What exactly did Richard Nixon do that was wrong?

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Richard Nixon has left a legacy as being the big bad guy for the baby boomers and the media. Yet for the life of me I can't find myself to hate him like they do.
I don't think he was a bad person. He was largely one of the better political figures this country has seen during this post World War II era. When you listens to old interviews of him he always came across as a genuine and humble guy especially the ones during within the last 10 years of his life. That is something better that can be said then of most politicians. I think that came from his background and the family that raised him if you'd look at his early life. The Anglo christian America he was born into rapidly change into the 90s America he died in. But whenever I hear anyone give a reason why he was a bad man I'd roll my eyes because the events of the past 10 years have help me grow empathetic to him and understand that the world I was taught was not all that it seem to be.

He hated the media!
Good, I hate the media too if I was in the same position as he was I would not have been so laid back about it as he was.

He prolonged the Veitnam war!
A quick withdrawal was not an option at the time. In hindsight, everything in that war was for nothing for the US but at the time it still seem like a victory was possible. They may not have a grand strategy to win at the last segment of the war but a big part of war is taking chances based off of outside circumstances. It really did seem at the time on the ground over there that there was a real chance of the Veit Cong collapsing and the North Veitnamese Government giving up on supporting Terrorists in the south. Remember Hippies did not cause the US to withdraw from South Veitnam, the families of the soldiers wanting them home is what ultimately convinced the government to do so.

Watergate!
You mean like when Obama spied on Trump and those backdoor bribe money is so commonplace in politics that they invented a new word so it doesn't sound so dirty. There is absolutly nothing he did that he suppoesed morrally better successors in all three, the house, the congress, and the presidency didn't also eventually do. At no point do I think he was trying to "destroy democracy".

He said racist anti-gay, and anti-semetic things in private!
Good! I wish he said those things in public too!
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He normalized China!
They hated the Soviets so it was a good idea at the time. It's not his fault that his successors sold our business out to them.

Does anyone got another boomer talking point about him?
 
He was a relative outsider who ran a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and went on to win the election. The GOP establishment never forgave him for that. Ultimately it was his "allies" that destroyed him.
 
He did what everyone else was doing/currently do and instead of finding a way to own up to it or plead innocent, he resigned. Additionally he wasn't a true swamp creature so he had to be ousted.
 
He’s responsible for the modern War on Drugs movement as we know it today. To quote John Ehrlichman,

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994. "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

Look how well that turned out.
 
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signed the repeal of the gulf of tonkin resolution, watergate=obfuscation, elites/intelligence etc. etc.
 
The negative attention is all just because he got caught and this gave the media ammunition to slander his reputation long term. If you want an actual example of his policy having negative consequences he did put in place alot of trade agreements with China that inevitably led to the offshoring of US jobs. Though the circumstances were quite different at the time, and it could be argued that it falls more on his successors who failed to take action when negative consequences started to take form.
 
His immigration policy kickstarted the border crisis we have today.
That was Reagan Sweetheart.
He’s responsible for the modern War on Drugs movement as we know it today. To quote John Ehrlichman,

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman told journalist Dan Baum in 1994. "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

Look how well that turned out.
Yeah, but, again, Reagan made that come to fruition.
 
He made that absurd trip to China in 1972 and set the wheels in motion for Taiwan to remain in a perpetual state of limbo. Mind you, Chiang Kai-shek was no saint and there were many times for Taiwan to be recognised as a sovereign nation to which Chiang adamantly refused.

Still, imagine if we lived in the timeline where the USA refused to recognise the CCP until Chairman Mao's death in 1976.
 
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I always thought watergate was regarded as being the worst thing to occur because americans had a much more positive and almost infallible view on the presidency and their government at that point in history, before watergate one of the worst big presidential scandals was teapot dome which today seems like a tuesday for a president. Hell when I was a teen and learned about watergate I instantly assumed nixon had cut a deal with ford to be pardoned and couldnt understand why this wasnt the default assumption, Now I could understand it was possible for people to think it was done to save the nation the pain of seeing a former president on trial, ofcourse I think thats horse shit but thats besides the point. I think after carter (who was the opposite of the next trend, a good man who just could not stop screwing up) the presidency just became increasingly more and more corrupt, conjure in your mind the increasing amount of scandalous activity from reagan to bush part 1 to clinton to dubya to obama to the shady shit that happened under trump to the trainwreck that is biden. After nixon corruption just became more and more normal in the view of the american people, its hard now a days to see the president as being a champion of the electorate.

Vietnam was a perpetual shitshow that the top brass had their head to far up their own asses to see that the american people were getting pissed off with the war, doesnt help that south vietnam was a completely worthless state on the same level as the government we left in afganistan before the taliban just walked in and took control.

China is easy to justify in my opinion since it was an excellent geopolitical move at the time, Im sure nixon wasnt expecting several presidents in an unbroken line to deindustrialize the US and feed china into becoming the demon it is today,

Something I want to know atleast from older people the general feelings of the time regarding presidents, how common scandals would hit the papers about the current president and how many people treated like nothing or showed offense to it, I could gauge some from my childhood about dubya but id want to have the full picture with him and clinton.
 
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