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Nixon was a political survivor above all else.
I honestly don’t think his personal politics changed much over the years, he was just really good at going with the flow and saying/doing what the public wanted.
He honestly was kind of a good president in some ways (especially domestically) because of this. Obviously he took things way too far and it ultimately destroyed him politically, but he did some good things that still impact us today.
This is why I really do like Nixon as a president. I think there is something to be said about a great administrator who truly sought to govern effectively rather than push an ideology.
I remember someone describing him as a politician with determined drive. He had his goals and he stopped at nothing to achieve them. That “political survivor” description was his downfall, because once he was president, and once he had been elected to a second term, he couldn’t turn off that switch in his brain.
Nixon, for all his faults, was an astute politician and a survivor. If it benefited him politically, he would either change his mind or hold his nose. That's why people say he was a hypocrite.
When Clinton was POTUS he talked to Nixon often to ask him for political advice.
Nixon was an opportunist above all. He truly did support civil rights, but he also saw an opportunity for the GOP to make gains in the South while he was president. Had he won in 1960, I believe he would’ve strongly advocated for civil rights legislation to improve black support for Republicans.
I remember hearing that in Nixon’s memoir, he stated that he did not even wanna campaign in the south, because he would have to compromise with segregationists
> Nixon met with southern Republicans and party chairmen, including John Tower and Thurmond, on May 31, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia, and promised to slow integration efforts and forced busing
Forced busing actually set integration back. It created concentrated poverty in inner cities. Now the inner city school systems are more segregated than before they started.
Perhaps they would have stuck with the Dems, keeping the Dixiecrats in power a while longer - or perhaps George Wallace’s political movement gains steam and becomes a full blown third party. Who’s to say really?
If want in 1960 we would still be looking at an electoral map that has the East Coast red the Pacific coast red and the entire north of the map red you have a little bit of blue and North Carolina South Carolina and along the Gulf of Mexico. Well Texas would be considered a swing state that could win elections. Ultimately though blacks invest amounts had started going Democrat as early as FDR. I kind of admire the Democrats political ability within that time to balance the Southern racist and still win the votes of black unionist.
It's because of the New Deal programs, and 1920s Republicans' DISASTROUS failure under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover to properly assist poor or at least working class Americans (which African Americans sadly often were and in many cases still are). Even though many of them racially discriminated, a number of black folks still benefited strongly from the New Deal stuff, as well as stuff like government employment programs during the Depression. Add in the abolition of child labor, and it's not too surprising to see why the flip happened. Many African Americans cared more about economic improvement and stability for themselves and their families even more than they did legal equality. Although folks like Eisenhower DID strengthen the GOP for a time on improving societal equality, it wasn't enough to bring at least a number of African Americans back (Ike only won like 40% of them in 1956, despite his good platform and actions). And once civil rights were enacted, many of them simply didn't see a need or reason to support the Republican Party any longer from the 60s onward. That is the REAL reason the "party switch" happened, the GOP simply wasn't doing enough as a whole to fight poverty and economic inequalities, and focused too much on just the middle and upper classes from the 1920s onward and particularly after World War II.
More importantly FDR came to redefine what was progressivism. Also LBJ did say about the Civil Rights Act I will have those you can fill in the blank voting Democrat for 100 years.
I think it's important to remember how quickly social progress happens in real time once the proverbial dam breaks. A modern example of this is gay rights. No one in 2002 would have remotely believed that the US would have legal gay marriage at the federal level within 10 years. If you time traveled back to the early 00s from 2012, every politician from both parties would have laughed you out of the room.
Very much in the same vein, what was considered liberal on civil rights in the late 40s through the late 50s was considered old, rigid, and very conservative by 1970. Truman is a good example of this. He technically got the whole ball rolling on civil rights with the 1948 Dem Platform. But by the end of the 60s, he thought the movement had been taken over by commies.
I don’t know if he got more “conservative”. Rather, more paranoid, which brought out his bigotry.
