Word: nixons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Dick Nixon was starting out in California in the '40s, some Republicans liked to say to one another: "He's our kind of guy." Despite Watergate, despite the universally acknowledged unlovability of Nixon, he still seems to many Americans "our kind of guy," in rudely definable contrast to "their" kind of guy. It is partly a cultural division-the difference between a sort of Nixon Class (some businessmen, blue-collar workers, large portions of Middle America) and the New Class made up of people who deal in symbols and information, not things: people from universities, Government welfare...
...capital punishment? Do you drive a Volvo? (The distinction is hardly complete or infallible; plenty of businessmen and blue-collar workers detest Nixon.) Some have argued that Watergate was the effort (a successful one) by the New Class to repeal the results of the 1972 election. Well, crime is crime: Congress and the courts, not the New Class, brought Nixon down. But the argument has a metaphorical, symbolic appeal to those who feel Nixon was destroyed for who and what he was, not what...
...Democrat now sitting in the White House and suffering his own troubles in the polls is also altering the perspective with which Americans view Watergate. Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments - China, SALT, the Middle East and the rest - look pretty good against the developing Democratic record...
...chillier international weather involving Russia makes many nostalgic for Henry Kissinger. Walter Lippmann wrote several years ago: "Nixon's role in American history has been that of a man who had to liquidate, defuse, deflate the exaggeration of the romantic period of American imperialism and American inflation: inflation of promises, inflation of hopes ... I think on the whole he has done pretty well...
After all sifting of reasons, however, it is difficult for Americans to know what to do emotionally with Richard Nixon. A compassionate and even sentimental people with a kind of friendly compulsion to forgive, they would be disposed to accept Nixon, to leave the past for historians to sort out. But some token of repentance seems to be an informal condition for that. Nixon, in his soft avowal during the Frost interviews that "I let the American people down" and some gentle self-accusations in his memoirs, appears to have traveled as far as he psychologically can toward contrition...