Nixon?

Sam:  Tell me about Nixon.  And everything you remember about that time and his impeachment.  

I originally thought that Nixon was an okay sort of guy.  He was smart in school.  He had been raised in a minority religion and I could relate to that.  I thought that deep down he had values from his youth.  His wife was a school teacher and I could relate to that, as well.  

My family and almost all of Arizona had always been Democrats when I was growing up.  I thought of myself as Democrat but...not anything like the ones you hear and see in the party today.  After the Peace Corps, which appeared to me to be run by political pay- offs of  Kennedy with no idea what they were doing, I began to question  myself as a Democrat and, eventually, registered as an Independent.  This turned out to be really silly, since you have no say in the primary votes. Some states now let anyone vote in primaries, which creates other problems. 

 I worked several years to help Fairfax County integrate schools and to help  Head Start get going as part of the War on Poverty.  It was supposed to help eliminate poverty.  When I got invited to a big party celebrating the first graduate of Head Start to have a child in Head Start,  I was appalled that this would be something to celebrate--another generation in poverty.  My doctoral research at American University showed almost no gains for kids in Head Start over their siblings who never had Head Start.  Forty years later we continue to dump money into a program that is just another entitlement in the worst sense.  All this is to tell you how I moved from a Kennedy Democrat  over quite a few years to become a Republican. 

There was another scandal about a politician, Gary Hart, I think, from Colorado that also came from a minority religion so strict that he wasn't even allowed to dance. So when he was young he would drive out in the country to some slab of cement and dance away with his girlfriend.  Nothing wrong with that, by almost anyone's standards.   Later, he was moving onto the national scene when an almost complete  lack of morals was revealed to everyone.  This was a big insight into human behavior for me.  If person has a set of  values and he decides to step away from just part of them, then he is blowing in the wind.  Once he has broken with one of his values, he seems to lose his moral compass and begins to break more and more of his original values, many of which were very valuable in guiding his life, much more valuable than the first one that was broken.  I do think that people can grow up  and move away from their original religion and still have values, but they have to work at it and do some soul searching on their own.  They cannot rely on automatically following some standard that they no longer hold to.

Someone posted last week, something like, "Don't throw away something good until you have something better to replace it with."  I think that sums up the above paragraph.

Lyndon Johnson had some of these same moral problems.  He had been a poor teacher and worked his way up in Texas politics.  He and/or his supporters  began to use methods of getting elected that were shady.  Near the end of his term, it seems like there was an investigation and a  secretary who knew a lot of secrets, was "accidentally" killed in a plane crash in the ocean.

     

What about this John Edwards who was running for president.  I didn't see any redeeming qualities in him from the beginning, but I haven't read that much about him.  

 Back to Nixon!  Since I now identified myself as a Republican, I didn't want to believe Nixon could be really bad, but it was beginning to look like it might be.  People couldn't go after him, at first, because the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was totally corrupt, so they had to get rid of the Vice President first before they could go after Nixon.  In the end, Nixon did not seem to have any boundaries that he wouldn't cross.  When the tapes of his conversations were opened to the public, I was revolted that he had vulgar language, as well. 

I felt so sorry for his wife and children when he had to resign.  Some of his staff members went to jail.  I felt for their families, as well.  Nixon was probably not the worst president that the U.S. has had, but he was, maybe, the most disappointing in my lifetime. 

Post Script:  Just this year I read a book about Nixon and Jack Anderson, a popular columnist who lived in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.  Nixon hated him and had the FBI or Secret Service or his own goons try to get something on Anderson's kids such as drug usage, etc.  They came back with the answer, that his kids don't even drink coca cola.  Jack Anderson was a Mormon.  Nixon or his cohorts even had a plan to poison Jack Anderson by painting a poison substance on his steering wheel that could be absorbed into the body.