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md5: 0ea04de2... 🔍
>Various presidents have used their office to mold the nation. George Washington was known as "The Father of His Country." Andrew Jackson was seen as the champion of the small American against moneyed interests. Abraham Lincoln guided the nation through one of its severest tests. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt molded the presidency into an instrument of social justice.
>Nixon did none of these things. His actions as president were purely in self-interest, his belief that in fact the president was an emperor above the rule of law. Clearly he had no respect for the careful system of checks and balances our founders laid down. Yet Nixon could hardly have acted alone; he was not the disease but merely a symptom of it. During the post-World War II years, the body politic in America was becoming increasingly rotted from within, the ideas of integrity in government slowly diminishing. During the worst times of corruption in the Gilded Age, honorable men such as Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland rose to the Oval Office and stood above the masses of dishonest machine politicians. The idea that corruption and willful ignorance of the rule of law would come to the White House had not yet appeared.
>Postwar Americans were increasingly accepting of corruption in government, arguing that it was the norm and something to be joked about rather than be disgusted at. There was also increasing lack of respect, whether accidental or deliberate, of the Bill of Rights and basic civil liberties. After all, our nation had survived its first 150 years without an FBI, a CIA, security clearances, domestic surveillance, and presidential enemies' lists, and it had done quite well for itself.
>Nixon did none of these things. His actions as president were purely in self-interest, his belief that in fact the president was an emperor above the rule of law. Clearly he had no respect for the careful system of checks and balances our founders laid down. Yet Nixon could hardly have acted alone; he was not the disease but merely a symptom of it. During the post-World War II years, the body politic in America was becoming increasingly rotted from within, the ideas of integrity in government slowly diminishing. During the worst times of corruption in the Gilded Age, honorable men such as Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland rose to the Oval Office and stood above the masses of dishonest machine politicians. The idea that corruption and willful ignorance of the rule of law would come to the White House had not yet appeared.
>Postwar Americans were increasingly accepting of corruption in government, arguing that it was the norm and something to be joked about rather than be disgusted at. There was also increasing lack of respect, whether accidental or deliberate, of the Bill of Rights and basic civil liberties. After all, our nation had survived its first 150 years without an FBI, a CIA, security clearances, domestic surveillance, and presidential enemies' lists, and it had done quite well for itself.
