Most people are a bit confused when I tell them who my favorite president is: Admittedly, Richard Milhous Nixon is an odd choice for a loony left-winger.
I've even got a poster on my wall, which features the slogan "You can't lick our Dick," as a demonstration of my devotion.
I just have different criteria. Instead of the "best" or "greatest," I honor the most fascinating, bizarre and entertaining. So, Nixon stands like a golden god among the frail mortals who inhabited the oval office before and since.
Author Philip Roth nailed it in 1961 when he said that Nixon was "so fantastic, so weird and astonishing, that I found myself beginning to wish I had invented" him. Roth only knew the half of it.
Everything is intriguing: his personality and paranoia, his profanity and prejudices, his foreign and domestic policies, Watergate and the Vietnam War.
And one cannot forget the era's other characters: reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, speechwriters Ben Stein, Pat Buchanan and William Safire, Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy and, of course, Deep Throat -- or, as we know him now, Mark Felt.
Felt's unmasking has prompted a re-examination of Watergate, and, oh, how I love the Nixon apologists. Everyone's favorite fascist, Buchanan, declared those who brought Nixon down were responsible for the United States losing the Vietnam War. Stein went a step further on the pages of The American Spectator by suggesting that they were also responsible for the Khmer Rouge's genocide.
American punditry doesn't get any more entertaining.
"Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible?" Stein intoned.
Oh! I know! He ordered his people to commit crimes against his political opponents, then he used his powers to try to cover up the crimes.
But it's a single quote that sealed my eternal affection for Nixon. The quote is from the David Frost interviews: "Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." Perfection.
It's no stretch or hyperbole to bring the word "totalitarian" into the Nixon discussion -- he put himself above the law and the Constitution --"A form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed." That's the definition of "totalitarian," and Nixon comes close.
Is it mere coincidence that two of the most passionate Nixon apologists, Buchanan and Liddy, have a history of promoting fascism? Both have also expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. In addition to questioning the Holocaust, Buchanan has praised such democracy-overthrowing dictators as Spain's Francisco Franco and Chile's Augusto Pinochet. During Nixon's presidency, Liddy drew up Operation Gemstone, $1 million plans that proposed kidnapping Republican National Convention protesters as well as engaging in numerous other strange, black-op, criminal activities. Attorney General John Mitchell, instead of firing Liddy, told him to come up with something at a quarter of the price.
Pretty all-American, this stuff.
Of course, I adore Liddy and Buchanan as much as Nixon. They're just as much fun.
For example, in a delightful absurdist twist, according to CNN, Liddy responded to the revelation of Deep Throat by saying that Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession."
(David Swindle was unable to finish this column because, apparently, after writing the previous sentence, he laughed himself to death.)
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