New Nixon tapes released: Nixon wanted the Brookings Institution "cleaned out"

[sabra]

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/02/1695418.aspx

From NBC’s John Rutherford
Richard Nixon's reputation takes a fresh pounding every time the National Archives releases another batch of audio tapes from his presidency, and today's opening of nearly 200 hours of Nixon White House recordings is no exception.

Again and again, Nixon comes across as ruthless, cynical and profane in conversations with staff members.

Here are some examples:

-- On July 1, 1971, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.:

"I can't have a high-minded lawyer ... I want a son-of-a-b----. I want someone just as tough as I am. ... We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy that will use any means. We are going to use any means... . Get it done. I want it done. I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame."


-- On April 4, 1972, Nixon discusses the press with Haldeman:

NIXON: “Return the calls to those poor dumb bastards ... who I know are our friends. Now do it ... We made the same mistake Eisenhower made, but not as bad as Eisenhower made, because he sucked the Times too much ... G-d damn it, don't talk to them for a while. Will you enforce that now?'
HALDEMAN: "I'll try."

-- On May 18, 1972, Nixon talks to Henry Kissinger about the National Security Adviser's meeting with Ivy League college presidents regarding the war in Vietnam:

NIXON: "The Ivy League presidents? Why, I'll never let those sons-of-b------ in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished ... Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again ... They came out against us when it was tough ... Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."


-- On Nov. 14, 1972, Nixon talks with his aide Charles Colson about his landslide re-election victory over Democrat George McGovern:

NIXON: "What in the hell did you think of McGovern's statement on the election? Wasn't that the sour grapes crap again?”
COLSON: “Well, it's unbelievable, the arrogance of the guy ... God, what a bad man. Just awfully glad we got him buried and put away for good. I think he is.”
NIXON: “Oh, he's buried. He's buried."


-- On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man.”
COLSON: “That's precisely it.”
NIXON: “They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

[Saboburns]

1. Clean out the Brookings Institue??

Smart man, that Richard Nixon.

[Gman]

2. It's times like this that I think of Hunter S Thompson's "He Was A Crook"

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
,
,
,
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.,
,
,
,
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

More at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm

[barbtries]

16. i loved that!

and i know exactly where that spot just south of LA empties into the ocean...

[monmouth]

3. Nixon makes Bush look like a choirboy...almost...n/t

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. Nixon was evil and smart.

Bush is evil and stupid.

It's a toss up which is more dangerous.

[barbtries]

17. i vote bush

i never thought i'd hate a president again, but bush's presidency has left me thinking that nixon was not all that bad. of course he was all that bad after all. but at least nixon was not coddled along through all of his crimes the way bush has been, which to my mind really incriminates msm more than any one person.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

7. Not true. Bush is behind the cold blooded murder of over a million people.

[cali]

8. uh, what the hell do you think happened in Cambodia

not to mention Vietnam. Sheesh. The white washing of that pig Nixon, even here, is just sickening

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

9. Sorry, you're right about Cambodia.

[malaise]

14. Both were responsible for over a million dead

Nixon really hated Ivy League schools. Trash is trash.
Most interesting is that he really pushed the opposition as 'enemy'. Bush and Cheney perfected it.

[Octafish]

5. Richard Nixon, BFEE

Here, Nixon receives Rev Moon's ble$$ing.



Nixon was a saint, compared to his Patrón.



Nixon said to fire "Everyone. Except Bush and the Texans. He'll do anything for our side."

No doubt.

[glitch]

15. Oh man.

Ain't that just perfect?

[WI_DEM]

6. Interestingly the LBJ tapes actually enhance his reputation

because on them he talks passionately about his committment to the poor and civil rights and is shown as a master politician, while Nixon's tapes show him as just a vile creep.

[blueclown]

10. Who here has badmouted LBJ and compared him with Nixon?

And they call themselves liberals?

[WI_DEM]

12. nobody I'm just pointing out that the LBJ tapes have been helpful to his reputation

while the Nixon tapes have done the opposite for him.

[H2O Man]

11. The documents that

are available are also fascinating. One shows how Hoover intimidated Nixon.

http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/dec08/081071_Liddy.pdf

[robertpaulsen]

13. "somebody else take the blame"? You mean somebody like domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy?

What a surprise it was Nixon who set that event in motion. And he might have maintained plausible deniability if it wasn't for those damn tapes. Really makes me wonder, how could he possibly have thought history would judge him favorably when he left a taped record of his crimes? Sounds like megalomania to me.

[barbtries]

18. wouldn't it be sweet

to discover that gw and dick were similarly megalomanic. so many events would be known so much more clearly.

[The Backlash Cometh]

19. Well, it looks like Nixon's dream came true.

Since there are a shortage of "high-minded" lawyers as in, I've yet to meet one around my sticks.