How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (31 page)

If plotting to kill and discredit one person isn’t devious enough for you, Nixon also had no problem ruining the whole world. In the 1968 election, his opponent, Hubert Humphrey (Johnson’s vice president), was pulling ahead in the polls because he singlehandedly made great strides toward peace in Vietnam leading up to the election. He called for a bombing halt and Vietnam
agreed
. America
and North Vietnam were just a few days away from total peace, and the American people were a few days away from electing their next president, but Nixon was born in slime, so none of that mattered to him. The day before the election, Nixon sabotaged the peace talks by convincing America’s allies in South Vietnam to back out, warning them that they were going to get “sold out” if they went ahead with this whole peace thing. Without the momentum of the peace talks behind Humphrey, he lost the election to Richard Nixon, who publicly criticized Humphrey for his inability to deliver.

Just to make sure this lands, here it is again: Nixon extended the war in Vietnam by five years just so he could screw Humphrey out of the White House and become president, where he could be shitty on a much grander scale.

But, hey, maybe Richard Nixon had a
better
strategy to end the war. Maybe he had his own plans for how to end the war and wanted to implement them as president. Maybe it was even more peaceful, right?

Well, he did have his own strategy, but if you know your history or how cheap rhetorical devices work, you already know that Nixon’s plan
wasn’t
more peaceful than Humphrey’s. Nixon favored what he called the “Madman Theory,” but what is commonly known among Pop Culture enthusiasts like you and me as the “Good Cop/Bad Cop Routine.” Nixon wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that he was
crazy
and could snap at any minute. Nixon legitimately said to his advisors, “We’ll just slip them the word that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t constrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button.’ ” Nixon
said that shit
. It would have been pretty badass, but the problem is that every Bad Cop needs a Good Cop, and Nixon didn’t have one, because there’s only one president. So there was no Good Cop being reasonable and calming down the Bad Cop; there was just the Bad Cop who, in his own words, wanted to “bomb the bastards off the earth,” and
damn near tried
. In 1972, he bombed for twelve straight days. No one bombs for twelve days
strategically;
that is the move of a literal, clinical, certifiable lunatic.

Eventually, Nixon did effectively end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Not thanks to the Madman Theory, obviously, that’s idiotic, but because Nixon agreed to remove all troops from the war and spend some time and money rebuilding North Vietnam, as long as American prisoners of war were returned. Call it “retreating” or “very expensive retreating,” if you want to split hairs, but Nixon did get our troops home. Got them home from a war that
could
have ended already if he hadn’t extended it five years for his own political gain because he sucks, but he still got them home, nonetheless. Yay, Nixon.

The House Judiciary Committee famously voted to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice and abuse of power, and he resigned the presidency after one of his many horrible, slimy scandals caught up with him, and, much to the chagrin of everyone, was given a full pardon by his successor, Gerald Ford. He was never indicted for any of the horrible things he did, only a
fraction
of which are covered in this chapter, and he spent the rest of his life dismissing the crimes as simple “blunders.”

Richard Nixon is one of the most dangerous men in this book. He’s not fighting for redemption; that’s out of the question. He has no image to protect, no legacy to preserve, and, since the nation has already collectively turned its back, nothing to prove to anyone. The only person Nixon will be fighting for is Nixon. He has nothing to lose. He is fearless, unpredictable, impossibly slippery, and has absolutely no soul. It’ll be like boxing Evil incarnate (but right after Evil showered and refused to towel off. President Nixon was very sweaty, and that’s funny and gross to me. Was that not clear?).

It’s unfortunate that Gerald “His Actual First Name was Leslie and We Should Really Be Making Fun of Him for That More Often” Ford will historically only be remembered for one of two things: his pardoning of Nixon and his inexplicable tendency to fall down with shocking regularity. Few people know just how
tough
Ford was (given that he spent nineteen hours of any given day already in mid-fall, he’d sort of have to be). Ford was an athlete his whole life, excelling at football through high school and college. His coaches often marveled at how sharp and meticulous he was, saying that having Ford on a team was like having an extra coach on the field. Ford’s high football IQ, attention to detail, athleticism, and shockingly high threshold for taking blows to the head were so impressive that he was offered huge salaries by both the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers to play professional football, but he turned them down and decided to focus on law. He didn’t have enough
money for law school but got accepted to Yale, on the condition that he coach Yale’s undergraduate boxing program (he accepted).

