Passed Presidents - # 37 – Richard M. Nixon

We will be taking a break from the Dead Presidents Quest after this story.  May is the only month of the year when no president has died.  However, the hiatus begins with a bang as we remember a personal favorite of mine.

(Copied from Google Images)

“It was twenty years ago today...”

So begins the Beatles’ classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and so begins this look at the president who died twenty years ago today.

Born into a modest Quaker family in California, Richard Nixon was studious and hard-working...maybe too much so.  His fellow law school students called him ‘Gloomy Gus’.  I believe he was humorless.  Regardless of what came first – the absence of social skills or perceived snubs and rejections - he had a chip on his shoulder his entire life. 

When he first ran for Congress in 1946, he took advantage of those tense, early post-war years by painting his opponents as Communist sympathizers.  He earned the nickname ‘Tricky Dick’ in 1950 when he won a Senate seat with some sleazy campaign tactics that also suggested his opponent was a Pinko.  After only two years in the Senate, he became Eisenhower’s running mate in the 1952 election.  He got in trouble when a secret $18,000 fund was revealed.  Ike ordered him to clear his name and he did on national TV with the famous “Checkers Speech”.  

Richard Nixon and Checkers

Shot at an exhibit of presidents and their pets

at the Newseum 15 May 2011

The presidential election of 1968 was the first time I voted.  I was no fan of Richard Nixon.  I remember the first ever televised presidential debate in 1960 when that young, handsome Kennedy boy just outshone gloomy Dick and his sweaty five o’clock shadow.  But I could not vote for the party that got us so deep into Viet Nam.  Hubert Humphrey was a nice guy but I had to vote for change...the first of my regrettable choices in the voting booth.

His time in office spanned the most tumultuous and impactful years of my life.  In that six-year period, I left home, married and separated.  I graduated college, went to grad school and dropped out before getting a Ph.D.  I faced the draft and induction into an army that, at one time had over a half million troops in Southeast Asia.  These were stressful times.

In my opinion, Nixon rightfully deserves all the infamy we can heap on his paranoid, anti-Semitic, foul-mouthed ass and it’s a shame since he had many significant accomplishments.  Détente with the USSR, opening China, arms reduction, creating OSHA and EPA and slowing inflation were all important achievements. 

He is also credited with obtaining the cease-fire in the Viet Nam War.  While it did happen on his watch, I still take issue with it.  I believe he strung out that conflict as long as he could with escalations, invasions and bombings of neighboring countries.  The Old Commie Fighter had to take it to the enemy as long as possible rather than face the fact it was a losing proposition.  On October 9, 1968, then candidate Nixon said that an administration that can’t get us out of Viet Nam in four years should not be re-elected.  In 1972, as he ran for re-election while the war continued to rage, George McGovern supporters wore this button.  I guess it was too subtle a message since Nixon won in a landslide.

I never parted with my little piece of history...even though I can get $13 for it today on E-Bay. 

“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal”

Richard Nixon to David Frost April 6, 1977

The problem was that Nixon really was a crook.  He lied, stonewalled and did everything he could to hide his involvement in the Watergate crimes.  After all the obstruction and lying, the Supreme Court ruled he had to turn over tape recordings he made in the Oval Office and lo and behold...there he was, just six days after the break-in, telling H.R. Haldeman how the CIA could pressure the FBI to back off its investigation. He was impeached and became the only president to resign from office...rather than face the shame of a slam dunk trial.

Cartoon by Blaine MacDonald, Hamilton Spectator (1973)

Taken from Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year – 
1974 Edition, Pelican publishing, LA

Dick and Pat are buried on grounds of the Nixon Library and birthplace in Yorba Linda, California.  The boyhood home is in view, a short distance from this final resting place.

He was a dirt bag.  His vice president also resigned in disgrace and more members of his administration were sent to prison than any other.  However, when I think about it, one very positive impression comes to mind.  As much as that president did to stain his office, the system worked.  An independent Congress, a free press, the Constitution and the laws of the land prevailed and justice was served.  Is this a great country or what?

 Richard Milhous Nixon

37th President; Served 1969 -1974

Born: January 9, 1913, Yorba Linda, CA

Died: April 22, 1994, New York, NY

Grave Location: Nixon Library and Birthplace, Yorba Linda, CA

Date Visited: 6/22/2004

Passed Presidents - # 32 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

We’ve visited some mediocrities and downright losers lately.  It seems fitting that after William Henry Harrison, the calendar allows us to remember one of the best.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is consistently on everyone’s Top Three list, as he should be.  Our only four-term president faced the two biggest challenges of the 20^th century, the Great Depression and World War II. 

Springwood, the Roosevelt Home in Hyde Park, NY (5 June 2006)

The Roosevelt Family settled in the colonies in the 1600’s and to say they were well-to-do is an understatement.  Their Hyde Park estate was a bastion of WASP wealth and propriety.    Franklin was born there in 1882.  He was the only child of his father’s second and much younger wife. 

Sara Delano was a piece of work.  Notoriously possessive and domineering, her son was raised by nurses and governesses and had little contact with other children...especially po’ folk.  It’s a wonder that this patrician became such a champion of the downtrodden.  Mommy Dearest disapproved of his marriage to Eleanor but bought them a townhouse when he began his law career and began his family.  Of course, she also bought the adjoining unit and built doors to connect them.  She lived into Franklin’s third term before dying at the age of 86.

