He was a horrible human being, but he is such a riveting character that I hardly even think of him as a real person--more like a fictitious character from an alternative history book written by Philip K. Dick. We all know that history had to have turned out differently. Nixon was voted out of office after making a fool out of himself with Alger Hiss, Helen Gahagan Douglas won election to the Senate in '50, Ike picked Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate in '52, and Humphrey was elected president in 1968, right? Maybe not, but for a man so unstable on several levels and obsessed with power and the adoration of the masses, his accomplishments are not trivial. Having read about the man for a very long time, I still have no idea what drove him. Lust for power, sure, but it was far more complicated than that, I believe.

I just loved those memos, though. I especially liked the line about how Nixon visited sick people "that nobody even cares about." Well, it doesn't make you a great humanitarian to visit sick people that nobody cares about, then trumpet said acts to the masses as being evidence of your superior enlightenment. I also loved the part about how he was such a good guy that he wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey after beating him. It wasn't like 1968 was the most vicious campaign ever (the Democratic primaries and convention were far more brutal than the general election), but writing the man a letter doesn't make up for secretly colluding with South Vietnam to boycott the Paris peace talks, preventing progress from being made and thus keeping said Senator from becoming President. In Nixon's world, though, he comes out the good guy on that one. The most impressive thing about that whole ordeal was that Humphrey actually knew what Nixon was doing and didn't say anything about it, for fear of destroying the nation's faith in government. That's a decent, upright man for you. Think of what might have happened if he had won in 1968? In the end, Nixon's great humanism seems like little more than a catalogue of things to be put on a memo trumpeting RMN's greatness. I doubt he ever did anything that didn't directly benefit himself--if he did, I certainly am unaware of it.

Ultimately, I don't feel too sorry that people didn't see Nixon's human side, because he hasn't quite convinced me that it exists...

I just saw a very human side of Nixon portrayed on Broadway in "Frost Nixon". I highly recommend it if you are ever in the area.

I was never a fan of Nixon to say the least, as I'm sure very few in the audience were either. But I do believe it was the very real complexities of the man that made him so flawed and so human.

Anyone who has his therapist sitting next to his wife at their own funeral must have had some real demons. I believe history will be kinder to him as the years pass.

Afterall, I think historians will have to focus all of their collective strength for decades to come in order to fully and properly dissect the infinitely more serious abuse of powers we are currently witnessing.

I am so tired of these kinds of pointless articles and comments. I know the liberal press hates Nixon. Interesting how Johnson escalated the war and bombed Vietnam into the stone age but that never gets covered. Fact is Nixon was a great president who engaged in alot of the kinds of activities that many presidents before him engaged in as well. The difference being the country was changing and everything the media could discover about government was going to be printed on the front page of the paper. You people can thrown this garbage in the news until hell freezes over but it doesn't change history. Nixon will go down as one of the better Presidents. No president before him could have survived the scrutiny he had to survive. In addition, the press dispised him from the time of the Alger Hiss incident. As far as this silly memo I challenge you to show me a President who thinks the media is reporting all the good things he might be doing. Get real and give real news not a rehash of old warn out garbage the liberal press wants to inject into the national discussion monthly just in case somebody might forget about it.

That's right. The point is that he was a very human being with certain flaws that cleaved him. He was like a figure in a Greek tragedy, he was not a monster. See my post "I corresponded with Nixon for decades."

My politics are different today, but i would much prefer Nixon, before his meltdown, to Bush and Cheney. The penchant to demonize or heroify is a mistake. Nixon was a person, and despite his failings limitations, and errors, it is his obvious humanity that makes him so interesting and fruitful to observe and understand. Nixon was...someone. Someone with gifts, and raw pain. I believe he did what he thought was best most of the time.

i do like the Philip K Dick line you're right about that. Oddly enough I met Humphrey once too, in an airport, but just for a second. i think part of the reason HHH lost was that he knew he had cancer before the rest of us knew, and it took the edge off him. But I have no evidence for it.