His enemies, the upper class, don't think so. They hated him for taking away their draft deferments as part of his transition to a all volunteer military.

He was also hated, by the business class, for ceating OSHA, forcing employers to provide safe non toxic working conditions, to have to add safety swicths, guard rails, hard hats. When I was young I recall very many people were crippled in various ways or had limbs lost, maybe 15%,, or died young, thats gone now because of OSHA. But I aso met many business managers and others of their class with bitter hatred of Nixon for forcing them to spend the money, just to protect cheap disposable workers (like me).

Thats just the start of all Nixon did for the blue collar and middle class. The upper clases had nothing good to say, he did nothing for them, and attacking they exagerated the slightest thing to try to get the public to turn on him, running their villfication campaigns 24/7. The military industrial complex had deep pockets and were determined to get rid of Nixon before he could shift the US economy away from depending on war to fuel it's economy. Nixon it seems wanted to end the Cold War and permently transfer 26% of the then military budget to pay for National Health insurence, no new taxes needed.

The liberals hated Nixon, that alone says he was a very good president.

mrliberal wrote the following post at 02/15/2008 7:48 AM: The liberals hated Nixon, that alone says he was a very good president. ******* Thats true. They hated him becaus he was given the job of prosecuting Algier Hiss for espionage, and convicted him. Hiss was a close former advisor of Roosevelt, and it turned out admired the soviet union (and spied for them) for idealistic reasons. The honestly well meaning but decieved liberals felt Nixon was doing a indirect attack on Roosevelt. The truth is, Nixon, a populist, Eisenhowers VP, was the last defender of Roosevelts New Deal. As soon as Nixon was ut of office thet began to dismantle it. Bth parties if you look closely. They described what they were doing as "Deregulation".

And of course the liberal/leftwinger Nixon haters have turned Vietnam into "Nixons War" with their revisionist history to get Democrats off the hook. To them, the man that got us into Vietnam-JFK-is almost a God like figure, while the man that got us out is a villain dining with Hitler in hell.

Nixon could be a pistol from time to time, but he also left us the clean air act and the clean water act.

Compared to LBJ he was a choirboy.

And he created the Environmental Protection Agency. And he derailed the possibility of hot war with China after Korea and Vietnam. And a lot of civil rights era progress was legally consolidated during his administration.

He was a very, very smart and effective man. His problems were that horrible paranoia and underlying insecurity which drove him, and drove him to do nasty, mean things and into the Watergate scandal.

EarlyBird:

He was a very, very smart and effective man. His problems were that horrible paranoia and underlying insecurity which drove him, and drove him to do nasty, mean things and into the Watergate scandal.

That pretty much sums it up. Nixon's paranoia was his undoing. I always saw him as a classical figure of tragedy, undone by his own character flaws. Ironically, Watergate didn't even help him win re-election. He would have won in 1972 regardless.

Yes, Nixon did accomplish a lot of positive things for the country. Unfortunately, though, the bad things he did have overshadowed his legacy.

schizoidman_21:

Nixon could be a pistol from time to time, but he also left us the clean air act and the clean water act.

Compared to LBJ he was a choirboy.

And the EPA, OSHA, NHTSB, NHTSA. Nixon was no saint, still it never seemed for personal gain, and the worst actions of Nixon's involved or seemed heavily influenced by Henry Kissinger, and some dirty deeds attributed to Nixon continoued untill 1980.

And of course the liberal/leftwinger Nixon haters have turned Vietnam into "Nixons War" with their revisionist history to get Democrats off the hook.

No they haven't. Rather, they note, quite correctly, that Nixon escalated the war (even expanding it into Laos and Cambodia), a move that led to the death of an addition 36,000 U.S. soldiers (more than twice the amount of all the preceding years combined) and many more southeast Asians.

Never mind the fact that the man that actually got us into Vietnam was Eisenhower, who opposed a unified Vietnam and pumped aid, advisers, and military aid to the South Vietnamese. Kennedy did, indeed increase U.S. involvement in Vietnam, though.

Yes. Competence is critical, of course, but poor character can undo every acccomplishment.

You conveniently overlook the fact that Nixon's highly effective plan to get us out of Vietnam was brilliant. He phased us out of that never-ending conflict.

Brilliant? Hardly. His policy of "Vietnamization" merely shifted the burden from U.S. soldiers to the South Vietnamese. We saw how "brilliant" this was when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese (an inevitable conclusion to this awful war, mind you). Additionally, his "brilliant" strategy of secretly bombing and invading Cambodia led to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, which, in turn, led to the so-called "killing fields."

Nixon promised "peace with honor" but instead sent tens of thousands to early graves.

Yes, Nixon adopted a smart policy towards Vietnam only after all of his stupid policies had failed. And the essence of his smart strategy was to negotiate a truce, declare victory, and leave.

BTW, that's just about the only alternative to McCain's 100 year war in Iraq.

It IS the only alternative to the situation in Iraq. The long the U.S. stays, the more U.S. casualties there will be. In the end, the outcome will be exactly the same whether the U.S. stays for two more years, ten more years, or 100 more years.

The only way to "honorably" leave Iraq is to falsely claim victory and leave.

Well, if you just look at postwar presidents, you have to at least rate him over Carter, Ford, Bush, Bush II, Kennedy, Clinton, Ike... Reagan and Johnson are debatable, I suppose.