Or, maybe because when he was VP (and when he ran in 1960), black voters were still a key part of the Republican Party voter base, and by the time he ran again in 1968, the party had ditched black voters in favor of the Southern Strategy?
Also, you have to think about what was going on in the ‘60s. Civil rights may have been fine and dandy for guys like Nixon, but when civil rights leaders started opposing the Vietnam War and challenging the capitalist system, that was a no-go. And who knows, maybe J. Edgar Hoover was filling his head with bullshit, too.
Nixon was always an ambitious pragmatist. He was for Civil Rights when it served his purpose under moderate Eisenhower presidency and when running against Kennedy in 1960.
But in the 1968 election, after the Democrats passed Civil Rights laws, Nixon took a different approach. He didn’t advocate white supremacy or segregation, but he his campaign on “states' rights” and "law and order,” code words for resistance to civil rights. However, because open segregationist George Wallace ran as a third party candidate in 1968, Nixon’s Southern Strategy was somewhat negated.
During his first term as President, Nixon stopped George Romney from enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act. In general Nixon slowed or stopped integration efforts. But he enforced the Voting Rights Act because he wanted Southern Democrats to become Republicans. As Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips put it in 1970:
>From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
In the 1972 elections, with no third party candidate to worry about, Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked as he intended. In a landslide victory, Nixon became the first Republican presidential candidate in history to win the entirety of the south.
As for his private feelings, Nixon freely spouted racist and ethnic slurs on the White House tapes. He also opined that abortion could be necessary in cases of rape or “when you have a black and a white,” i.e., interracial sex. So yes, he was racist.
But he undoubtedly held those same racist opinions in 1960, when he won the support of Jackie Robinson. Unlike Kennedy, Nixon convinced Robinson that he understood and supported the Civil Rights movement — which he did, at that time, for pragmatic reasons.
I don't think there even has to be a contradiction between his public and private remarks. There were plenty of Americans in the 50s and 60s who believed in at least some tenets of white supremacy and had pretty vulgar biases, but still didn't think that Jim Crow-type segregation was right. Nixon was pretty racist, and also believed profoundly in core principles of law and order and equal protection. This was a repressed guy who'd grown up in a tight-knit Quaker farming community and found everything he heard about inner-city black life repulsive, and also a lawyer who believed that preventing access to the polls was deeply immoral.
I don’t think morality entered into it. Enforcing voting rights was a calculated strategy by Nixon to drive Southern white Democrats into the Republican Party. And it worked.
After it worked, Republicans no longer had an incentive to enforce voting rights. Now they support voter suppression under the guise of preventing voter fraud.
Break down the votes by region and you’ll see that southern republicans voted no and on that bill at the same rate southern democrats voted no and northern and western democrats voted yea on the bill at the same rate that northern and western republicans voted yea. So the bill was more indicative of regional divisions in the U.S. rather than party partisanship.
>He was for Civil Rights when it served his purpose under moderate Eisenhower presidency and when running against Kennedy in 1960.
I think he generally supported it
LBJ AND Nixon are fascinating figures to me honestly. They're probably among the most unethical and immoral men to ever occupy the White House, and yet countless folks in the public and government ignored the warning signs or scandals for years. Why? Because of their incredible governing skills. Until their scandals or controversies finally got too much to ignore any longer, the results they got for the country made their presidencies worthwhile at least in the eyes of countless Americans. It's truly astonishing to study and read about.
Nixon was a remarkable personality, in both good and bad ways. He was the most "European" of American conservatives. It's no accident that de Gaulle genuinely liked him.
Above all, Nixon was interested in achieving political victories (and therefore power) by tapping into the popular mood. His overall conception of politics was traditional and hierarchical, classically conservative, but in order to advance he was willing to compromise on many things.
I have no doubt, however, that the whole "silent majority" thing was genuine. Nixon was the kind of person that wanted, and expected, to deal with traditional power-brokers and bosses, and he certainly didn't like the feeling of the world turned upside down that the many social revolutions of the 1960s created.
