A good read as composed by Jack about Nixon and doing a comparison of Nixon to Trump and foreign policy. Jack is another writer I subscribe to. I usually pull up his old articles so as not to take advantage. We exchange a conversation from time to time. I lived in Michigan for a couple of decades and read his commentary for time to time.

Comparing Trump to Nixon? A slam dunk favoring Nixon. If not your choice, we will not go there as I might get angry. This is not absolving Nixon of his faux pas either. He screwed up big time.

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“We’d be so much better off with the old crook.”

Remembering Nixon; Fearing Trump

– by Jack Lessenberry

Politics and Prejudices and other musings

More than forty years ago, I got a letter from Richard Nixon, then nine years removed from the presidency and living in exile in Saddle River, New Jersey. It was typed, but my name and “Sincerely, Richard Nixon” had been written out in longhand.

I was stunned. With the letter, Nixon sent me the page proofs of a new book he had written, saying he was sending it to “a selected number of opinion leaders who had shown a serious interest in East-West issues.”

Why me? Then I understood. I did a lot of book reviews in those days, and Nixon was attempting to rehabilitate his reputation and stay relevant by writing what seemed like an endless stream of foreign policy books. He was a veteran Cold Warrior, but intelligent and well-informed in a way few in public life are today.

Most of his books were predictable, but I found one to be well worth reading, a book called Leaders, which consisted of short profiles of some of the famous leaders he met during his years as President and vice president. I gave it a very favorable review, which is, I suppose, how I became an “opinion leader.” Around that time, Nixon started hosting dinners for reporters and editors too young to have covered Watergate.

I applied to be invited to one of them, but that never happened. Ten years later, that odd enigmatic man who was not only a huge political but cultural figure for decades, had a stroke and died.

I remembered all this today, because it would have been Nixon’s 113th birthday. He’s been gone almost thirty-two years, but people are still writing books to try to figure him out. He could be a sleazy politician, a liar and a crook, and he often was.

But he could also be a statesman.

Foreign policy was what he cared about most, and avoiding a nuclear war his top priority, even if he never said so explicitly. He did not want our enemies to think of us, or him, as weak. Nixon never endorsed a Democrat for office, and never failed to support any Republican, even ones he loathed, like Nelson Rockefeller.

But I have to wonder what he would think of Donald Trump’s utter reckless behavior in regards to Venezuela, his total ignorance of the facts, and his utter disregard of national pride and tradition, of the Constitution and the law.

Tricky Dick could be unscrupulous, and didn’t always respect other nations’ sovereignty. After the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, he advised John F. Kennedy, the man who had beaten him in the presidential election just months before, to “find some (acceptable) cover and go in,” meaning invade.

That was a bad idea, and Kennedy rightly rejected it. But Nixon was normally anything but reckless, and would have been shocked by what Trump did in Venezuela, even though Nixon himself was very nearly murdered by a mob in Caracas, that nation’s capital, in 1959. Most people today don’t know that.

Nor do they understand how precious and important NATO and collective security is. That’s something the fatuous moron in the White House has no more understanding of than the neon tetras in the aquarium in my office do.

We are in peril greater than any we’ve had at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A working world order, like civilization itself, takes a long time to build, but can be quickly destroyed.

And if you aren’t frightened by the spectacle of White House aides calling for us to seize Greenland by military force, you are ignorant in a way none of us can afford to be.

Happy birthday, President Nixon. Your worst was a minor misdemeanor compared to what those who hijacked your party are doing now.