On this President's day, I really don't want to acknowledge the piece of shit President we have currently. Our country will have a black mark where that part comes in because he's not what we deserve. Okay, maybe he is because we are an awful nation filled with our own egos and we deserve this black mark on our history.
More than anything, he's just an awful President. From going on from shouting about emergency crisis at the boarder and following it up by going for a three day golf trip. Yeah, that's exactly what screams that our nation is under crisis.
No, typically on President's day I share this story of the former most corrupted President we had. Richard Nixon, even though I hate Reagan with just about all my being, Nixon was viewed as the worst president because of actually getting caught with all his bullshit. I'm sure he's sitting in his coffin happy now that we got what we deserved with a truly awful President.
But no, for as many faults that Nixon had, and certainly had so many, there was one shinning moment that I will forever point out that amazes me every time I think about it.
The Story of the Really Weird Night Richard Nixon Hung Out With Hippies at the Lincoln Memorial
It was one of the unlikeliest spectacles in Washington history: the President of the United States paying a late-night visit to thousands of radical protesters camped out at the Lincoln Memorial. Here’s how it happened.
The lead-up to what remains one of the most bizarre moments in Washington history began on the evening of April 30, 1970, when President Richard Nixon announced in a televised address that the Vietnam War was being expanded into Cambodia.
Four times during his talk, Nixon rose from behind his desk in the Oval Office and, looking like a stiff-limbed geography teacher, made his way to a map of the war theater set up on an easel. The North Vietnamese base camps along the Cambodian border glowed in red. One, dubbed the Parrot’s Beak, pointed directly to Saigon, and from not far away. It was, the President said, as close to the South Vietnamese capital “as Baltimore is to Washington.”
Near the end of his talk, Nixon appealed for calm, especially on America’s college campuses. But he expected blowback—and he got it, nowhere more tragically than at Kent State University in northeastern Ohio.
....
....
“The weirdest day so far,” Haldeman began his diary entry for Saturday, May 9.
“Started with call from [domestic-policy adviser John] Ehrlichman at about 5:00 a.m., saying [the President] was at the Lincoln Memorial talking to students.”
Nixon, it turned out, couldn’t sleep Friday night—and couldn’t stop talking, either. Between the end of his 10 pm press conference and 3:30 the next morning, the White House logged 50 phone calls from the President, eight to national-security adviser Henry Kissinger alone. Shortly after the last call, Nixon roused his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to ask if he wanted some hot chocolate. Sanchez declined, but Nixon wasn’t discouraged. Had Sanchez ever seen the Lincoln Memorial, the President persisted. The valet apparently had not, and with that, the Night of the Weird began.
“I said, ‘Get your clothes on, and we will go down to the Lincoln Memorial,’” Nixon said in a version of events he dictated for the record several days later. “Well, I got dressed, and at approximately 4:35, we left the White House and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. I have never seen the Secret Service quite so petrified with apprehension.”
With cause. Protesters had already gathered at the memorial in advance of Saturday’s demonstration against the war, against the Kent State dead, against, most personally and viscerally, Richard Nixon himself. But a man on a manic high, as the President almost certainly was, and the commander in chief of the world’s largest army and his own Secret Service, as he constitutionally was, is not easily dissuaded.
A famous photograph captures the next scene: Nixon in suit and tie, the ski-nose profile tilted slightly forward, a handful of sleepy-eyed demonstrators listening in shock and dull amazement, maybe wondering what drug could have produced such an apparition, as the President reprised his press-conference triumph for an early-morning audience who, stranded on the Mall, hadn’t watched a moment of it.
“I said I was sorry they had missed it because I had tried to explain in the press conference that my goals in Vietnam were the same as theirs—to stop the killing, to end the war, to bring peace…There seemed to be no—they did not respond. I hoped that their hatred of the war, which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country, and everything that it stood for. I said, ‘I know you, that probably most of you think I’m an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.’ ”
That’s the President’s official account. The protesters would tell an alternate version to the press who descended on them that morning. Nixon mentioned Vietnam, but when that drew a tepid response, he moved to other topics. What college were they attending? One student was at Syracuse University, a chance for the commander in chief to talk about football. Another was from California—on to surfing.
Both accounts are in keeping with a President obsessed with war matters, battered by Kent State, challenged by small talk (aides commonly fed him three-by-five cards for such moments), and physically brave, but as the sun began to rise and word of the night visitor spread, even Richard Nixon had to acknowledge that it was time to leave.
If a President as hated for the war in Vietnam's continuing situation could go down and meet his detractors, the folks who are the complete opposite of his own views on the matter, and with some civility try to appeal for understanding, but that we currently live in a world where that couldn't happen at all, than I don't know what to tell you other than we need to try harder.
If fucking Richard Nixon can try to speak across the table, then what goes for our parties today just is garbage. We can't even listen to one another without death threats flying out or violence acted upon. This is just crazy that there was that much more respect for one another's views and how to reach a middle ground then than now.
I'm not asking you to be more civil to someone with opposing political views because it's easy. I'm asking you to do that because it is hard. It's difficult to open your mind up to something that is just not your bag of tea. But we all are better off for it.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment