The three most hated modern American politicians were LBJ, Nixon, and Hillary. They were driven out of power by their enemies.
Nixon was long called Tricky Dick by Democrats. The Democrats hated him as they hated no other nationally famous Republican. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn at the Democratic National Convention in 1960 persuaded LBJ to take the Vice Presidency slot under Kennedy, whom LBJ despised almost as much as he despised his brother Bobby, in order to defeat Nixon. He ate a big mud sandwich in the name of Party unity against Nixon.
Johnson quit in March 1968 before he was driven out of power by the Republicans in November. The anti-war Democrats had deserted him in the primaries.
Nixon was driven out of power in 1974 by a small contingent of Republicans in Congress, who went to him and said he would be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.
Hillary was defeated in full public view by the first man with zero political or government-employment experience to win the Presidency.
All three went into forced retirement.
THE HATED NIXON.
The conservatives trusted Nixon in 1948 when Nixon trusted Whittaker Chambers. Nixon was a first-term Congressman from California. In 1948, he was the member of a House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. (Note: there was never a House UnAmerican Activities Committee. "HUAC" was a phenomenally successful acronym imposed by the Left onto a Committee that should have had "HCUA" as its acronym.) HCUA was investigating Communists in government. President Truman had issued an executive order in 1947 to require a loyalty oath for federal employees. This order was an extension of Truman's growing surveillance state. His executive order and Eisenhower's 1953 extension of it were repealed by Bill Clinton in 1998.
Chambers, an editor at Time (and the translator of Bambi), testified to the committee that the Roosevelt Administration's Alger Hiss was a Communist. Hiss had been an advisor at the Yalta Conference of February 1945. Then Chambers escalated his accusation in 1949: Hiss had been an informant to the USSR -- in short, a spy. Chambers was ridiculed by the Establishment. Yet it was all true. Hiss went to prison for perjury in 1950; the statute of limitations against espionage had run out.
Nixon supported Chambers from the beginning. The Democrats never forgave Nixon for this breach of etiquette. Hiss's apologists still insist that Hiss was somehow innocent. From then on, Nixon was hated by the Left.
He was hated more in 1950 when he defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagen Douglas for the U.S. Senate. She was the far-Left wife of the far-Left actor Melvyn Douglas. It was in that campaign that Democrats first labeled him Tricky Dick. The story is here.
They tried to destroy him in 1952 with charges of having accepted bribes. He destroyed them in one of the most famous political speeches in American history the "Checkers" speech. He was a lawyer. He knew how to sway an audience. Eisenhower kept him on the ticket as VP.
The Left's hatred of him escalated. They got him in 1960. They got him again in 1962: his unsuccessful run for governor in California. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the present Gov. Jerry Brown's father, buried him in a landslide. Nixon in his anger then uttered the most inaccurate political prediction in American history.
Little did he know. Little did they know.
He got even with them in 1968 and -- overwhelmingly -- in 1972. But then they got him in 1974: Watergate. The tapes did it -- and the utterly illegal leaking of portions of those tapes from a mole within the White House. The courts turned a blind eye. Unless you have read my articles on this long-suppressed story, you are unaware of it. Download them here.
This almost killed him. He almost died from phlebitis in 1975. But be recovered physically. Then he recovered politically. He wrote his way out, beginning with his memoirs in 1978. He followed with these books: The Real War (1980), Leaders (1982), Real Peace (1984), More Vietnams (1987), Victory Without War (1988), In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (1990), Seize The Moment: America's Challenge In a One-Superpower World (1992), Beyond Peace (1994), completed two weeks before his death. At the time of his death, he was widely recognized as a statesman, an assessment never offered to him by the political Establishment prior to 1980.
THE HATED LBJ
His decision to accept the VP candidate's position in 1960 led to his Presidency on November 22, 1963. That in turn led to the anti-war movement which despised LBJ as no other politician. "Hey, hey, LBJ. How many people have you killed today?" No other President in wartime was ever subjected to such a taunt by so many people -- most of them Democrats. He did not have the courage to run for re-election in 1968. His photograph appeared nowhere at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He had become a pariah in his own party. He died in 1973 at his ranch in Texas, invisible to all outsiders except Harvard's government professor Doris Kearns, who had been on his payroll, and who ghostwrote his 1971 political memoirs, which were believed by no one, almost certainly including Dr.. Kearns. She made her academic reputation on the basis of her 1977 biography of LBJ. (On Dr. Kearns' future plagiarism, click here.)