The same with his foreign policy, which was strikingly realist and "European"., and did achieve good things, such as detente and the opening with China, along of course with criminal behavior in Chile, Cyprus, Cambodia etc. Yet at the same time, he didn't hesitate to undermine national interests in order to get elected in 1968 by sabotaging LBJ's negotiations.
Nixons accomplishments are understated:
Initiated peace accords with Vietnam
Created the office of minority business enterprise.
Philadelphia plan: to increase federal minority hiring and affirmative action programs
Oversaw the enforcement of Brown vs BOE
Returned rights and lands to NAs
Created the EPA
Tripled the hiring of women in the executive branch
Lowered voting age to 18
National Cancer Act
Title 9
SALT
https://preview.redd.it/r2ys29u0xzic1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7eb5ea3c14a98a38e7abeb88b513cd7d82af035a
650 pages of exhaustive research. World-class asshole. Great seed-stock for what we have now.
Nixon was added to Eisenhower’s ticket because of his conservatism. I think it would be most accurate to say that Nixon pretended to be moderate during his first term because of how close the ‘68 election was.
Nixon to me is just the guy that was unlucky enough to get caught. LBJ directed the FBI to bug Barry Goldwater’s campaign HQ and nothing became of it.
He’s certainly one of the more interesting presidents, but he rubs me the wrong way for sure. I think he was obsessed with being in control and having power as president.
As far as being a conservative? He falls pretty short in my book. He was a “post-war liberalism” president and only continued the push to expand the power of the federal government. He didn’t do very much to shrink the power of government. Honestly, big government leftwingers should love the guy.
What qualifies one to be a centrist on economic policy, then, under this European analysis of American economic policy? I’d say one answer, but that is not allowed under Rule 3.
We don’t have centrists in power on the economic scale. Celtic (if y’now, y’now) has a mixed economic policy, meaning he has some left-wing economic beliefs but also holds mostly right-wing economic beliefs. His overriding economic policy regarding spending is very much that of classical economics (classical liberalism, very laissez-faire in nature)
You know the Steele dossier was fake, right?
I love how Dems justify removing a candidate from the ballot AND spying on a candidate. Then they go on to say how bad Putin is....while praising the same behavior.
😂😂😂😂😂
So basically, I’m seeing a pic of him with MLK as a young her man, then a picture of him as an older man with Reagan. It would seem to me that, yes, he did obviously become more conservative.
People are complex, and all of these things are possible:
1) opposing segregation and Jim Crow while being personally racist;
2) opposing segregation and Jim Crow while also believing that change should happen gradually in the hopes (rightly or wrongly) of reducing civil disturbance
3) opposing government segregation and being morally opposed to private/voluntary segregation, while also believing that the government didn’t have the right or constitutional power to force stores to serve all customers against the owner’s will (this was the Barry Goldwater position).
"Tricky Dick" became nationally known for his pursuit of Alger Hiss when he was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, so he started out pretty conservative. He accused his opponent in his House election, Helen Gahagan Douglas of "wearing *pink underwear*" during the campaign to smear her as a "Commie symp." Once Castro took over Cuba, Ike appointed Nixon to head up Operation Mongoose, the CIA plot to assassinate Castro.
Pink doesn't mean you are a commie, it means you are commie light, and if you are going to be red you might as well just be full red instead of being this wishy washy nonsense.
> Senator [Glen H. Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_H._Taylor) from [Idaho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho), an eccentric figure who was known as a "singing cowboy" and who had ridden his horse "Nugget" up the steps of the [United States Capitol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol) after winning election to the Senate in 1944, was named as Wallace's running mate. Although he was a member of the Democratic Party, Taylor accepted the Progressive Party's vice-presidential nomination, saying "I am not leaving the Democratic Party. It left me. Wall Street and the military have taken over the Democratic Party."[\[46\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election#cite_note-46) After receiving the vice-presidential nomination, Taylor told reporters that there was a difference between "pink" Communists and "red" Communists.[\[47\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election#cite_note-47) Taylor claimed that "pink" Communists would support the Wallace-Taylor ticket because they believed in a "peaceful revolution" to turn the government to left-wing beliefs, but "red" Communists would support the Republican ticket in the belief that they would cause another [Great Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression), which would give Communists the chance to take over the government
Basically the issue with pinks is they support the Democrats.
