FDR Fireside Chat Reference In Scott's Tower Calendar

[A Joseph Ross]

On 3/17/2013 3:25 AM, Kevin Vahey wrote:

> "I am not a crook" is the ultimate Nixon sound bite.

And that's not quite what he said, either.  He said, "The American 
People want to know if their president is a crook.  Well, I'm not a crook."

> What scares me is that Nixon 40 years later looks pretty 
> good compared with current cast of characters.

Apart from Watergate and the surrounding events, Nixon was a pretty good 
President.  For example, he ended the military draft, he supported 
lowering the voting age to 18 (and I heard him favor that back in the 
1960 campaign), he instituted the EPA and appointed a strong 
administrator, William Ruckelshaus, he finally ended school segregation 
in the South by threatening to withhold Federal aid to education, he 
proposed a welfare reform bill that was considered liberal then and 
would be considered liberal today, and despite his sometime 
anti-semitism, he came to the aid of Israel during the Yom Kippur War.  
I worked at the Brookline Rent Control Board at that time, where most of 
us were Jewish and all of us had been for McGovern a year earlier, but 
we talked about it once and all agreed that, at that time, we were glad 
Nixon was there, since we weren't sure McGovern would have come through 
the same way.  Watergate was a colossal mess, for which Nixon was 
responsible, but it's too bad that it overshadows all the good Nixon did.

-- 
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