{"id":686,"date":"2013-01-10T01:04:00","date_gmt":"2013-01-10T01:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2013\/01\/10\/happy-birthday-tricky-dick"},"modified":"2013-01-10T01:04:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-10T01:04:00","slug":"happy-birthday-tricky-dick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=686","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday, Tricky Dick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I cannot let this day pass without taking note that it marks the 100th birthday of the 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll admit to having mixed feelings about this day and the man who came into this world a century ago. <\/p>\n

He took part in the first election in which I voted. It was 1972 and I voted for his opponent, Democratic U.S. Sen. George McGovern. I was barely home from the Army and was cutting my political teeth. I despised Nixon\u2019s conduct of the Vietnam War, which I got see up close for a time. McGovern, who died near the end of 2012, sought to end that war. Nixon\u2019s allies painted McGovern with grotesque distortions. The Committee to Re-Elect the President \u2013 with its apt acronym CREEP \u2013 waged a reprehensible campaign that turned out to be a winner; Nixon won re-election in a 49-state landslide.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t end there. The Watergate scandal that started with the June 17, 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee office in DC exploded in 1973 and \u201874. The nation learned of Nixon\u2019s profound paranoia, of how he sicced the CIA against the investigation of what happened at the Watergate. The House of Reps sought to impeach him; the Judiciary Committee drafted articles of impeachment, setting the stage for the full House to follow suit. Nixon quit his office in August 1974.<\/p>\n

Nixon, who was nicknamed Tricky Dick by those who loathed him, left the public stage with the disgrace he had earned.<\/p>\n

But my feelings about him today, so many years later, have been tempered by what has happened to his Republican Party. Nixon would be seen by many GOP zealots today as the kind of liberal that Nixon himself despised. The Environmental Protection Agency came to life on Nixon\u2019s watch; the president supported equal rights for women; he was virtually silent on issues such as abortion and marriage equality. How would he fare in today\u2019s climate? Not well. Indeed, some have suggested he couldn\u2019t win a GOP primary.<\/p>\n

I cannot celebrate this man\u2019s centennial birthday. My own memories of him remain mostly negative, although my bitterness toward him has subsided. Perhaps one day those thoughts will turn positive. Just not yet.<\/p>\n\n

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I cannot let this day pass without taking note that it marks the 100th birthday of the 37th president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon. I\u2019ll admit to having mixed feelings about this day and the man who came into this world a century ago. He took part in the first election in which … Continue reading Happy birthday, Tricky Dick<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}