Portrait of Young Franklin (5 June 2006)

Taken as I walked through the Springwood mansion

He followed the upper crust path to adulthood...Groton, Harvard, Columbia Law School and a Wall Street law firm.  He was less interested in lawyering and more drawn to politics.  As a New York State senator, he fought the Tammany Hall political machine.  He was the vice presidential candidate when the Democrats lost to Harding and Coolidge in 1920.  He was governor of New York when the Crash happened.  The Depression and Herbert Hoover’s unpopularity ensured an easy win when he ran for president in 1932. 

A portion of the Roosevelt Living Room,

Hyde Park, NY (5 June 2006)

Franklin was stricken with polio in his late 30’s.  From that point on, he lost the use of his legs.  He found the climate and waters in Warm Springs, Georgia very helpful and often returned to swim and rehabilitate.  It was there he died of a cerebral hemmorage on this date in 1945 at age 63.  He is buried on the grounds of the Hyde Park estate along with Eleanor who died in 1962.

His first 100 days in office were marked by the greatest assertion of federal power in our history.  The New Deal brought on banking reform, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and many other initiatives.  The Social Security Act came a year later.

FDR Memorial, Washington, D.C. (10 April 2014)

The new Memorial, set along the Tidal Basin, allows visitors

to walk through his four terms in office and see

representations of the trying times.  Significant quotes

from the president are carved into the massive granite walls.

I try not to editorialize (too much) in these biographical and journalistic essays.  However, this quote from his second inaugural address in 1937 still resonates.  Made during the depths of the Great Depression, it reminds me, 77 years later, that so much of the nation’s wealth is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer people.  The disparity continues to increase and it is now approaching what it was before the market crashed in 1929.  Just sayin’... 

 

FDR’s was actually the first president’s grave I ever visited.  We were in the area for Becky’s brother’s wedding and took some time the day before to tour around the magnificent Hudson River valley.  I returned there in the middle of the Quest to make better, digital images.  In addition to the impressive home, the property includes a museum and presidential library.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

32^nd President; Served 1933-1945

Born: January 30, 1882, Hyde Park, NY

Died: April 12, 1945, Warm Springs, GA

Grave Location: Franklin Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY

Dates Visited: 7/8/1977; 6/6/2006

Passed Presidents - # 9 – William Henry Harrison

On this day, 173 years ago, our ninth president gave up the ghost.  William Henry Harrison was the first president to die in office and he holds the distinction of serving the shortest term on record.  On a miserable, late winter day, he gave the longest inaugural speech EVER and did it without wearing a hat, coat or gloves.  He caught a cold and pneumonia finished him off exactly a month later.  This is why mothers all over say, “Put a coat on.  I’m cold.”  They all used to say, “That’s how President Harrison died, you know.”  When kids started saying, “President who?”, mothers left that part out and stayed with the tried-and-true, “...because I said so.”  

Born to plantation aristocracy in Virginia (his father signed the Declaration of Independence), he joined the Army and went to the Northwest Territories after daddy died and left him no money.  There, he fought Indians, met his wife and settled into territorial government after leaving the military.

I guess if Native Americans had their ‘Hall of Shame’, Harrison would be a prominent member.  As governor of the Indiana Territory, one of his primary duties was to make things easy for settlers – with no regard for the people already living there.  Negotiating treaties with the tribes was a less messy way to acquire their lands.  Liberal donations of alcohol made the process go smoothly and the final terms more agreeable.  If we didn’t want to abide by the terms of the treaties, we didn’t and would conquer them anyway.

Entrance to William Henry Harrison Memorial,

North Bend, OH [21 October 2006]

Apart from his record term length, Harrison is known by his campaign nickname.  With his running mate, John Tyler, their slogan was ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too’.  Tippecanoe was the battle he won against the Shawnee Confederation.

Some refer to the 1840 election as the first ‘modern’ presidential campaign because the Whigs manipulated the issues and stressed style over substance.  The issues were secondary as Harrison’s handlers preferred to falsely emphasize his frontier background and tout his military victories over the Indians. 

I guess his brief time in office did have something to show for it...even if that happened because he croaked.  Harrison’s premature passing prompted us to clarify the vague constitutional aspects of presidential succession.  

We can also give him this much.  When C-Span conducted its Second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership in 2009, 65 experts placed Harrison firmly in the Bottom Ten but at Number 39.  There were still three guys who ranked lower...despite his being in office for only a month and in a sick bed most of that time.

It’s only fitting that my visit to the grave of the president with the shortest term was also abbreviated.  It was late in the day when I arrived at the memorial and it was too late to enter.

All I could see of the Harrison Tomb [21 October 2006]

Until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 at age 69, Harrison was the oldest man to take the oath at age 68.  Interestingly, another thing Reagan did was defeat ‘Tecumseh’s Curse’.  It was said that Tecumseh’s brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as The Prophet, put a curse on Harrison.  He said Harrison will die and “every Great Chief chosen every twenty years thereafter shall also die.”  Damned if that didn’t work for a long time.  After Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were assassinated, Harding was poisoned...um, died suddenly, FDR died on the job and JFK was shot.  For the next 120 years, every president elected in a year ending in ‘0’ died in office until Ronnie lived through his two terms...despite John Hinckley’s effort to keep the streak going in 1981.

William Henry Harrison

9th President; Served 1841

Born: February 9, 1773, Berkeley, VA

Died: April 4, 1841, Washington, D.C.

Grave Location: Harrison Tomb State Memorial, North Bend, OH

Date Visited: 10/21/2006