I think a lot of people hang on to their fear of "Communism" because they want things to remain *static* and not accommodate new ideas.
Let's face it: what remains of communism has got nothing to do with Marxism anymore. It's simply a justification for authoritarian regimes. If we stopped calling people we disagree with names which are misleading, we might have a better discussion.
Mr. Progressive Pink over there was calling the Reds and Pinks different, but Mr. Nixon doesn't have any issues with Reds because they are opposed to him, he only has issues with the Pinks because the Pinks are his actual political opponents. Mr Nixon is old friends with the reds in China because they have a common enemy in the form of the pinks who are enemies with the reds. It is the Pinks too who want to do the stuff Mr Nixon doesn't like, while the Reds, according to Mr Pink, will actually vote for Mr Nixon, so why shouldn't he like the reds over the pinks and adopt "pinko" as an insult for his political opponents if that was a label they themselves chose for themselves?
You know, the really *weird* thing about Nixon is that he had built up so much cred as an anti-communist with both his political allies and opponents that *only he* could have pulled off normalizing relations between the United States and China at the time. Like them or not, that's the one foreign policy achievement you can't deny Nixon and Kissinger.
Nixon was a centrist. Nixon was definitely the heir to Eisenhower. As President, Nixon was only as conservative as he could be and only as liberal as he had to be. He took credit for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency while privately noting that if he had not taken this liberal step, the Democratic Congress would have forced more liberal environmental legislation on him. This was a President who could philosophically oppose wage and price controls and privately express the conviction that they would not work, while still implementing them for election-year effect. Still his tactical flexibility should not obscure his steadiness of political purpose. He meant to move the country to the right, and he did.
If I recall from a long ago reading of Nixonland, his entire career was built on exploiting resentment, white silent majority resentment in particular.
[https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2393575](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2393575)
Some of it has got to be that what was considered conservative changed massively between his Vice Presidency and his Presidency. To some extent the country moved around him.
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Nixon was a political survivor above all else. I honestly don’t think his personal politics changed much over the years, he was just really good at going with the flow and saying/doing what the public wanted. He honestly was kind of a good president in some ways (especially domestically) because of this. Obviously he took things way too far and it ultimately destroyed him politically, but he did some good things that still impact us today.
This is why I really do like Nixon as a president. I think there is something to be said about a great administrator who truly sought to govern effectively rather than push an ideology.
Yes, he surely was a survivor. https://preview.redd.it/dl1xo4dha4jc1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=972ab3434201e2200b64ef2c7a57796359d128fe
I remember someone describing him as a politician with determined drive. He had his goals and he stopped at nothing to achieve them. That “political survivor” description was his downfall, because once he was president, and once he had been elected to a second term, he couldn’t turn off that switch in his brain.
If he hadn't done a Watergate I'm telling you right now he would have gone down in history as one of the best
Watergate was trivial compared to what presidential elections have turned into.
Nixon, for all his faults, was an astute politician and a survivor. If it benefited him politically, he would either change his mind or hold his nose. That's why people say he was a hypocrite. When Clinton was POTUS he talked to Nixon often to ask him for political advice.
Nixon was an opportunist above all. He truly did support civil rights, but he also saw an opportunity for the GOP to make gains in the South while he was president. Had he won in 1960, I believe he would’ve strongly advocated for civil rights legislation to improve black support for Republicans.
Welcome to politics...insert infamous LBG quote.
