Matt Welch asks an interesting question today: Knowing what we now know about Richard Nixon, if it were 1972 again, and you voted for him then, would you still do so?

Speaking as someone who was a year too young to vote at the time, and had a McGovern bumper sticker sealing a tear in the rear window of my MGA, I'd vote for Nixon over McGovern in a heartbeat now. What's important is not just what we know about Nixon, but what we also know about McGovern and subsequent history, particularly in foreign affairs, which was where the real difference would have been, since in his own words, Nixon was a Keynesian.

I have a couple problems with Matt's question, though, or at least the motivation for it, which was to justify whether or not to vote for Gray Davis this fall. Nixon was many (bad) things: paranoid, racist, cold, politically chameleonic, indifferent to liberty (including economic freedom), a poor judge of character in his underlings. But he wasn't corrupt, at least in the same sense as Gray Davis (and Bill Clinton) are. He never, as far as I'm aware, rawly sold policy for money. I don't think that the comparison is appropriate.

While he should have resigned over Watergate (and should be commended, unlike Clinton, for having the integrity to do so, though he was helped by being a member of a political party with the integrity to demand it), I don't believe that Watergate was that bad, at least not as bad as Woodward and Bernstein portrayed it. Yes, he had an enemies list, and he sicced the IRS on some of them.

But that's not why he lost his job. Bill Clinton, after all, did the same thing--it's just that his sycophants in the press didn't want to report about it. You have to be of a particularly trusting nature, unfamiliar with his and Hillary's adventures in Arkansas, to believe that the FBI files deal was just a "bureaucratic snafu."

It was both hilarious and sad to watch Woodward and Bernstein, particularly the latter, making the talk-show rounds during the impeachment saga, solemnly intoning how unlike Watergate this was. That this was just about sex, and not about abuse of power. They couldn't let their scandal be eclipsed by this one.

Not about abuse of power? Tell it to Betty Currie, who was called into the White House on a Sunday to have her perjury suborned. Tell it to Kathleen Willey, whose tires were slashed, whose cat was killed, and like Linda Tripp, whose children were threatened, and whose supposedly private personnel records were made public. Tell it to Billy Dale, who was fired, and then arrested, on trumped-up charges, and then acquitted, after having to spend a great deal of his personal wealth on lawyers defending himself, so Hillary could get "her people" into the White House travel office. Tell it to Judicial Watch, whose IRS audit occurred two weeks after a complaining letter went to the White House from a Democrat on the Hill.

It's been often said that Clinton gave his enemies the opportunity that they were seeking. So did Nixon. What was different was the nature of their enemies. Nixon lost his job because, just as the press adored Clinton, they hated Nixon with a fiery passion. Once they caught him at actual criminality, and (unlike Clinton, he, for whatever reason, didn't dispose of the evidence), they tore him apart like a shiver of famished sharks.

Which brings us to Mr. Davis. He has become so unloved, that even the mainstream press has overcome their traditional worship of all things Democratic, and even after the (so far) lousy campaign, and the adverse decision in the lawsuit, Bill Simon still has a chance to beat him. It's not necessary for the press to push his candidacy. All that may be needed is for them to not promote Davis, and to continue to expose his corruption and venality, and that still seems to be happening.

Let's keep our fingers crossed.

> Yes, he had an enemies list, and he sicced the
> IRS on some of them.

Yes, he _asked_, but it's not at all clear that they obliged. Wasn't it Chomsky who said, "Sure I was on Nixon's enemies list. It was no big deal--they never even audited my taxes!"

The Billy Dale case is instructive, and frightening. Dale was an at-will employee, not civil service. They could have dismissed him whenever they wanted, no questions asked. My assumption is that they were unwilling to undergo the criticism that would have resulted from gratuitously dismissing this long-serving non-partisan man, so they cooked up this excuse. Bleah, and worse.

Leaving aside any of your other points, I would like to invoke my memory of the time to say that Nixon only resigned after a tape was discovered on which he was heard ordering the Justice Department to back off from investigating the Watergate break-in or any related cover-up. After this, even his former speech writer William Safire called for him to go, and Nixon obliged. I would say it is ridiculous to credit him with any integrity for this decision because it was made when the game was obviously up, and he never apologized or admitted any wrongdoing.

He did admit to wrongdoing--just not as much as he was accused of.

And he did turn the tape over (unlike all of the emails that the Clintons were smart enough to have erased, and the files that they had shredded).

I was always sadly amused by Clinton Administration statements that there "wasn't a shred of evidence" linking them to various misdoings. I suspect that shreds were the only form in which most of the evidence existed, at least by the time they made those statements.

The 1972 election was my first. I was in college at the time, in Rochester, New York, which is in Monroe County. At that time, Monroe County had not voted for a Democratic candidate for president for something 50 or 60 years.

So, naturally, I volunteered early to work for McGovern. By the end of the campaign I was so disgusted with McGovern ($1,000 per person DemoGrants!) that I ended up voting for Nixon.

The damage done to the Democratic Party by McGovern persists to this day. The method by which delegates are selected and seated (and which led directly to the capture of the party by a loose coalition of single interest pressure groups) was imposed by McGovernites in reaction to the 1968 convention. As far as I know, it persists today largely unmodified.

If McGovern could tie the Democratic Party up in knots for thirty years (and counting) simply by running for President, what would he have been able to do to the country as President? The mind boggles.

Mr. Simberg: I do believe Nixon fought tooth and nail not to turn over any of the tapes that were subpeonaed. But he lost in the Supreme Court. I still remember Safire writing that Nixon won a victory of sorts because the Court acknowledged for the first time that such a thing as "executive privelege" existed, but the Court also ruled that it did not apply in this particular case and that he must therefore turn over the tapes. Nixon can be credited for honoring the Court's decision, but certainly not for turning over the smoking gun tape or any other without a legal fight. As for the comparisons to Clinton, I'm not going there, I'm only interested in correcting what I see as revisions about Nixon. You say he admitted some of his wrongdoing? Well, maybe, I sure don't remember every detail of everything he ever said, but I feel pretty confident he never admitted it was wrong to block the Watergate investigation (what I maintain ultimately did him in), and I do remember him later telling David Frost, "if the president does it, then it is legal."

Yes, he fought not to turn them over. But in the end, they were there to be turned over (minus the eighteen minute gap). Clinton both fought to keep them, and often destroyed the evidence, in case he lost the fight.

Well, I worked for Humphrey during the 1972 primaries. I was a law student in Ann Arbor and to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, as to political correctness, we didn't have the name but we had the thing in great profusion. It was rare for me to be able to walk down the street quietly, wearing a "Humphrey for President" button, without drawing some nastiness.

I voted for McGovern, albeit with great reluctance. If I had to do it over again (assuming that by Election Day it was obvious that McGovern had no chance)? I don't know. If by some chance the race had been a toss-up? Knowing what I know now, God help me, I would have voted for Nixon.

A nice blog.