A Quote by Nancy Gibbs
After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.
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In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon's arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency.
I think Nixon says a lot about those times. It was possibly hard, in the '90s and early 2000s to understand the grip of fear that communism had on the country in the 1950s and 1960s - a fear Nixon rode like a endless great wave on the Pacific to high office. I'm sure, though there's no evidence of it, one of the things that rankled him down deep was that it was called McCarthyism and not Nixonism.
I think I governed effectively. I don't have any doubts about that. I had the benefit, when I was in office, of having an excellent relationship with the Republican Party. We had superb bipartisan support and we had the highest batting average of any president since the Second World War, except Lyndon Johnson. He had a little better average than I did.
When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.
Some male colleagues, just as in accountancy, had doubts about whether women could perform some roles. There was a sense that women needed more protection or if men were out on the street they would be distracted by having to look after a female colleague.
When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.
[T]he Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.
In the last 100 years only Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford lost their bids for reelection. President Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term.
Back in the '90s, whenever we were having '70s nostalgia, you could take the good with the bad. Like yeah, sure, Nixon happened, Watergate happened, but we also had bell bottoms and ABBA and 'The Brady Bunch.'
History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.
[Gerald Rudolph ] Ford pardoned Richard Nixon to save everybody that, and the Democrats were ticked about it.
[Gerald] Ford and [Jimmy] Carter, in fact, were huge disappointments to me. Think about this: They were the presidents around the time of America's historic bicentennial, and yet rarely quoted the founders.
The Democrats loved Jimmy Carter, even though - and, by the way, take a look at some economic circumstances. In 1980, the economy of this country was in the tank after four years of Jimmy Carter. I mean, it was desperately bad. Unemployment was sky-high. Carter had seen us through a couple of near-depression recessions, all of this coming out of Watergate, which happened in 1972.
One of my most often repeated quips was the one I made when former Presidents Carter, Ford and Nixon stood by each other at a White House event. 'There they are,' I said. 'See no evil, hear no evil, and . . . evil.'
I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.
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