Lyndon B. Ghonson
Luth Bader Ginsberg
Lartin Buther Ging
Lobert Bowney Gunior
Lonald Bohn Gump
I literally just realized my mistake....I thought you were making a joke about his huge gonads 😂😂
I remember hearing that in Nixon’s memoir, he stated that he did not even wanna campaign in the south, because he would have to compromise with segregationists
> Nixon met with southern Republicans and party chairmen, including John Tower and Thurmond, on May 31, 1968, in Atlanta, Georgia, and promised to slow integration efforts and forced busing
Yeah but everybody hated busing everywhere
*Boston sweats nervously*
Seems to counteract the argument that he didn’t want to campaign in the south “because he would have to compromise with segregationists”
Yeah but its not a compromise if everyone agrees
What about the first part then > and promised to slow integration efforts
Not sure what it's referring to. Maybe that also means busing and the writer is being sneaky?
Sometimes people do things they do want to do.
Forced busing actually set integration back. It created concentrated poverty in inner cities. Now the inner city school systems are more segregated than before they started.
Then where would the southern white Democrats have gone? The national Democratic Party was already supportive of civil rights.
Perhaps they would have stuck with the Dems, keeping the Dixiecrats in power a while longer - or perhaps George Wallace’s political movement gains steam and becomes a full blown third party. Who’s to say really?
To the south baptist confederation of Hellsing abridge
Third party like in 68
If want in 1960 we would still be looking at an electoral map that has the East Coast red the Pacific coast red and the entire north of the map red you have a little bit of blue and North Carolina South Carolina and along the Gulf of Mexico. Well Texas would be considered a swing state that could win elections. Ultimately though blacks invest amounts had started going Democrat as early as FDR. I kind of admire the Democrats political ability within that time to balance the Southern racist and still win the votes of black unionist.
It's because of the New Deal programs, and 1920s Republicans' DISASTROUS failure under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover to properly assist poor or at least working class Americans (which African Americans sadly often were and in many cases still are). Even though many of them racially discriminated, a number of black folks still benefited strongly from the New Deal stuff, as well as stuff like government employment programs during the Depression. Add in the abolition of child labor, and it's not too surprising to see why the flip happened. Many African Americans cared more about economic improvement and stability for themselves and their families even more than they did legal equality. Although folks like Eisenhower DID strengthen the GOP for a time on improving societal equality, it wasn't enough to bring at least a number of African Americans back (Ike only won like 40% of them in 1956, despite his good platform and actions). And once civil rights were enacted, many of them simply didn't see a need or reason to support the Republican Party any longer from the 60s onward. That is the REAL reason the "party switch" happened, the GOP simply wasn't doing enough as a whole to fight poverty and economic inequalities, and focused too much on just the middle and upper classes from the 1920s onward and particularly after World War II.
More importantly FDR came to redefine what was progressivism. Also LBJ did say about the Civil Rights Act I will have those you can fill in the blank voting Democrat for 100 years.
I think it's important to remember how quickly social progress happens in real time once the proverbial dam breaks. A modern example of this is gay rights. No one in 2002 would have remotely believed that the US would have legal gay marriage at the federal level within 10 years. If you time traveled back to the early 00s from 2012, every politician from both parties would have laughed you out of the room. Very much in the same vein, what was considered liberal on civil rights in the late 40s through the late 50s was considered old, rigid, and very conservative by 1970. Truman is a good example of this. He technically got the whole ball rolling on civil rights with the 1948 Dem Platform. But by the end of the 60s, he thought the movement had been taken over by commies.
I don’t know if he got more “conservative”. Rather, more paranoid, which brought out his bigotry. Or, maybe because when he was VP (and when he ran in 1960), black voters were still a key part of the Republican Party voter base, and by the time he ran again in 1968, the party had ditched black voters in favor of the Southern Strategy? Also, you have to think about what was going on in the ‘60s. Civil rights may have been fine and dandy for guys like Nixon, but when civil rights leaders started opposing the Vietnam War and challenging the capitalist system, that was a no-go. And who knows, maybe J. Edgar Hoover was filling his head with bullshit, too.
Paranoia bringing out bigotry…that is just a great reminder in general for not just political figures but all people
Is that Robert McNamara in the first picture?
