|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Jim Farmelant
||
||
||
|| On Sat, 02 Mar 2002 16:01:34 +0000 "Justin Schwartz"
|| writes:
|| >
|| >
||
|| >
|| > I miss Richard Nixon. For all his creepy personality and attacks on
|| > the
|| > Constitution he did more good for this country in any week in office
|| > than
|| > Clinton did in eight years.
||
|| It is a sad fact but the two most progressive presidents during my
|| lifetime
|| have been Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Despite these two
|| presidents' many faults and outright criminality, none of their
|| successors comes
|| even close to measuring up to them.
||
|| Jim F.
||
A lucid geopolitical crap player he most certainly was but progressive? That's one I haven't heard before. If Nixon was progressive, who was the bigot speaking below?
Hakki
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20361-2002Feb28.html --------------------------------------- When President Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to France got roaring drunk and began groping the flight attendants on a trip home from Paris, Nixon didn't see that much to get excited about.
"Look, people get drunk," the president said after a Jack Anderson column regaled readers with a graphic account of Ambassador Arthur K. Watson's behavior on a March 1972 flight to Washington. "People chase girls. And the point is, it's a hell of a lot better for them to get drunk than to take drugs. It's better to chase girls than boys."
"Now that's my position and let's stop this crap," Nixon declared at a March 14, 1972, Oval Office meeting with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. "Understand?"
The episode, which prompted Democratic congressional demands for an investigation and Watson's resignation, is one of thousands chronicled on 426 hours of White House tapes released yesterday, the biggest release to date.
The new batch deals with the tumultuous first half of 1972, which included Nixon's historic trip to China, a fierce battle for the Democratic presidential nomination and an assassination attempt that crippled Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace at the height of his popularity. It also included what the White House sought to dismiss as a "third-rate burglary" at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex.
At one point, in a discussion with national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger about intensified bombing of North Vietnam, Nixon abruptly suggested a nuclear strike. But he may have just been trying to get a rise out of Kissinger, who quickly played down the idea.
Through it all, Nixon kept a shrewd eye on the Democrats who wanted to challenge his reelection. He frequently expressed bafflement over Democrats' embrace of Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), who eventually won the nomination. Always more worried about Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who never entered the race, Nixon dismissed McGovern with expletives and called him "a damn socialist with a blind spot for communists."
"The Democratic Party is going through the throes of a suicide, which is fine," former treasury secretary John B. Connally told Nixon in a wide-ranging conversation on May 9, 1972, after Connally had become head of Democrats for Nixon. Both talked of the nation's chaotic, anti-war mood, with the metaphor-mixing Nixon envisioning "a wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire." The president said the news media was "one of the major culprits" in creating the negativism.
>From there, the talk quickly shifted to what Nixon, "without getting into
any anti-Semitism," described as the inordinate influence of "a terrible
liberal Jewish clique." Connally said there was too much of it in government
as well.
"Oh! Oh, God!" Nixon said with a sigh. "It erodes our confidence, our strength. They're untrustworthy. . . . Look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews."
"Any place of power," Connally agreed. "SEC used to be -- all of them, those lawyers."
"Listen, the lawyers in government are damn Jews," Nixon said. ---------------------------------------