A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

He was a crook

Some 20,000 pages of telephone transcripts from the Nixon White House were released earlier this week, including a segment where Henry Kissinger describes how President Nixon was once too drunk to take a call from British Prime Minister Edward Heath at the height of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Now MSNBC has some more excerpts from the transcripts here. I've included a few of my favorites:

"You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. [...] Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. [...] You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns. That's been going on for years—centuries." —Nixon in May 1971

"I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."
—Nixon in May 1971 declaring the Northern Californian city "is the most faggy god----ed thing you could ever imagine"

"We're going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family—let people like [New York Sen.] Pat Moynihan ... believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work—throw 'em off the rolls. That's the key ... I have the greatest affection for [blacks], but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like."
—Nixon in May 1971

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."
—Nixon to H. R. (Bob) Haldeman in May 1971

But, you know, he went to China.

I can't help but shake my head whenever someone pops up with some revisionist bullshit about what a Great President Nixon was. This delusion was particularly prevalent in the days immediately following his death, but for my money, Hunter S. Thompson penned the best eulogy:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
...
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
...
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Just think of the new transcripts as sprinkles on top of the whole fetid banana split of the Nixon presidency.