The (One) Time The Good Guys Won

“I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.” Richard M. Nixon, August 8, 1974.

“He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family.” Hunter S. Thompson, in his scathing obituary of Nixon, 20 years later.

We should be so lucky. Nixon might be the last great progressive president — hell, he almost got universal health care through before Watergate threw him overboard — but he was a crook, “an evil man,” Thompson observed, “evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.”

Sound familiar, class? Thought so. Please don’t give me the ‘Nixon understood the office’ crap, either. He was prepared to fight and drag it out into 1976 if he could have. It was only Barry Goldwater’s reality check, “How many votes do I have, 35, right?” a clearly delusional Nixon asked, hoping for an answer that would salvage the remaining twenty-nine-and-a-half months of his Presidency.

“Mr. President,” Goldwater replied, as he wrote in his dairy, “Dick, you might get four votes for acquittal.”

His first Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, had resigned in disgrace nearly a year earlier. Agnew was taking…