Experimental Blog # 192

Quotations, comments, and notes from "In the Arena" - A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal by Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon writes in very great detail about at least eleven "myths", or falsehoods, that are associated with the whole "Watergate" episode that ended his presidency.
"The most preposterous myth was that I or < > White House staff erased eighteen and one-half minutes of incriminating conversation from one of the White House tapes. < >They ignored the perfectly plausible explanation that, given the design of the tape recorder < > it was possible to erase a tape accidentally. They overlooked the fact that < > complete notes of the meeting, which were turned over to the courts, contained nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, it begs credulity to believe that I or my staff would erase this one segment of tape and yet leave untouched dozens of hours of < > conversations that I clearly would have preferred not to see made public."

"From an intellectual standpoint, the decade between 1978 and 1988 was the most creative period of my life." "My travels during those ten years were extensive." A list of 26 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa follows. "In most of these countries I met with heads of government."

Besides "Six Crises", which was written in 1962, and "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon", Richard Nixon writes about 5 other books that he wrote. Five of these seven books, he says, "were < > international bestsellers, {but} a serious non-fiction best seller at best reaches only about a hundred thousand people."

In his chapter entitled "Religion" Richard Nixon says, "I do not share the views of some well-intentioned anti-Communists that students should not be exposed to courses on Marxism." And, "In the end, it all comes down to whether the individual believes in something greater than himself." And in another chapter; "A student should know the rudiments < > and understand the tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the world's other great religion, Marxism-Leninism."

"I was not a good athlete. I went out for football, basketball, baseball, and track, and never made a letter. But I learned more about life from sitting on the bench with Chief Newman than I did getting As in philosophy courses."
"Marx believed that those who have capital exploit those who don't and that the solution was to give all capital to the state." "Capitalism, unlike communism, is not a religion; it is a morally neutral set of economic principles. It is a tool, not an end in itself, and it can be put to bad uses as well as good ones."

"I am reputed to have a pretty good memory for people's names. In fact, when I was in the House and even in the Senate, I could almost unerringly remember the names of hundreds of county chairmen, city chairmen, precinct chairman, volunteer workers, newspaper reporters and publishers, and prominent business people. As President < > whenever I knew I was going to meet people at a reception, a dinner, or other function, I thought that the least I could do was to remember guests' names, occupations, family backgrounds, and hometowns."

The above is very remarkable. However:
"After eight years of a popular President{Ronald Reagan} in the White House and three Republican Presidential landslides..." And, "In 1952, when Eisenhower was elected by a landslide..." The elections of 1952, 1980, and 1988 were not generally considered to be landslides according to the popular vote.

"In Marxist-Leninist theory, the Communist Party has a unique understanding of the inevitable processes of history and has the right to rule society without the consent of the people ..."
"To operate optimally, capitalism requires that all enjoy equality before the law and equality of opportunity. < > No society, including our own, has fully succeeded in establishing full equality in either sense."
"In the West, the non-socialist welfare state is committed to the proposition that the poor or unemployed will not become destitute."

" ...600,000 South Vietnamese perished in the South China Sea as they fled their country in anything that would float." According to other sources the number of people who died, although still very high, was somewhere between 50,000 to 200,000.

" ... no one had the power or the courage to tell him{Mao Tse-tung} to retire until the grim reaper called him to meet Marx a few months later."