WatchEven 40 years after Watergate Richard M. Nixon is still a part of the American and world psyche. Woodward and ernstein are talking bad about him again. My tak on the man is that he was a brilliant and misunderstood person. He had the potential to have incredible accomplishment and made a good start with the opening to China. Sadly his bad character destroyed his career, caused us to lose the Vietnam War, hurt his family and personally cost each one of us in one way or another.
For me one important question remains. Let us assume that Nixon had won the 1960 presidential election. In October of 1962 he is handed the proof of Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. Would he have followed the advice of his military people and launched massive air strikes and an invasion of Cuba or would he have played it cautious as John F. Kennedy had done.
The Soviets not only had the MRBM's with nuclear war heads. They also had quite a number of battlefield nuclear weapons. US authorities bragged that they knew about these weapons and could have taken them out. I am skeptical. I suspect that the invasion force would have suffered horrific casualties and tha tthe US Navy ships supporting them would have also been sunk in large numbers. A nuclear response on Cuba would have been ordered.
This could have escalated into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. The US with its better nuclear weapons and delivery systems, would have lost 20 million and the Soviet Union would have been flattened with up to 70 million casualties. We would have had global warming and nuclear winter for years. Where would we all be now?
All of us need to have a god idea of what Nixon would have done almost 50 years ago.
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Madison, WI
All those years ago..
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... he was certainly better than McGovern. There is something to be said about republican presidential candidates.. if you dont succeed the first time.. try try again.. certainly cant say the same about democrats ... perhaps Mrs. Clinton will try again!
PS.. we dont lose in Vietnam. A treaty was signed by the North, South and US. but the Viets broke it. It was their battle!
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Lost? Peace with Honor. He sold his election on getting out of the crazy Democratic nightmare in Vietnam. Likely, after watching Ike strugging with the crazy fucks on SAC, he would have done exactly what JFK did and told them to stuff the nukes up their asses. Ike was frightened at what had become acceptable policy ideas among his joint chiefs and the head crazies at SAC, Curtis LeMay and Anderson. I dunno how close they were but likely Nixon heard of Ike's trouble with these characters' apocalyptic embrace of the nuclear option.
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Pacifica, CA
Incredible historical ignorance here, I'm surprised at the lack of knowledge.
In 1968, Nixon ran for president and secretly had his advisor, Henry Kissinger, negotiating with the North Vietnamese to scuttle the peace talks that the Johnson administration had initiated. Kissinger promised the NV a better deal - what they got was years more bombing and war and finally our retreating with our tail between our legs in 1975.
Kissinger and Nixon were engaging in treason - negotiating with a foreign power outside of US diplomatic channels.
I believe Christopher Hitchens wrote a book about this.
It's not obscure.
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My idol, Barry Goldwater, did not think very highly of Nixon. Actually that was an understatement.
JFK did an awesome job getting Khrushchov to back down. That was nothing short of brilliant. (But you got to love Khrushchov's shoe.)
On the other hand, AuH20 could have stopped the Vietnam War. He was not afraid to use nuclear weapons so the Soviet would have backed down. But I am now being an armchair historian.
Where have all the statesmen gone?
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monkframe says
Did you mean sedition? There are differences.
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More than likely if Nixon had won the 1960 election,there would probably been no missile crisis(never mind from cuba),whatsoever.Nixon as vice president had a prior meeting with Khrushchev in the 1959"kitchen debate"-
Nixon had visited Moscow to support an American exhibition of an affordable home anyone in the US could afford!!!!!
Khrushchev tried to play down soviet inadequacies on"luxury"domestic products for their people!!!!-Nixon made sure the soviet's translated throughout the ussr!!!-making the soviet leader quite awkward and slightly intimidated through the power of television!!!
Khrushchev found Nixon a lot like the way future soviet leaders perceived Ronald Reagan in the 1980's-a nuclear cowboy who gave the impression on the world scene of shooting and asking questions later,when involved in a sensitive situation or world crisis!!!!
Khrushchev still thought Kennedy(even after their summit and the Berlin crisis that preceded it),was a chip off old neville chamberlain block.Only a possible nuclear conflagration throughout the world,convinced the ussr that JFK was the right man for the job!!!!!!
The crisis did teach Nixon to be more negotiating and tolerant on the geopolitical front,which served him well until he resigned from office in 1974.
Openings with china,the beginning of arms control would not have happened if not for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962!!!!!!