>Nixon was one of the worst US presidents of the modern era see, I disagree. I mean, I don't want to diminish his crimes, but he did a lot of good things. N

>Nixon was one of the worst US presidents of the modern era see, I disagree. I mean, I don't want to diminish his crimes, but he did a lot of good things. Nixon was responsible for Détente, I think, in ways that Reagan wasn't. Really, to the extent that Reagan deserves credit for the wall falling, he deserves credit for not screwing it up. Nixon had a lot more to do with actively turning China from being our enemy to being our workshop. Compare that, say, to JFK, who almost started world war three. It's astonishing to me that JFK gets credit for not screwing up the Cuban missile crisis, when the Cuban missile crisis was the inevitable result of the bay of pigs, an operation he approved. JFK was kind of insane, and if he had gone up against a soviet ruler with his level of crazy, rather than a comparatively sane Khrushchev, the east coast of the US would have been irradiated. (I mean, the CCCP would have been fucked up even more, sure; and I'm sure that's why Khrushchev backed down; we would have "lost less" as it were, but that's still losing.) The thing to remember is that we know far more about Nixon's presidency than about any other presidency since. Now, again, this doesn't excuse Nixon's crimes, but he did voluntarily record a lot of what he did. If he acted as all modern presidents have acted, which is to say, in secret, we wouldn't have known about most of this. I mean, I really think it is important to punish crimes when you see them happen, which is why I keep going on about how none of this excuses his crimes... but I really think he looks a lot worse than most presidents because he recorded all this stuff for posterity. For all we know, everyone since has done worse; they've just been more careful to cover their tracks.