That’s only really striking when you realize that Ford had never boxed in his entire life. Yale took him on face value alone and said, “Your grades aren’t
quite
good enough for law school, but we’ll let that slide because you look like a man who could train people how to beat the shit out of other people,” and Ford simply responded, “Sounds about right.” Because he didn’t make enough money as a boxing coach, he spent his summers working as a professional bear-feeder, which is a title I would
pretend
to hold to impress women if it didn’t sound so completely made up. But it’s true. Ford was a park ranger/bear-feeder at Yellowstone National Park, because someone needed to feed the bears and that fell under the category of tough-guy things that Ford assumed he’d rule at. He also, randomly, worked briefly as a male model and appeared on the cover of the April 1942 issue of
Cosmopolitan
. He’s a dumb guy with a bunch of random jobs under his belt who ended up spending a ton of time in the White House; basically, Gerald Ford’s life story is like a less believable
Forrest Gump
.

After Pearl Harbor, Ford put his law degree on hold and hung up his boxing gloves and, I don’t know, bear-feeding nunchucks and male-model underpants, so he could pursue killing all of the bad guys who hated America. He joined the navy and quickly rose from ensign to lieutenant commander. He was then made a naval fitness instructor (teaching big, tough navy men how to be bigger, tougher, navier men). This might have been enough action for your average guy, but Ford was raised in the school of hard knocks (Yale, I guess?) and he wanted
more
, so he requested a transfer to the USS
Monterey
, a light-aircraft carrier that appeared in almost every major battle in the South Pacific. As if that wasn’t enough, God decided to join the war and sent massive typhoons to attack the
Monterey
and three American destroyers. The other three ships capsized and lost most of their crews, and Ford’s ship almost tipped over and burst into flames. As the ship tipped twenty-five degrees to one side, Ford lost his footing on the deck and started sliding toward the ocean and
would have fallen right in if he hadn’t caught hold of the rim of the deck
with his foot
. He readjusted, got himself to a safe place on the boat, and put out the fire (later admitting that he “never had any fear of death during the war,” which, when your boat is sideways and on fire, is
literally impossible
).

Ford never went to hide below deck or anything, he just stood up top in the storm, watching his ship sway and burn, thinking, “Nope. Still not fearing death.” By the time he left the war, Ford had accumulated ten battle stars. A man who has enough battle stars that he can comfortably throw a few of them at you like ninja shurikens and still have a bunch left over to intimidate bears is
not
a man to be fucked with, no matter how many fashion runways he walks down.

After the war, Ford was bitten by the politics bug and made a name for himself (not Leslie; a different name), as a hardworking, honest politician of integrity. He never lied, never told a half-truth, never manipulated anyone, and never did anything that he didn’t think was right. His moral streak earned the admiration of Republicans and Democrats alike. His Homer Simpson–esque plainspoken nature mixed well with his Homer Simpson–esque appearance and,
when he succeeded Nixon and promised to restore integrity and honesty to the White House, America was ready to believe him.

And then he pardoned Nixon and America was like, “Oh, blow me, you clumsy fart.”

The hard truth was that pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do. Sure, declaring that everything a person had done over a five-year period was fine and legal without ever even knowing what Nixon had done is kind of a boner, but at the time, Ford needed to close the book on the whole Nixon thing if he wanted to get anything done. He saw a country with a failing economy and a military that was second-best in a time when second-best wasn’t an option, but all anyone wanted to talk about was “Nixon this and Nixon that.” So Ford made the tough call and granted Nixon an absolute pardon, because it was a more official way of ending the conversation than saying “Just shut the fuck up and let me be president already.”