On this day in 1974:

[stevedeshazer]

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

1. Yes, but then he crawled out of his grave seeking the flesh of the living (nt)

[babylonsister]

3. You think? I think he tried to redeem himself. I think he made

a better elder statesman than a crooked prez. He was smart, and not having a lot of bad advice might have gone a long way.

[ZombieHorde]

9. Nothing wrong with that. nt

[tridim]

2. I just finished watching All The President's Men

Great flick.

[Webster Green]

4. That was sweet!

I was living in DC at the time. I bought about 30 copies of the Washington Post with the huge headline. I wonder if I still have a few.

[Brother Buzz]

5. Thirty days later Ford pardoned him

That's not healing.

[stevedeshazer]

6. After all these years, I don't feel the 'healing' so much.

I'm well-known and hated for my anti-Ford rant.

[depakid]

11. Kinda reminds one of the current situation (sans the outright pardon)

Hell, we didn't even get a truth and reconciliation deal.

[Skink]

7. I remember this. My first childhood memory.

:bounce:

[BlueIris]

12. For real?

My first is getting an awesome inflatable Winnebago for X-mas the year before my baby sister was born.

Tricky Dick involved in one's first childhood memory? Ouch.

[Jennicut]

15. I was born the year after. Thankfully, I remember nothing about Nixon.

I don't think I missed much other then he was a corrupt, miserable person.

[NBachers]

8. Thanks for posting this

[stevedeshazer]

10. Nixon disgraced innocent man to avoid heat for Vietnam bombing

http://www.news-journalonline.com/opinion/editorials/other-voices/2010/08/08/nixon-disgraced-innocent-man-to-avoid-heat-for-vietnam-bombing.html

The infamous Watergate tapes that were the undoing of President Richard Nixon more than three decades ago have been called, as in the Hallmark greeting-card slogan, "the gift that keeps on giving." They are reminders of the perfidies, large and small, of our only resigned president.

The cause of his departure was the June 1972 "smoking gun" conversation in which Nixon spoke of his awareness of an attempted cover-up of White House payments to the arrested Watergate burglars for their silence. But other tapes also documented evidence of Nixon's contempt for others and his willingness to let them take the fall for him as needed.

A new, non-Watergate example has now come to light with President Barack Obama's call upon the Senate to exonerate the Air Force general who carried out Nixon's orders to bomb North Vietnam in 1971-72 and who subsequently was demoted and forced to retire.

Four-star Gen. John D. Lavelle said at the time he was just following orders and called the outcome "a catastrophic blemish on my record ... for conscientiously doing the job I was expected to do." Nixon, asked thereafter at a news conference about Lavelle's conduct and fate, lied, saying: "It wasn't authorized. It was proper for him to be relieved and retired."

But in a prior June 1972 taped conversation just spotlighted, Nixon said to Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser at the time: "I just don't want him to be made a goat, goddamnit. . . .Can we do anything now to stop the damn thing?"

more @ link

[saltpoint]

13. It's too bad Ford didn't clean house.

He should have rolled in and within hour sacked Kissinger and any number of others and then started with fresher faces.

It would have been a good time for a very high-profile bipartisan slew of appointments to demonstrate faith in the government's primary mission, etc.

Nixon was monstrous, likely worse than we even know IMO, but as babylonsister says upthread, Nixon was at least smart.

I don't think the same could be said about Gerald Ford.

[annabanana]

14. yeah.. and his deciding NOT to prosecute the crook

set the stage for so much of the damage that's been done to the Republic since.

[saltpoint]

16. The House Committee had the articles lined up

and ready for Nixon, and at last a group of Puke Senators ambled over to the White House to tell him the articles were essentially air-tight and that the votes were certainly there, and that he could save a lot of trouble by resigning.

There were darker accounts of Nixon, unconfirmed, crawling around in a drunken stupor on the Oval Office floor barking paranoid and racist remarks. The tapes he made when he was sober were bad enough; I'd likely flinch at hearing the others when he was loaded.

Ford was praised as a kind of "elderly Boy Scout" of a guy but at no time did I ever hear him accused of being a Statesman. He was one of the most unexceptional people to ever hold public office, IMO.