President Nixon was severely abused by the American news media. This 2014 article from CNN, though, shows him in a different light. In the event that it has been pulled from the internet here is its content:
Ben Stein: The truth about Nixon – CNN
Ben Stein is an economist, author, movie and TV personality and speaker. He is he winner of the 2009 Malcolm Forbes Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism. Stein was also a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
(CNN) The Richard Nixon I knew had almost nothing to do with the Richard Nixon as portrayed in most media. The Richard Nixon I knew was a man who had served his country honorably as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president at the height of the Cold War, when Eisenhower kept us at peace for eight years — with Nixon’s help — only to have the 1960 election stolen away from him by handsome, rich John F. Kennedy’s fraud at the polls in Chicago.*
Nixon had endured eight years of seeing the country disintegrate into chaos in the streets and an endless, hopeless war in Vietnam under a genuinely great but very misled president, Lyndon Johnson. When Nixon won in 1968, he embarked on a presidency in which he never once had control of both houses of Congress. He faced an endless bitter assault from the media and from the so-called intellectuals — the “pointy-headed” intellectuals, as George Wallace aptly called them. Nevertheless, he ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW’s and calmed the wild streets.
More than that, he saved Israel when it was threatened with annihilation by its neighbors, sending a massive airlift of arms to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Nixon gave unequivocal support to Israel: Johnson could not have cared less about its fate.
Nixon opened relations with Red China that greatly sobered up Russia and allowed the U.S. to become the world’s dominant power and peacekeeper for a generation. This was the key event in ending the Cold War. By “encircling” the USSR and signaling that if Leonid Brezhnev began a war against either the United States or China, he would face a dreaded two-front war, he showed Russia that its hopes of global domination were not going to work.
To soothe matters with the still extremely dangerous Russian bear, he even signed a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets. His goal, as he often explained to me and others on his staff, was to create “a generation of peace.”
He did it. He gave us the longest sustained period of peace since World War II. When the Russians were kicked out of Afghanistan — just as we are about to be — the encircled Russian domination machine simply ran out of gas. Will it revive? No. But it is a menace anyway.
Nixon was tortured, abused, beat up by the Beautiful People, but through it all, above all, he was a peacemaker, a trait he inherited from his Quaker mother. If we no longer have to fear Russian ICBMs screaming out of hell to start nuclear war, we can thank the shade of Richard Nixon.
He was startlingly progressive in domestic affairs as well. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He sent up to Congress the first proposal for universal health care. I know. I wrote the message sending it to Congress — where Teddy Kennedy promptly killed it.
He proposed a national energy policy far greener than anyone had ever imagined a conservative would go. Again, Congress killed it.
In his personal relations with me and with my father, who was his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and with my mother, his most devout fan and a friend and admirer of Pat Ryan Nixon as well, he was the soul of kindness, concern and politesse. He brought up two of the most wonderful women on the planet, Julie and Tricia. He was a wit and a trustworthy confidant.
Why did the media hate him so much? I have always thought it was because he was vulnerable and showed it when attacked. He did not have the tough hide of a Reagan or an Obama. Like the schoolyard bullies they are, the media went after him for his vulnerability.
But let’s look at him with fresh eyes. Unlike LBJ, he did not get us into a large, unnecessary war on false pretenses. Unlike JFK, he did not bring call girls and courtesans into the White House or try to kill foreign leaders. Unlike FDR, he did not lead us into a war for which we were unprepared.
He helped with a coverup of a mysterious burglary that no one understands to this day. That was his grievous sin, and grievously did he answer for it. But to me, Richard Nixon will always be visionary, friend and peacemaker. And I will never turn my back on a peacemaker.
