My Reflection on the 40th Anniversary of Richard Nixon's Resignation

Topic: Forty Years Later, What Have Americans Learned from Richard Nixon?

Yesterday, Friday August 8, 2014, was the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon delivering his address to the nation announcing his resignation from the presidency effective at noon the following day. At that time, Watergate was merely the latest in what had been a generation of unprecedented social and political turmoil plus bloody warfare during the height of the Cold War; the issue of stagflation remained a growing burden not soon to be solved, too. Nixon was noted for his political pragmatism and one of the elite foreign policies ever crafted by National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, as he embarked upon the first true initiative to turn the Soviet Union on its ear by opening the door to the People's Republic of China in 1972 to economic globalization and a diplomatic relationship with Washington, plus Beijing's eventual seat at the United Nations Security Council as a permanent member. As the Soviet Union under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev had embarked upon a retraction of Destalinization in favor of its most repressive foreign policy objective ever and the launch of the world's largest military expansion in human history, Tricky Dick served as the last true stop gap in preventing Moscow from expanding beyond its doctrine of Soviet absolutism in dominating its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In 1979, Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, which alongside the Iranian hostage crisis demonstrated the impotence of Jimmy Carter as president of the United States and America's decline from a nation of patriots and minutemen to one of angst and dashed dreams as well as hopes. 

In dealing with the era where for the first time in recorded history both unemployment and inflation soared following his predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson's signing into law a tax hike inclusive with a 10% surcharge in 1968, he employed the failed principles of Keynesianism through price fixtures and quantitative easing for his monetary solutions. The result was the acceleration of an already steep rise in inflation while doing nothing to stall the equally soaring unemployment. When in 1973 OPEC implemented its embargo on oil exports and gas prices reached unfathomable prices, his political career was already on the rocks due to the previous year's breakin at the Watergate Hotel, which was at the time the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. More than a generation of a deteriorating and debilitating public stream of consciousness amid the zeitgeist of America's apparent decline by way of social malaise seemed to have peaked in its abysmal collapse. Once Nixon resigned 40 years ago yesterday, the Civil Rights Movement, the counterculture and beatnik movements, plus Vietnam had cost one president his life and upon his announcement to resign the presidency, two to resign after quelling the public's once-unconditional trust in government.

While Nixon was never impeached, the articles for it were being drawn; it was a mere fait accompli. He fell upon his own sword, realizing his complicity in the Watergate scandal had effectively destroyed his political career, his presidency at that time metastasising the greatest divide in the history of American politics. It was the latest and perhaps greatest example of what once was a nation of unconditional sycophants finally transferring into everything the Founding Fathers ever feared, a government looking over its shoulder. Richard Nixon effectively destroyed this culture of naivete, for following the debacles of his successor Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter in their inability to avoid the economy and incompetence in foreign affairs becoming insolvent, the damage was nearly final. The last president's "crisis of confidence" admonition of a guilty American public was the final straw. The die was cast for the Reagan Revolution to unfold its wings and as if the bald eagle, fly shotgun to return to Lady Liberty her confidence and unmatched exceptionalism.

As America today faces her greatest existential crisis in her history, we are plagued most not by Islamic terrorist emanating from the Middle East and Central Asia, nor Russia and China, but here at home residing in Washington at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - the White House, with his legs propped atop of the desk of the people's Oval Office running his government while ignoring that we the people are who foot his bill and pay his salary; this is only if he is not attending a fundraiser or golfing. As he continues to circumvent Congress entirely, defying both representatives and senators within the GOP as well as his own Democratic Party, he ordered in the wee hours of Friday morning "targeted airstrikes" designed to "contain, not destroy" ISIS so long as they agree to maintain their present position as a state rather than drive them from Iraq and Syria as the horde of barbarians that they are. As our borders continue experience the obvious deluge of Hispanic Americans crossing over to escape persecution in their native lands, few understand that this would never have occurred had the president not funded contra operations in Venezuela, Panama and yes, Cuba. His goal was to launch an invasion of a clandestine variety by driving Latin American populations from their nations in funding rogue state governments colluding within to achieve amnesty while engaging in proxy warfare to topple those regimes not friendly to him in these efforts. The American people's sovereignty had never been more at risk nor in peril of its usurpation through this anarchical measure for unfiltered violence and pillaging which would lead to we the people, the sovereign and the general will, being forced away from our God-given right to rule with one individual, one vote.

Far more pernicious than even this exodus from Latin America are the untold scores of Islamic terrorists who stand to enter legally into America via international passports and through cross the Rio Grande and the acquired Gadsden land purchase. As ISIS just filmed an organizational operative proclaiming their intent to "liberate" Turkey should they fail to open the Euphrates Dam, the die was cast: the question is not whether Turkey will be invaded, but when ISIS intends to cross over into Anatolia, or sovereignty Turkish territory. And once this occurs, America is pledged by our commitments as the chief NATO power to defend our Turkish allies, also an alliance member since 1952. Upon the time this invasion occurs, the initiation of the next great and penultimate global war will come to fruition. The fight will peak over control of the Bosporus Strait connecting the Balkan Peninsula to Asia Minor at Istanbul (Constantinople). Should ISIS succeed in sacking that large city and gaining control of the Bosporus Strait, Western Europe and, indeed, all Christendom and the European Jewry, will be in mortal peril, with Russia standing to find itself at a dichotomy to either remain neutral while NATO fights ISIS or to defend her former Soviet republics while surreptitiously "liberating" them too, albeit installing puppet governments friendly to Moscow upon forcing out of power the besieged states. Russia historically has coveted control of the Balkan Peninsula and the Bosporus Strait; Catherine the Great initiated multiple wars to occupy it for the Russian navy and sea merchant vessels to have access to the Mediterranean Sea. Russia also has fought Turkey over the Crimean Peninsula; Turkey under the Ottoman Empire in 1915 committed the genocide of millions of Armenian and other Aryan peoples dues to their Eastern Orthodoxy or Jewish faiths. The world is imperiled, and there still remains the Asian question with an expansionist China under its president, Xi Jinping.  

John Basil Barnhill was quoted to have said that when government fears the people, there is liberty; when the people fear government, there is tyranny. Richard Nixon truly feared the people, but rather than check his own paranoia through his insecurities, he ordered FBI surveillance performed on individuals he considered subversives to the state, among them being John Lennon. Once the Watergate Hotel was raided, however, that mistrust like a hot pot of grits on the having been heated at too high a temper for far too long, overflowed. A man so gifted politically and intellectually an elite like Nixon fell prey to his own neuroses; he did not merely distrust the people, but managed to engage in a primitive means to check the power of the people as if his own electors were a mob of sans-culottes poised to storm the Bastille that was his own White House. For all the good he achieved in foreign policy - among the greatest collection of feats in our nation's history - he failed the people he was elected to promote their general welfare, one of the Constitution's two major commandments alongside providing the common defense. Democracy has never been a good government, but as Winston Churchill stated before Parliament, it is better than all others. Good government listens to the people, but has a leader which cautiously balances popular consensus with his or her own conviction. Richard Nixon's mistrust of the Americans he pledge to serve faithfully in his execution of the office of President of the United States provided credence 185 years following the opening of the federal government in New York City why we the people must always be on guard, to always trust but verify, to ensure that we are always prepared so that we may always be free.