Why do people like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal say Nixon was an ineffective and immoral president...

>49 state near-sweep
>"B-but muh watergate was the reason he won!"

Why do liberals refuse to admit that their ideas have never been popular in the US?

>conducting operations in Cambodia damaged US safety
You wot?

Also I don't understand the logic, so North Vietnam is free to use Cambodian territories for weapon transport and military bases, but US are the only bad guys for bombing that shit?

It was actually 6 million Cambodians, check your sources.

>refused to let the Joint Chiefs of Staff invade Cuba
>this is "almost getting the whole planet nuked"

Ah yes, but cheating is easier when you nixon.

That's basically the problem; JFK got elected campaigning on the "missile gap", and the moment he was in office the CIA showed him reports via the U2 concerts that showed that there was no missile gap and the US had more missiles than the soviets.

Similarly, Nixon broke into his opponents offices, stole all their shit, ebayed it, and then called their opponents paranoid for focusing their campaign around Nixon breaking into the DNC offices.

Nixon was the ultimate, the ur president, he is what you have when you strip the office of president of its facade and charisma - just a mad drugged up weirdo who will do anything to continued to be the most powerful meth addict in the world for just 8 more years.

Whereas JFK made damn sure the facade never dropped and knew that the best time to leave was while you were still on a high.

Because cambodia was our fucking ally.

The fact he refused to pull missiles from Turkey until it escalated into the Cuban crisis means he almost got the world nuked. Americans don't like nukes in their back yard pointing at them, and turns out Russians don't like such things either.

Wow that's a BTFO

Kennedy knew the best time to leave was when your brains are all over the upholstery and your wife's face

lol no

>muh cambodia

I'm so glad this leftist trash argument was left in the 1970s where it belongs. Even democrats today realize that drone strikes in Pakistan are necessary even though we are not "at war" with them and they are our """allies"""

>Kennedy himself brought humanity closer to nuclear annihilation than any other human being in history

Completely untrue.

What's funny is that by modern standards Nixon is actually far more liberal than Kennedy.

1/2
You'll find that both Chomsky and Vidal- the latter of which having been related to Kennedy through marriage- were both highly critical of Kennedy, johnson, etc. This wasn't a binary thing. You should read through Gore Vidal's many essays on Kennedy, which serve as some of the most merciless and outspoken takedowns of what he calls The Holy Family in the English language.

> Yet today Kennedy dead has infinitely more force than Kennedy living. Though his administration was not a success, he himself became an exemplar of political excellence. Part of this phenomenon is attributable to the race's need for heroes, even in deflationary times. But mostly the legend is a deliberate creation of the Kennedy family and its clients. Wanting to regain power, it is now necessary to show that once upon a time there was indeed a Camelot beside the Potomac, a golden age forever lost unless a second Kennedy should become president. And so, to insure the restoration of that lovely time, the past must be transformed, dull facts transcended, and the dead hero extolled in films, through memorials, and in the pages of books.

2/2
On Nixon:
> The unsatisfactory end to the most unsatisfactory and pointless was in American history will be, like Kissinger himself, a footnote to a presidency that will be remembered for the bold initiative to China combined with a degree of detente with the Soviet Union... In the spring of last year [1982] he addressed a fund-raising event at the Disneyland Hotel, in Orange County, California. For the Right-Wingers present, he was obliged to do a bit of the Russians-are-coming; then he made absolute sense.
> "The Soviet Union needs a deal," Nixon said. "And we should give them one. But for a price." Noting that the West has a five-to-one edge in economic power over the Soviets, Nixon said that this advantage should be used as an "economic lever." Because "simply to have a program that would lead to a balance of nuclear terror is not enough. We must try to add to that a new dimension of the use of America's and the free world's economic power as both a carrot and a stick." Predictably, the press did not pick up on this, but history will; and since we are all of us Nixon and he is us, the fact that he went to Peking and Moscow in order to demonstrate to all the world the absolute necessity of coexistence proves that there is not only good in him but in use as well- hope, too.

Chomsky spends a lot of time denunciating the Vietnam-Laos- Cambodia War as a whole- which means getting into Kennedy for his undeniable hawkishness

Chomsky:
> The Kennedy administration escalated the war in South Vietnam, engaging U.S military forces directly in bombing, defoliation, and "advising" combat troops from 1961 to 1962 as part of an effort to drive several million people into concentration camps ("strategic hamlets") in which they could be "protected" behind barbed wire and armed guard from the guerillas whom, the United States conceded, they were willingly supporting. Douglas Pike assessed indigenous support for the NLF at about 50 percent of the population at the time- which is more than George Washington could have claimed- while the United States could rally virtually no indigenous support...
> Guenter Lewy describes the purpose of the U.S air operations of the early 1960s, which involved "indiscriminate killings" and "took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children," in manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in "open zones" were "subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets."

Chomsky said Nixon was the last liberal president. There's something.

This ain't even wrong: both Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky were highly critical of Kennedy, and gave guarded praise to Nixon.

If united statians weren't a bunch of bigmouthed cowards, he would have ended Both conflicts in a single year by attacking for real.

Vidal was just butt hurt because RFK and him hated each other

Lil Bobby-boy's a bitch-ass mcarthyite- everybody knows it

As in free markets? I guess I can see it, but idk.

>Kennedy himself brought humanity closer to nuclear annihilation than any other human being in history

Am I missing something here? It was Khrushchev who tried to put nuclear missiles to the backyard of the US.

>The US missiles in Turkey were just there for laughs.

>Kennedy himself brought humanity closer to nuclear annihilation than any other human being in history

That was Khrushchev's doing, not Kennedy.

>Why do people like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal say Nixon was an ineffective and immoral president, when Kennedy himself brought humanity closer to nuclear annihilation than any other human being in history?

How does that even make sense?

Nixon being ineffective and immoral and Kennedy bringing humanity close to nuclear annihilation are two different issues.

>Why do people say Nixon is shit if Kennedy is also shit?

>Cambodia
>illegal
We were invited.

>this will NEVER happen again

Because they are his contemporaries and as such can't see the longer term consequences. JFK's domestic programs didn't survive (neither did LBJ's, besides the Civil Rights Act which only codified existing SCOTUS doctrine) meanwhile Nixon created the EPA and Amtrak.

didn't Reagan win even harder?

Looks pretty popular to me

He got 5 more electoral votes but Nixon's popular vote margin was higher