LBJ, it turns out, was exactly the crook described best and earliest by one of America's greatest regional historians, J. Evetts Haley, in his 1964 self-published book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, which carried the accurate subtitle, A Study in Illegitimate Power. It became one of three conservative best-selling paperbacks in the 1964 Goldwater campaign, along with Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice Not an Echo and John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason. The establishment hated Haley's book most of all. It sold 7.5 million volumes, the largest-selling political book in American history. It became a crucial campaign tool for Goldwater's supporters. Everything that Haley wrote about Johnson's crimes has been verified with massive documentation by Johnson's biographer Robert Caro, whose multi-volume biography is considered the standard. Yet Haley in 1964 was dismissed by the media as some sort of Texas rube.
There was only one way to put lipstick on the insatiable pig that LBJ always was: his love of power, which led to centralized political power in the hands of Democrats, 1964 to 1966. The Democrats did just this. This strategy exploded in their faces, literally, in the rice paddies of South Vietnam. He left Hubert Humphrey, his super-liberal, but both hapless and helpless Vice President, to hold the bag in the election of 1968. He had to run on Johnson's record, just as Hillary had to run on Obama's. He lost to the hated Nixon. She lost to the hated Trump.
Ain't politics grand?
THE HATED HILLARY
She was dead broke in 2001, she famously announced. Today, she is fabulously rich. So is her husband. Post-Presidential and pre-Presidential politics paid off big for the Clintons. Nevertheless, before November was half over, she and he were dropped down the Democrats' memory hole, just as LBJ was after March 1968.
Politics is all about winning. Hillary will never run for anything again. She and her hot-shot, can't-lose campaign managers had burned through $1.2 billion of donors' money, and all they had to show for it was a slogan: "basket of deplorables." Lots and lots of deplorables. Big basket (electoral college).
The headlines on November 9 should have read: Shrill, Secretive, Platitudinous Old Woman Loses Election.
Biden is too old to run in 2020. So is Sanders. The Social Security poster girl Elizabeth Warren will probably dodder forth, holding the banner high for the Democratic Left, cheered on by Nancy Pelosi. The Democrats have become the Antiques Road Show.
Hillary left a legacy. It was the legacy predicted by her mentor, Saul Alinsky. She wrote her 1969 senior thesis on him. He offered her a job as a community organizer. She turned it down to attend Yale Law School. (The thesis was closed to the public at the request of the White House when she became First Lady. In 2001, after she departed, we the people were allowed once again to read it, but only if we went to Wellesley College to read it. Today, it is online. Take a look. One thing stands out in my mind, as the author of a 1963 senior thesis that was even longer. She was too cheap to buy a new typewriter ribbon.)
Alinsky famously said that a radical who tries to change the U.S. government from the inside will either be murdered or else co-opted.
Hillary was not murdered.
So, what is next for this once-radical, once dead broke, now senior citizen? There will be no more access to power. There will be no more speaking invitations from Goldman Sachs. Her books sold poorly. She was paranoid about public scrutiny when she had the trappings of power. She was not heralded for her honesty, not even by her supporters. She will not launch a public relations business, "Transparency, Inc."
We know what an honest memoir by her should be titled: People Who Let Me Down. The cover would feature a photo of a pile of broken dishes.
Nixon wrote his way out. She will not.
LBJ simply gave up. He died in obscurity, but was unfortunate in death to have attracted Robert Caro as his main biographer. Caro simply fleshed out Haley's A Texan Looks at Lyndon.
Quiet obscurity is an option for her. She can bake cookies for her grandchildren or even Bill, if Bill is ever around.
But quiet obscurity is difficult for a lifelong political nagger. LBJ had no choice. He did not nag. He intimidated. She never had enough political power of her own to intimidate people with political power of their own. Bill was a charmer. That was never her way. Bill had power. She never did. This clearly bothered her, early on. Her life has been an endless "if only." My guess is that this fact will grate on her for the rest of her life.
She will spend the rest of her life under the supervision of the Secret Service. I suspect that this will be the assignment for agents under discipline: "Hillary or resign." It will not be an easy decision.
And then there is Carlos Danger. There are always new surprises from him. What was on his hard drive? How did it get there? Inquiring minds want to know.
Quiet obscurity may not be an option.
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