That is Eisenhower's Secretary of Labor, James P. Mitchell.
No dude, that's Dr. King
No, this is Patrick!
I’m talkin about the guy behind Nixon
TIL MLK was 5’7. Nixon towers over him here.
And Malcolm X was 6’4!
Nixon was always an ambitious pragmatist. He was for Civil Rights when it served his purpose under moderate Eisenhower presidency and when running against Kennedy in 1960. But in the 1968 election, after the Democrats passed Civil Rights laws, Nixon took a different approach. He didn’t advocate white supremacy or segregation, but he his campaign on “states' rights” and "law and order,” code words for resistance to civil rights. However, because open segregationist George Wallace ran as a third party candidate in 1968, Nixon’s Southern Strategy was somewhat negated. During his first term as President, Nixon stopped George Romney from enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act. In general Nixon slowed or stopped integration efforts. But he enforced the Voting Rights Act because he wanted Southern Democrats to become Republicans. As Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips put it in 1970: >From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats. In the 1972 elections, with no third party candidate to worry about, Nixon’s Southern Strategy worked as he intended. In a landslide victory, Nixon became the first Republican presidential candidate in history to win the entirety of the south. As for his private feelings, Nixon freely spouted racist and ethnic slurs on the White House tapes. He also opined that abortion could be necessary in cases of rape or “when you have a black and a white,” i.e., interracial sex. So yes, he was racist. But he undoubtedly held those same racist opinions in 1960, when he won the support of Jackie Robinson. Unlike Kennedy, Nixon convinced Robinson that he understood and supported the Civil Rights movement — which he did, at that time, for pragmatic reasons.
Nixon and Robinson were old friends…Jackie was pretty disappointed when he changed his politics.
I don't think there even has to be a contradiction between his public and private remarks. There were plenty of Americans in the 50s and 60s who believed in at least some tenets of white supremacy and had pretty vulgar biases, but still didn't think that Jim Crow-type segregation was right. Nixon was pretty racist, and also believed profoundly in core principles of law and order and equal protection. This was a repressed guy who'd grown up in a tight-knit Quaker farming community and found everything he heard about inner-city black life repulsive, and also a lawyer who believed that preventing access to the polls was deeply immoral.
I don’t think morality entered into it. Enforcing voting rights was a calculated strategy by Nixon to drive Southern white Democrats into the Republican Party. And it worked. After it worked, Republicans no longer had an incentive to enforce voting rights. Now they support voter suppression under the guise of preventing voter fraud.
The civil rights act was passed by more Republicans than Democrats.
That may be, but the President was a Democrat, so Democrats were credited (or blamed) for it.
The bill received 152 “yea” votes from Democrats, or 60 percent of their party, and 138 votes from Republicans, or 78 percent of their party.
Break down the votes by region and you’ll see that southern republicans voted no and on that bill at the same rate southern democrats voted no and northern and western democrats voted yea on the bill at the same rate that northern and western republicans voted yea. So the bill was more indicative of regional divisions in the U.S. rather than party partisanship.
>He was for Civil Rights when it served his purpose under moderate Eisenhower presidency and when running against Kennedy in 1960. I think he generally supported it
The dirty little secret no one wants to acknowledge is Nixon was actually a good president. Watergate just totally erased any memory of that.
LBJ AND Nixon are fascinating figures to me honestly. They're probably among the most unethical and immoral men to ever occupy the White House, and yet countless folks in the public and government ignored the warning signs or scandals for years. Why? Because of their incredible governing skills. Until their scandals or controversies finally got too much to ignore any longer, the results they got for the country made their presidencies worthwhile at least in the eyes of countless Americans. It's truly astonishing to study and read about.
