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Let's look briefly at this self-serving contention. Nixon tried to cover-up the Watergate burglary, despite the fact he had no knowledge of it in advance. Among other things, he urged his staffers to lie, he might have endorsed the payment of hush money, and he delayed the FBI's investigation of the break-in for a short period of time by falsely claiming CIA involvement. Now, I know Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee have a much longer litany of crimes and transgressions. However, as bad as Watergate was, it was not the most deplorable scandal in modern American history. Putting aside Bill Clinton's serial felonies; LBJ's self-dealing and personal enrichment; JFK's underworld connections and relations with a known East German spy (and his brother's illegal tapping of Martin Luther King Jr.'s telephone); the dishonor of having committed the most egregious violation of our Constitution belongs to that liberal icon whose profile appears on America's ten-cent piece — Franklin Delano Roosevelt. August 7 is the 60th anniversary of the Roosevelt administration's completion of its removal of about 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and legal residents from the Pacific Coast. I wonder how much coverage this will receive in the mainstream media? Not much, I'm sure. So here's a brief chronology of events leading to this most deplorable of all presidential actions, the source of which is the Harry Truman Presidential Library website: December 30, 1941: FDR's attorney general, Francis Biddle, authorizes raids without a search warrant on the homes of people of Japanese descent as long as at least one resident is a Japanese alien. February 19, 1942: FDR issues Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, or any military commander designated by Stimson, to designate "military areas" and exclude "any and all persons" from them. March 2, 1942: The Western Defense Command proclaims the western parts of California, Oregon, and Washington state, and the southern third of Arizona as military areas and that all people of Japanese descent are to be removed. March 18, 1942: FDR issues Executive Order 9102 establishing the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which is authorized "to provide for the removal from designated areas of persons whose removal is necessary in the interests of national security." March 21, 1942: FDR signs Public Law 77-503, making it a federal crime for a person to refuse an order to leave a military area. March 22, 1942: On this date, and for the next 18 months, people of Japanese descent are removed from the Pacific Coast area to ten relocation centers in California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. Despite FDR's record of wholesale human-rights and constitutional violations, he's consistently rated the greatest, or among the greatest, presidents in American history by historians and academics. Somehow, they conveniently overlook their hero's unprecedented abuse of power (I haven't even addressed FDR's brazen assault on the U.S. Supreme Court). Say what they will about Richard Nixon. Even if most or all if it is accurate, he was no Franklin Delano Roosevelt. |
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ave you heard? Today
is the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. You'd have to be living
in a cave in Afghanistan to have missed all the media hype and hyperbole
of the last few days. And, of course, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and
Ben Bradlee are reminding us that Richard Nixon was the most contemptible
man to ever serve as president.
