Thursday Wrap: Nixon Resigns

Finished The Final Days this evening. Yup, Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president. I wonder now if I had read this way back in the spring of 1977; maybe I just purchased it and put it on the shelf, waiting for a more appropriate time to read it. In any case, it was 'good stuff' going back to that time and reading about the last days of the Nixon presidency. A couple of items:

-Len Garment said after the release of the first tapes that it was a violation of the American People's right not to know. Interesting comment and one that I agree with - I did not read the tapes, was not interested in reading the tapes. And the same was true of a more recent release of the private goings-on of a president, that being Bill Clinton, who also found a private part of his life exposed to the public view. This was an even greater outrage as far as I am concerned as it dealt entirely with a person's private life. With Nixon, the tapes had to do with the operation of our government and in the end the revelation of a crime, or a multiplicity of crimes, committed by Nixon and his band of crooks.

-Late in his final days, Nixon bemoaned the fact that peace in the Middle East remained elusive and that it was supposed to be one of the three things his administration would be remembered for. He did not, and neither did the authors, reveal what the other two were or might have been. Certainly the war in Vietnam was not a shining moment for Nixon any way you look at it. The normalizing of relations with China? I don't know...

-Do I remember rightly that Nixon is now considered one of the worst presidents ever? He's certainly in the bottom five in my book. Just recently, Alan Greenspan called him one of the smartest men (presidents?) he dealt with in his long career (Clinton was the other one he mentioned).

-Nixon - modern day tragic figure? Well, he certainly was flawed.

-I remember watching most of the Sam Ervin hearings in the summer of 1973 - riveting stuff. Missed most of the drama of the final days as we were on the road heading back west (Seattle area) after spending a year in South Bend. We traveled at a most leisurely pace, leaving South Bend in late May or early June and finally moving back into our Bellevue house some time in early September.