped down from office. He resigned because he knew he would be thrown out of office if he didn't. There was never a smidgen of remorse or regret expressed by him for his crimes. Mitchell, Colson, Liddy, Hunt, all went to jail; but the mastermind behind it all was allowed to slink back to California and live the rest of his life unaccountable for anything he did.
Hunter S. Thompson expressed it brilliantly on the occasion of Nixon's death:
He was a Crook
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
snip
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
snip
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
The whole obituary is must read.
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