Why I voted (twice!) for Richard Nixon, even though I'm a liberal Democrat

For some reason Richard Nixon comes to mind, my mind at least, periodically. Maybe because the punditry are already talking about who was the worst president ever. Until now, Nixon seemed to be the "gold standard" of bad presidents, and there's no doubt that the Watergate conspiracy and those damned tapes hung out all his dirty laundry.

And yet . . .

It is not mentioned that only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in more daunting circumstances than Nixon. Four years later, he was reelected by 49 states and a plurality of 18 million votes, because he stopped the assassinations, race riots, anti-war riots, skyjackings, inflation, extracted the U.S. from Vietnam without losing the war, opened relations with China, warmed up relations with the U.S.S.R., negotiated and signed the greatest arms control agreement in history, started a Middle East peace process, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, vastly expanded the national parks system, pioneered welfare reform and fiscal decentralization, reduced the crime rate, eliminated the draft, and ended school segregation without recourse to the court-ordered nostrum of transporting millions of schoolchildren all around the cities of America by bus to effect racial balance.

Conrad Black, “Escape from Nixonland”

The NY Sun, June 19, 2008

So, to the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people, we might add another -- what should we think about bad people who do good things?