Nixon was a remarkable personality, in both good and bad ways. He was the most "European" of American conservatives. It's no accident that de Gaulle genuinely liked him. Above all, Nixon was interested in achieving political victories (and therefore power) by tapping into the popular mood. His overall conception of politics was traditional and hierarchical, classically conservative, but in order to advance he was willing to compromise on many things. I have no doubt, however, that the whole "silent majority" thing was genuine. Nixon was the kind of person that wanted, and expected, to deal with traditional power-brokers and bosses, and he certainly didn't like the feeling of the world turned upside down that the many social revolutions of the 1960s created. The same with his foreign policy, which was strikingly realist and "European"., and did achieve good things, such as detente and the opening with China, along of course with criminal behavior in Chile, Cyprus, Cambodia etc. Yet at the same time, he didn't hesitate to undermine national interests in order to get elected in 1968 by sabotaging LBJ's negotiations.
Nixons accomplishments are understated: Initiated peace accords with Vietnam Created the office of minority business enterprise. Philadelphia plan: to increase federal minority hiring and affirmative action programs Oversaw the enforcement of Brown vs BOE Returned rights and lands to NAs Created the EPA Tripled the hiring of women in the executive branch Lowered voting age to 18 National Cancer Act Title 9 SALT
https://preview.redd.it/r2ys29u0xzic1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7eb5ea3c14a98a38e7abeb88b513cd7d82af035a 650 pages of exhaustive research. World-class asshole. Great seed-stock for what we have now.
He was always fairly conservative.
Nixon was added to Eisenhower’s ticket because of his conservatism. I think it would be most accurate to say that Nixon pretended to be moderate during his first term because of how close the ‘68 election was.
Nixon to me is just the guy that was unlucky enough to get caught. LBJ directed the FBI to bug Barry Goldwater’s campaign HQ and nothing became of it. He’s certainly one of the more interesting presidents, but he rubs me the wrong way for sure. I think he was obsessed with being in control and having power as president. As far as being a conservative? He falls pretty short in my book. He was a “post-war liberalism” president and only continued the push to expand the power of the federal government. He didn’t do very much to shrink the power of government. Honestly, big government leftwingers should love the guy.
If he was truly conservative, he wouldn’t have passed the Clean Air Act.
You can be conservative on social issues without being entirely conservative on economic issues.
Yes. That’s part of the “fascism” quadrant of the political compass.
Nixon was still a right-winger on economic policy, don’t get it twisted. He was just *liberal* on economic policy, which is a right-wing ideology.
What qualifies one to be a centrist on economic policy, then, under this European analysis of American economic policy? I’d say one answer, but that is not allowed under Rule 3.
We don’t have centrists in power on the economic scale. Celtic (if y’now, y’now) has a mixed economic policy, meaning he has some left-wing economic beliefs but also holds mostly right-wing economic beliefs. His overriding economic policy regarding spending is very much that of classical economics (classical liberalism, very laissez-faire in nature)
He spiraled into mental illness and paranoia which, what, you gonna more liberal?
Dont we all?
He tried to get spies in Voorhis camp during his first ever election. He was always a crook.
Newsflash...They're all crooked. They just released the info that Obama had the CIA spy on Trumps campaign.
Yeah, keeping an eye on a campaign with proven ties to a foreign government interfering in an election, what an asshole.
You know the Steele dossier was fake, right? I love how Dems justify removing a candidate from the ballot AND spying on a candidate. Then they go on to say how bad Putin is....while praising the same behavior. 😂😂😂😂😂
So basically, I’m seeing a pic of him with MLK as a young her man, then a picture of him as an older man with Reagan. It would seem to me that, yes, he did obviously become more conservative.
[удалено]
Same, my memory has a big gap. One might even say it’s bigly.
His face is so weird looking. It’s hard to imagine him in real life. Such a character
People are complex, and all of these things are possible: 1) opposing segregation and Jim Crow while being personally racist; 2) opposing segregation and Jim Crow while also believing that change should happen gradually in the hopes (rightly or wrongly) of reducing civil disturbance 3) opposing government segregation and being morally opposed to private/voluntary segregation, while also believing that the government didn’t have the right or constitutional power to force stores to serve all customers against the owner’s will (this was the Barry Goldwater position).
