Nixon and Bush Walk into a Bar…

A decade and a half after he died, the ghost of Bad Presidents Past keeps reappearing, rattling his chains to remind us that, as George W. Bush leaves, he did not invent bad behavior in the White House.

The latest batch of released Nixon tapes provokes a headline: “Ruthless, Cynical, Profane.”

In contrast to the President Present, Nixon was never someone you would want to have a beer with, more like the weird guy who comes into the bar and inspires everyone to move to the other end.

With Nixon we are beyond politics, deep into the personal pathology of a man who saw himself surrounded by a world of enemies yet hungered for their approval even while hatching plots against them and, throughout it all, secretly recording every word in the Oval Office that would come back to destroy his presidency and, beyond that, haunt and puzzle generations to come.

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