The discussion of Richard Nixon’s legacy on The Editors podcast today is fascinating. I also commend Rich’s piece on the homepage, and Charlie was right to tout Dan’s excellent essay in the November issue of the mag, “Nixon’s Not the One” (published on our site in mid-September).
Like my fellow Reagan conservatives, I am not a fan of Nixon’s policy preferences — not the statist domestic policies that, in some ways, grew the government in ways that would have made the JFK and LBJ administrations blush, not the economic mismanagement, and not détente with the Soviets. I mostly agree with my colleagues’ observations about Nixon’s China policy (and how ludicrous of President Trump to recently claim that China was our ally in World War II when our actual ally was Formosa — now democratic Taiwan — which today’s Communist China is actively scheming to gobble up); but I would give Nixon and Henry Kissinger more of a nod on the strategy of driving a wedge between Mao and Moscow. Nixon’s Vietnam War chapter is too complicated to summarize in a sentence or two, so I won’t try.
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