Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After Richard Nixon died in 1994, many pundits, historians and Republican politicians eulogized him as a great but tragic figure who had managed to achieve redemption after slithering away from the Presidency in disgrace. This portrayal is a ludicrous misrepresentation of a man who actually attempted to impose his own brand of vicious and venal fascism on America. Yet, partially due to such revisionism, Nixon is almost certain to fare better in the historical record than his first vice president Spiro Agnew, who died two weeks...
...Unlike Nixon, Agnew was not granted tragic hero status, primarily because he had nowhere to fall from. Although Agnew had rapidly risen from obscurity to national prominence like Nixon, his ascent was never considered a mark of political acumen or leadership skill. In fact, his selection as Nixon's running mate has been primarily attributed to his bitter outburst at Baltimore's black leaders and to the machinations of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond. In his outburst, Agnew blamed Stokely Carmichael's presence in Baltimore for the riots in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Such lunacy...
...political reasons. He didn't illegally marshal the resources of the CIA, FBI, IRS, FCC and the Justice Department against the news media and his political opponents. Compared to Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger '50, John Mitchell and other seriously and criminally depraved goons of Nixon's administration, Agnew was a petty thug...
Agnew even managed to leave office quietly and to fade back into obscurity. Nixon thrashed about hideously for months, refusing to surrender his audio tapes and firing a special prosecutor and insisting that he was not a crook...
...other hand, Agnew deserves harsher criticism than he has recieved. His harangues against the press did not merely "rais[e] issues of media bias, arrogance and unaccountability that are still banging around," as Lance Morrow wrote last week in Time magazine. Agnew was the point man in Nixon's crusade to gut the First Ammendment, laying the rhetorical framework for police style measures in areas such as confidentiality of sources, gag orders and prior restraint. These attacks on free speech also included extensive and illegal intimidation of the press; they were intended to cow the mass media into becoming...