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" If he were still alive, and the existence of god thereby utterly disproved in a huge and public way, this would have been Richard Nixon&amp;#039;s 100th birthday. It is the 40th anniversary of the first turning of the year since burglars in his employ broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, requiring him to engage all the power and majesty of the presidency to cover up their crimes. Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the guilty pleas of two of those burglars, Gordon Liddy and James McCord. If there had been any justice served in 1974, this would be the 29th anniversary of Nixon&amp;#039;s having finished his 10-year bid in the federal slam for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. (And, not for nothing, but last December 18th was the 40th anniversary of the &amp;quot;Christmas bombing&amp;quot; of Hanoi and Haiphong, in which United States warplanes dropped 20,000 tons of bombs and killed almost 2,000 Vietnamese people. And this is what was said about that by Henry Kissinger, who I think is possibly even less excusable a human being than Nixon: &amp;quot;We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.&amp;quot; The world went mad back then and, when it did, Nixon was there, waiting in the shadows to take advantage of it.) There will be a lot of chin-rubbing and beard-pulling, and discreet apologias on the theme of what a &amp;quot;quintessentially American&amp;quot; life was led by Richard Nixon. This a whole load of bollocks. I know hundreds of Americans who live their quintessentially American lives without doing a fraction of the damage that Richard Nixon did to his country and to the world simply by getting out of bed in the morning. His crimes are not excused by his neuroses. The subsequent dementia of the Republican party does not absolve him of the damage he did to our politics. Nixon was not &amp;quot;us.&amp;quot; Most of us don&amp;#039;t kill Asians to prove to someone else how tough we are. Most of us don&amp;#039;t cover our workplaces with shame and disgrace and then claim that somebody else, and there was always somebody else with him, was really to blame. For me, I stand with what Lewis Lapham wrote on the occasion of Nixon&amp;#039;s death: When Richard Nixon resigned the office of the presidency twenty years ago this summer, I thought it possible that in his own peculiar and crooked way he might have done his countrymen an honest service. It wasn&amp;#039;t the one that he had in mind, and honesty was never a trait for which he had much liking or use, but by so conspicuously attempting to suborn the Constitution and betray every known principle of representative government, he had allowed the American people to see what could become of their democracy in the hands of a thoroughly corrupt politician bent upon seizing the prize of absolute power. The civics lesson was conducted in plain sight over a period of eighteen months on network television and memorably illustrated by the singular ugliness of Nixon&amp;#039;s character. The more obvious aspects of that character (its hypocrisy and self-pitying rage) had been made, as he so often said, &amp;quot;Perfectly clear&amp;quot; during his prior years in public office, but the congressional hearings preliminary to his certain impeachment showed that he was also vindictive, foulmouthed, and determined to replace the rule of law with corporate despotism. Nixon&amp;#039;s distrust of any and all forms of free speech was consistent with his ambition to shape the government of the United States in his own resentful image, and when he left for the beach at San Clemente, as grudgingly as a dog giving up its bone, I remember watching his helicopter rise for the last time from the White House lawn and thinking that his fellow citizens wouldn&amp;#039;t soon forget the constitutional moral of the tale. The assumption was mistaken. He was history&amp;#039;s yard waste, and I am sorry the man ever was elected president. And, oh, for the love of Mary, I wish he&amp;#039;d been a better football player. We&amp;#039;d all have been better off. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17909/nixon-100th-birthday-010913/>