Monday, November 15, 2004

 

My new obsession

Richard Nixon. Not Watergate, but Nixon the man.

I started reading All the Presidents Men, only to put it off until break--I found I have to make charts of names just to keep things straight, and I've got my hands full of enough charts and graphs right now. But it got me to thinking about what made the man tick--the book only gives you the reporter's side of the story.

Then I remembered diggerblue talking about Nixon's memoirs, and this weekend I finally saw Oliver Stone's Nixon. (I highly recommend!) The movie made me kinda think the guy was just plain evil, but at the same time I really felt bad for the guy.

He was clearly bitter, resentful and paranoid, he used people, he lied (especially to himself), he let others take the fall for his sins, he bombed the shit out of itsy bitsy Cambodia, but was he a bad guy? Was he mentally ill? Was he merely a victim of the system? Was he just plain evil? Or, like the rest of us, did he just want to be loved?

So I've got to get it directly from the source (not that it will make anything clearer)--so I'm headed to the Urbana library to check out his memoirs.


"The tricky thing about 'evil' people is they don't think they're evil."
--D. Blue

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