*And in case this 2010 article, referred to above, has been pulled from the internet, here is its content:
| Chicago ties cast shadow on 1960 presidential win | Posted | Comment | Recommend |
| By Judy Keen, USA TODAY CHICAGO — Stephen Schiller was a 23-year-old law student when he became a member of a secretive team investigating the outcome of the 1960 election. Schiller, now a retired judge who is 73, joined special prosecutor Morris Wexler’s staff in December 1960 to answer a question still debated by historians today: Did Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley steal Illinois‘ 27 Electoral College votes for fellow Democrat John F. Kennedy, denying Richard Nixon the presidency? Kennedy won the state by 8,858 of 4.7 million votes. “It was really intense,” Schiller recalls. “There were possibly forces of evil out there, and we didn’t want them to know what we were doing.” Five decades later, there’s no definitive answer. “My sense is nobody really knows and nobody’s ever going to know,” says Edmund Kallina Jr., a University of Central Florida history professor and author of the new book Kennedy v. Nixon: The Presidential Election of 1960. He believes vote fraud did occur in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, but not on a scale that changed the outcome. Bill Daley, son of the late mayor, says his late father “took offense” at persistent speculation that he wielded his political power to engineer “hanky-panky” in the 1960 election. Kennedy carried Cook County, which includes Chicago, by 318,736 votes — more than double his national margin of 118,574 votes. “As we’ve found out in modern times, there are problems or difficulties or anomalies in many elections,” he says. “Election days are not pretty.” Bill Daley, 62, was chairman of Al Gore‘s 2000 Democratic presidential campaign against Republican George W. Bush. A razor-thin margin of 538 votes in Florida decided that election for Bush after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled ongoing recounts unconstitutional. ‘Substantial’ miscounts The country was in an uproar over the legitimacy of Kennedy’s win when Schiller went to work on Wexler’s inquiry into irregularities in the Cook County vote. “There was a public sense that things weren’t as they should be … having absolutely nothing to do with Kennedy,” he says. Mayor Daley already had a reputation for stuffing ballot boxes and giving ward bosses and precinct captains vote quotas. Two recounts of Chicago-area voting later showed that Democrats had likely stolen tens of thousands of votes, but most were in the Cook County state’s attorney race. Between classes at the University of Chicago and into the night, sometimes until 2 a.m., Schiller joined other members of Wexler’s team to conduct interviews and cull through ballots and election judges’ tallies. When Schiller misplaced a draft of a report, a supervisor feared someone had broken in and stolen it. Wexler’s report, issued in April 1961, found “substantial” miscounts in the 1,367 precincts it examined, including unqualified voters, misread voting machines and math mistakes. In one precinct, voters asked where to deposit tickets for a drawing for hams. In another, a precinct captain handed out slips of paper entitling voters to free lunches. Wexler brought contempt charges against 667 election officials, but the cases were dismissed by a Democratic judge. Three people were convicted on criminal charges. Schiller thinks now that a Democratic “mechanism was in place” to make sure that party’s candidates won — not just in the presidential race, but in local contests. As for the Kennedy-Nixon results in Illinois, he says, “looking at the margin of victory, it’s very hard to believe that there wasn’t at least a significant likelihood that the outcome would have been different in the state.” Donald Dowling, 73, a Palm Beach County, Fla., lawyer who like Schiller was a Wexler researcher, isn’t so sure the Illinois results changed history: “Not at all. Drop-in-the-bucket stuff.” 1960 changed politics Bill Daley was 12 on Election Day 1960. He remembers his father coming home early the next morning, showering and going back to his office. He also recalls attending Kennedy’s swearing-in and visiting the president in the White House the following day. Harry Truman “was the first visitor the day after the inauguration, my dad, mom and us kids were second,” he says. Bill Daley says he spoke with his father, who died in 1976, about 1960 when he was an adult. “His defense was always, [Republicans] were the ones who said they didn’t want a true statewide recount, so maybe they had something to hide,” he says. Daley doesn’t expect the debate to end anytime soon because of the closeness of the election and the Kennedy mystique. His father, he says, “had enormous pride in helping the first Irish-Catholic president.” If the late mayor knew the topic was still being hashed over, Daley says, “he’d probably laugh.” Professor Kallina says the widely held belief that Chicago shenanigans robbed Nixon in 1960 is one of the myths about that election. After all, he notes, winning Illinois would not have been enough to propel the Republican into the White House; he would have had to carry Texas or a combination of other states to give him the 269 electoral votes needed then to win. Kennedy ended up with 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219. Nevertheless, Kallina says, the repercussions of the 1960 election changed politics — and perhaps contributed to the collapse of Nixon’s presidency. He was forced to resign in 1974 after he was linked to a 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters and the subsequent coverup. After 1960, Kallina says, Republicans mounted massive poll-watching efforts and presidential campaigns focused on winning electoral instead of popular votes. The election fed conspiracy theories in politics and helped fuel partisanship, he says. “One of the major consequences,” he says, “is that you can draw a link … to Watergate in the sense that the lesson Nixon took out of all this is, ‘I’m not going to be cheated again. The Democrats play unfairly.'” Posted |
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