Nixon-Thompson-Nixon
Hi. I arrived to New York a few days ago to warm balmy weather — a weird contrast to the 4 feet of snow I left behind at Owl Farm. It’s finally cold today, thank god. We had our first snow yesterday. The weather bureau promised that the historically warm weather that East coast people are experiencing is not due to Global Warming, but rather, El Nino. They didn’t mention what caused El Nino.
At the moment, I’m sitting at Columbia University’s Butler Library, the huge stone building facing the green fields in front of the Alma Mater statue and the dome of Lowell Library. It’s the first building that greets me every day with the massive carved names of Homer, Heredotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil… (when I first arrived on campus last September, I barely knew the works of half of them — but I’m leaning.)
Anyway, I realized I hadn’t posted for several days and ran to Butler for a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, which is shelved between the titles The Presidency of Richard Nixon (University of Kansas Press) and The Nixon-Kissinger Years (Paragon House). So, I decided to go ahead and post a nice little HST/NIXON quote about Watergate. enjoy:
The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.
it goes on about how public opionion at the time (August 1973) was that Nixon was no worse than other politicians…
Anybody who really believes this is a fool — but a lot of people seem to, and that evidence is hard to ignore. What almost happened here — and what was only avoided because the men who made Nixon President and who were running the country in his name knew in their hearts that they were all mean, hollow little bastards who couldn’t dare turn their backs on each other — was a takeover and total perversion of the American political process by a gang of cold-blooded fixers so incompetent that they couldn’t even pull off a simple burlary… which tends to explain, among other things, why 25,000 young Americans died for no reason in Vietnam while Nixon and his brain trust were trying to figure out how to admit the whole thing was a mistake from the start.
—Hunter S. Thompson The Great Shark Hunt.
Until next time, your friend,
Anita Thompson