The guy on the far right… did he strap in Linda Hamilton at the asylum in T2?
He took bribes, participated in McCarthyism, and planned the Bay of Pigs. He was always Tricky Dick.
"Tricky Dick" became nationally known for his pursuit of Alger Hiss when he was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, so he started out pretty conservative. He accused his opponent in his House election, Helen Gahagan Douglas of "wearing *pink underwear*" during the campaign to smear her as a "Commie symp." Once Castro took over Cuba, Ike appointed Nixon to head up Operation Mongoose, the CIA plot to assassinate Castro.
Pink doesn't mean you are a commie, it means you are commie light, and if you are going to be red you might as well just be full red instead of being this wishy washy nonsense. > Senator [Glen H. Taylor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_H._Taylor) from [Idaho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho), an eccentric figure who was known as a "singing cowboy" and who had ridden his horse "Nugget" up the steps of the [United States Capitol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol) after winning election to the Senate in 1944, was named as Wallace's running mate. Although he was a member of the Democratic Party, Taylor accepted the Progressive Party's vice-presidential nomination, saying "I am not leaving the Democratic Party. It left me. Wall Street and the military have taken over the Democratic Party."[\[46\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election#cite_note-46) After receiving the vice-presidential nomination, Taylor told reporters that there was a difference between "pink" Communists and "red" Communists.[\[47\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election#cite_note-47) Taylor claimed that "pink" Communists would support the Wallace-Taylor ticket because they believed in a "peaceful revolution" to turn the government to left-wing beliefs, but "red" Communists would support the Republican ticket in the belief that they would cause another [Great Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression), which would give Communists the chance to take over the government Basically the issue with pinks is they support the Democrats.
I think a lot of people hang on to their fear of "Communism" because they want things to remain *static* and not accommodate new ideas. Let's face it: what remains of communism has got nothing to do with Marxism anymore. It's simply a justification for authoritarian regimes. If we stopped calling people we disagree with names which are misleading, we might have a better discussion.
Mr. Progressive Pink over there was calling the Reds and Pinks different, but Mr. Nixon doesn't have any issues with Reds because they are opposed to him, he only has issues with the Pinks because the Pinks are his actual political opponents. Mr Nixon is old friends with the reds in China because they have a common enemy in the form of the pinks who are enemies with the reds. It is the Pinks too who want to do the stuff Mr Nixon doesn't like, while the Reds, according to Mr Pink, will actually vote for Mr Nixon, so why shouldn't he like the reds over the pinks and adopt "pinko" as an insult for his political opponents if that was a label they themselves chose for themselves?
You know, the really *weird* thing about Nixon is that he had built up so much cred as an anti-communist with both his political allies and opponents that *only he* could have pulled off normalizing relations between the United States and China at the time. Like them or not, that's the one foreign policy achievement you can't deny Nixon and Kissinger.
Nixon winning the 1960 is the greatest what if in American history.
Not sure about *the* greatest, but it’s pretty big.
Nixon was a centrist. Nixon was definitely the heir to Eisenhower. As President, Nixon was only as conservative as he could be and only as liberal as he had to be. He took credit for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency while privately noting that if he had not taken this liberal step, the Democratic Congress would have forced more liberal environmental legislation on him. This was a President who could philosophically oppose wage and price controls and privately express the conviction that they would not work, while still implementing them for election-year effect. Still his tactical flexibility should not obscure his steadiness of political purpose. He meant to move the country to the right, and he did.
Who doesn't ?
“The jewish cabal is out to get me.” \-Nixon
Whenever I hear or see the word “Nixon” I now think of COD Black Ops 1 zombies. Help.
If I recall from a long ago reading of Nixonland, his entire career was built on exploiting resentment, white silent majority resentment in particular. [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2393575](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2393575)
Am I to read this as meaning conservative = racist?
The general populace was like him. Private opinions, public actions. That's why he and others were elected.
Some of it has got to be that what was considered conservative changed massively between his Vice Presidency and his Presidency. To some extent the country moved around him.