What would Nixon's legacy had been if not for Watergate?

What would Nixon's legacy had been if not for Watergate?

Opening up to China

This and the utter failure of Vietnamization.

If it weren't for Watergate he would have had to accept responsibility for it.

He would of been remembered as possibly one of the top 10 had he not gotten in trouble.

Reagan would not have been elected actually

Had Nixon stayed in office, the North Vietnamese would never have massed their forces sufficiently to invade the South, as they knew Nixon surely would have responded with an aerial bombing to such a blatant violation of the agreement he'd negotiated with the North. They still might have subverted the South and taken over eventually, but it couldn't have been so precipitous a collapse as historical. Thus his legacy of Vietnamization of the conflict and eventually a South Korea type situation might have become real.

>utter failure of Vietnamization.
>this was Nixon's fault
lmao

>opened China
>first strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, leading to an agreement
>ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the prisoners of war
>saved the life of the state of (((Israel)))

Talk about the merits of each, but he did make the world a more peaceful place. And his involvement of Watergate was discussing a cover-up and not going through with it. This is much less damning than Kennedy's discussion about Operation Northwoods, and both are childsplay to the Obama Administration weaponizing the IRS and FBI into political wing. Of course, with a complicit media, nobody hears about the latter two.

>get elected president on a platform of "peace with honor"
>stay in Vietnam for five more years, during which time 22,000 more Americans are killed
>South Vietnam collapses anyway because they sucked and they always sucked

I see this as somehow being a negative thing for a presidential administration to be responsible for.

GOAT

hes still GOAT

In a century, when no one cares about the decades of propaganda, he'll be lauded as a mastermind statesman

Wait, if you put Israel in the echo parentheses, does that cancel out the Semitism and make it NOT Jewish?

He’d be the guy Republican party like Reagan is now (though Reagan would still be lauded/would probably end up taking his spot). 1972 was a fucking slaughter for a reason.

We'll have to ask Veeky Forums...

Why is Nixon so well liked in Veeky Forums? I'm not asking in a ironic way, i'm asking out of pure curiosity, as i know nothing about Nixon other the Watergate

Reality reexamined via the avenue of Veeky Forums contrarianism.

This unironically explains pretty much every retarded opinion on this site. Very few people here have any idea what they're talking about nor do they care.

yea, "le xD contrarianism" is probably the biggest reason for "why does Veeky Forums like X"

because he was a genuine prodigy, with very good intentions and an open mind, whose reputation is dragged through the dirt by morons who get their history from pop culture

He was a real human bean.

>he was a genuine prodigy, with very good intentions and an open mind,
Care to expand on this?

This and environmentalism

>In a century
lol it doesn't even have to be that long. Idiots actually think Joseph McCarthy actually benefited the US gov't till this day.

a prodigy?

he got his start as a dirty tricks man for the california GOP

vietnam fell because Nixon was in trouble at home... due to Watergate.

the way the US was fighting Vietnam was unwinable

If the US stayed committed to keeping troops in or at least material support to South Vietnam, it would've been a Korea type situation at worst and South Vietnam would still exist as a country. There's even a possibility Vietnam would eventually unite under Southern leadership after the Soviet collapse, like what happened in Germany.

when the US left, the fighting could be heard from Saigon for months

Including von hoffman

Signing veiled bribes into law, overseeing the beginning of the great transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the upper, overseeing the divorce of productivity from profitability are the big ones imo.

>Opening up to China
>EPA
>Desegregation of schools
He was p good president overall

Personally cause he came from modest background, was quite smart, with an effective foreign policy, and, would've ended up as the best president of late 20th century(if he wasn't so paranoid)

>divorce of productivity from profitability are the big ones imo.

It's a meme to blame Nixon for this, unless you think Nixon enforced monetary policy across all western nations

Yep, Nixon literally came right from the very very bottom. Few world leaders can say that these days.

ran as vice president twice, was elected twice, then managed to get nominated as his party's presidential candidate three times, only one of which was as incumbent, and two of which came after he'd lost an election, which is typically considered a political death sentence. That's a record for presidential runs that's completely unbeaten in US history. Beyond that, he more or less saved his first VP run single-handed with the Checkers speech, likely only lost the election in 1960 through Chicago tricks, entrenched the GOP in the South and scored one of the largest victories of all time in the 1968 election. All of that's beside his generally excellent record on mundane stuff like the economy, and not even mentioning foreign policy, which was his real priority

Look up Martin Anderson's Revolution, which basically praises Reagan, but shows interesting contrasts between Reagan and Nixon

>Ended the Gold Standard
The man who began the destructive finacialization of the modern era.