Friends, listen in to my latest appearance on the Newsmaker program of WLEA 1480, in which Brian O'Neil and I discuss some very hot topics, including Trump hatred, the Mueller investigation, Watergate, Governor Cuomo's threatening letter to ICE, and gun rights, to name just a few. To give you some added incentive, the first five listeners get a Nobel Peace Prize (but not if your last name is "Trump")... Enjoy!
wlea.net/newsmaker-may-2-2018/
Dr. Waddy: I listened. I can comment from first hand experience about the excoriation of Richard Nixon. I participated in it back then; frankly, I loathed Nixon. As I remember, it was because Nixon "seemed" to stand in the way of all"progress" and to exemplify a frumpy "cloth coat" banality which could not help but fade and so should, in the words of Nobel Winner Bob Dylan, "get out of the new world if you can't lend a hand". Nixon's electoral defeat of leftist Helen Gahagan Douglas early in his career and his persecution of Alger Hiss (since 1991, a proven spy for hellhound Stalin)had some impact among the intelligentsia and the"pseudos" ( among them, me). But a most telling image still obtains in the picture of a scruffy, granny glass wearing celebrant dancing outside the White House fence after Nixon announced his resignation. "Like, y'know (with suitable undergraduate philosophical gestures) Nixon wasn't with it". Though it had had a significant role in bringing down a President, I don't think that the left of 1974 actually thought it could take over. But their 2016 compatriots fully expected to ride a Hillary victory to assured permanent dominance. So though Nixon's tormentors may have had intense juvenile hatred for him, I'd suggest that today's leftists are suffused with an antipathy irreducible to any more elemental form than that to which they have taken it.
ReplyDeleteInteresting analysis, Jack. It's hard to imagine you as an anti-Nixonite! Times change... Can you recall what forms of "progress" Nixon was seen as obstructing? It surely wasn't the growth of government, which he abetted, in many ways.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: I'll try again, my computer ate my first reply. By 1968 Nixon had cultivated a "law and order" image in response to the growing lawlessness enabled by the insouciant Baby Boomers (eg. the way the wonderful love children of 1967 obtained atavistically necessary food - they "ripped it off".) The real bad asses caught on to that real fast and moved right in -result- the Altamont riot, with Hell's Angels mauling hippies. Nixon had not had to address this syndrome in 1960 because most adults, even the Kennedys, assumed that law and order was a solid concept. The advance cadre of the Boomers had reached age 21 by '68 and were making their unprecedented, massive influence felt. They interpreted Nixon's law and order concerns to be anti-black, anti poverty stricken and anti disadvantaged of any kind, because the radical left, advancing that notion and presumptuously advancing their perception of the cause they assumed these groups shared, bade them so and we slavishly responded ("statistically proven high crime rates in minority areas proves only oppression of criminals, no more")Nixon just did not fit in. The Boomers assumed he'd stand in the way of anything they wanted:" this is 1969, its not 1956". Actually, had the electorate known Nixon would shake hands with Mao Tse Tung and slap on price controls, Hubert Humphrey might have been elected in '68. Since the Boomers were not yet in government, they did not look to government for solutions and did not anticipate that they might some day (2016) have a chance to take over. For them, the Age of Aquarius was nigh, no matter what. Since I grew up, I see Nixon as a tragic figure, a son of the real America, who, along with his tough, publicly unappreciated wife Pat, despite his faults, did his best by the lights taught him as a member of the Greatest Generation. Until the advent of the execrable Clintons he was the most significant figure in American public life post WWII and and his status, I think, will grow apace among historians.
ReplyDeleteJack, I agree with you about Nixon's historical importance. It's interesting that you ascribe such weight to the "law and order" question. I didn't live through those times, but it strikes me that a lot of people must have thought society was coming apart at the seams -- someone like Nixon no doubt reassured them. For the true believers in flower power, though, no doubt he seemed like a reactionary. The "Southern strategy" probably didn't win over many leftists either...
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: I don't suppose Nixon expected the Democrat convention to descend into anarchy (Buchanan would know) but it sure did make his law and order concerns popular. "So that's what these ungrateful little pots are all about". And poor old Hubert's histrionic but pathetic paeans to the "Politics of Joy" didn't "make it" with my generation. Oh of course leftists despised the Southern strategy and, reflexively, all things Southern; they just couldn't help themselves. In '72, McGovern denounced it as "bigoted" and got sloughed.Nixon was eventually done in by factors for which his life could not have prepared him. It makes me cringe sometimes to think of the wrong so much of our generation did his.
ReplyDeleteYes, I feel sorry for older generations (perhaps I can include myself in that group) who wake up one day and find that the values they've clung to all their lives are suddenly "fascist" and retrograde. The young can be an arrogant bunch.
ReplyDelete