Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...During Nixon's first years out of office, each move in the comeback was measured by micrometer: the first public appearance, the first foreign trip, the first political speech. Now all that is commonplace: Nixon has visited 18 foreign nations, conferred with 16 Chiefs of State, appeared frequently on TV and in the press...
...Nixon has hundreds of contacts that he maintains, some of them daily, many of them weekly," says one of his former advisers. "He'll call and just want to talk politics or world affairs. At the time of last month's Israeli elections, he was calling up everybody to ask what they thought and to tell them what he thought. There's a lot of back and forth...
There are analysts who believe it is time for more favorable judgments on Nixon's presidency as a whole. "Watergate obscured what Richard Nixon was really doing," says a former White House insider. "Nixon was in the forefront on affirmative action. He set up the Legal Services Corporation. He established the Environmental Protection Agency. There was a coherence to those years, and Nixon was a moderate because successful politics is moderation...
Leon Litwack, a Pulitzer-prizewinning historian at the University of California at Berkeley, strongly disagrees: "If there is any nostalgia for Nixon, it's not based on any new historical findings but on the perception of Nixon as less dangerous and more intelligent than the current President. To forgive the enormity of Nixon's crimes would be a mistake. He waged war on American citizens...
Elliot Richardson, who was Nixon's Attorney General when he was forced out in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, sees his ex-boss as a President who succeeded in making the U.S. "adapt to the realities of change" but was "brought down by fatal flaws in his character." Says Richardson, who is now campaigning for a Senate seat in Massachusetts: "We all have the defects of our qualities. Nixon resented those more fortunate than he. He was insecure. But that was what propelled him to the presidency...