And He Was a Rabid Sports Fan, Which Helps

  • By Mike Dewey
  • July 23, 2014
  • 445
                        
SUMMARY: It's midsummer and Mike Dewey's heading for some well-earned beach time, but before he foes, he shares some startling insights on the 37th president of the United States. You won't believe his conclusions. Brace yourself, because you’re probably not going to believe the next sentence, especially if you’ve been part of this cozy little clubhouse we’ve built since the spring of 1990. I don’t think that Richard Nixon was all that bad a president. In fact, despite the fact that Tricky Dick is the only man ever to resign the office in shame and probably should have been put on trial for his crimes, he might have been better than any of his successors. Let’s look at the competition, shall we? Jimmy Carter: Gas lines, silly sweaters, lusting in his heart, failing to free the hostages, being the brother of a bozo boozer and losing to a onetime Hollywood matinee idol who couldn’t think for himself. Ronald Reagan: Traded arms for hostages, killed the union movement, created “trickle-down” economics and probably served the last few months of his second term with an aging memory that was melting like a popsicle. George Bush I: Nice enough guy but accomplished nothing and couldn’t even beat a womanizing governor from a nowhere state. And he’s gotta answer for Dan Quayle, perhaps the most ridiculously unqualified vice president this side of Gerald Ford. Bill Clinton: Traded an entire generation’s hope for sleazy sex and tawdry celebrity, wasted an incredible intellect on a health-care plan that was doomed to fail and never seemed to understand how, even after eight years, he embodied epic and egotistic failure. George Bush II: Couldn’t spell “ass” if you spotted him a couple of S’s, a draft-dodging hypocrite who sported a flight suit in front of an audience of real soldiers and declared that his illegal war in Iraq was an unqualified success. Who knows who knew what prior to 9/11, but this buffoon probably was briefed and forgot all about it. Barack Obama: Riding a wave of unparalleled popularity, proceeded to kick it all away, giving rise to a wave of ugly partisanship not seen since the days of FDR or Abraham Lincoln. His fingerprints are all over today’s right-wingnut resistance and he’s the unnamed father of the Tea Party and similarly damaged breakaway cults. Stacked against that lineup of utter fools and jesters, old Dick Nixon looks pretty good. Sure, he stomped all over the Constitution and, yes, he lied to everyone who asked him a direct question and, of course, he was the mastermind behind the greatest cover-up in American electoral history, but you have to admit, he did some good things. He began withdrawing troops from Vietnam. He cancelled the draft lottery. He broke through in China. He made nice with the Soviet Union. He did some fine things for the environment, women’s rights and stayed out of Roe v. Wade. Heck, he was on the phone when Neil Armstrong picked up on the other end … after having walked on the moon! THE YEARS BETWEEN Apollo 11 and Watergate – 1969-72 – coincide roughly with my high school days and a person tends to remember those years as he or she looks back. For some of you, it’s the daddy figure of Eisenhower; for others, it’s one of the Bush family tree leaves. It’s a personal thing, something that’s actually an accident of birth. Remember Rod Stewart’s line from “Every Picture Tells a Story?” “Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off. You didn’t ask to be here anyway.” And that’s the truth. None of us signed up to be born. We’re genetic products of an experiment over which we had no control, given life and then expected to, in 20 or 30 years, propagate the species while trying to understand life, love and loss, all the time staring at a TV set thinking, “There must be more to this than cable … and why are those televangelists always asking for my money?” Jimmy Swaggart and Tammy Faye Bakker … and then it was MTV and all of a sudden, it seemed like a good idea to unplug and stop paying attention to the joke parade. In the summer of 1974, Dick Nixon would have certainly agreed with that self-saving solution but, well, there was a problem. Recordings. Self-incriminating evidence. A magnetic noose of his own making, thousands of slim and shiny brown yards of tape, perfect for a public hanging. The thing is, I can understand why Nixon went to all the trouble of bugging the Oval Office. He was a paranoid politician and, as such, believed that everyone was against him. He also believed he was untouchable. You know people like that. I know people like that. They’re a sad lot, but dangerous as an outhouse rat and must be dealt with in the strongest terms. “Mister President,” someone on the inside of the embryonic cover-up might have said just after he’d crushed George McGovern in the most lopsided election in U.S. history. “You won every state but one. Americans love you.” And he’d have uttered some foulness about how the Kennedys hated him and then, well, the game was on. And there was only one possible outcome. SEE, RICHARD NIXON wasn’t like his successors. He had a finely honed sense of his own limitations and, even though he was the president, was convinced he was unworthy. Somewhere in the depths of his rancid soul, he was, well, honest. Why do you think he didn’t just have a White House bonfire and burn the damning proof of his perfidity? I’m guessing here, but where there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, there’s a once-ripe and now-rotting sense of guilt. Nixon knew he’d get caught. It was as inevitable as Sam Ervin’s cornpone humanity and John Dean’s rat act. He was surrounded by enemies, both perceived and actual, and the only hope he had was to come clean. But this was the Summer of 1974. Too little, too late. I like to believe that he had only the vaguest notion of what went down at Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, the night the Hunt and Liddy’s clowns began to tear down his circus tent. “THEY DID WHAT!”?!?!?” I imagined the president bellowing upon hearing the news that the burglars had bungled so badly. “What the (expletive deleted) are you jackals doing up there!” Barker and McCord were too dim to rip off a kid’s lemonade stand, let alone knock off the opposition’s fortress of information, their Bastille. It was, as Nixon later and truthfully called it, “a third-rate burglary.” And yet, once it became known, he chose to erase it by any means necessary. And that’s where he fumbled the ball. Cover-up became the better option to confession and we all know that tune. Pride plus paranoia multiplied by politics divided by personal problems equals, well, public shame. On the night of Aug. 8, 1974, my friends and I celebrated until dawn as if we’d won a war. We’d watched the Watergate hearings for months and felt vindicated when it turned out we were right about that felonious phony. The next day, Dick Nixon boarded a helicopter and vanished into the annals of infamy. Nearly 40 years later, I kind of miss the greasy guy. He might have been a miserable, lying, cheating, conniving creep, but Richard M. Nixon was at least honest enough to admit, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Criminal logic, sure, but it’s clean and smooth, nonetheless. His flawed successors might have done well to echo that slimy sentiment. Maybe we’d despise them all a little less. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to check out his Facebook page.


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