Per Thom Hartmann's daily newsletter this morning:
https://hartmannreport.com/p/four-presidents?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=302288&post_id=138954997&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3lpqr&utm_medium=email
This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon.
He took millions in now-well-documented bribes both while Vice President to Eisenhower and as President (his VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned rather than go to prison for taking bribes). Nixon saw public service as a way to bathe himself in money, power, and adulation.
He didn’t care a bit about democracy.
As Lamar Waldron and I point out in detail in Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, then-President Eisenhower’s then-Vice President, Richard Nixon, was getting beat up badly in the 1960 election by his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.
Most of it had to do with Cuba, where mobsters affiliated with Nixon for decades had just lost fortunes, millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue.
After the Cuban revolution of 1959, Castro came to the US to seek military and economic aid for his island nation; Eisenhower left town, forcing Castro to meet instead with VP Nixon.
Given that Castro had just overthrown the dictator Batista, a friend of both Nixon and Nixon’s mafia patrons, the Vice President essentially blew off Castro, sending him into the welcoming arms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.
Thus, throughout the 1960 presidential race, Senator Kennedy pounded on Vice President Nixon for having “let Cuba go communist” on his watch. In response, Vice President Nixon put together a series of CIA and Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, timed to happen before the November 1960 election.
His hope was that if the Eisenhower/Nixon administration could be seen as having successfully overthrown Castro in 1960 it would de-fang JFK’s attacks and make Nixon — who Eisenhower had put in charge of Cuba policy — a national hero just in time for the election.
Nixon figured that would be enough to help him beat JFK at the polls. It was going to be his “October Surprise.” (The remnant of this scheme was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.)
For Nixon democracy was just an inconvenience, an obstacle to be conquered. He never really believed in it.
You can imagine Nixon’s frustration when plot after plot was bungled or foiled and, by election day, Castro was still happily ensconced in the Havana presidential palace. This appears to be the moment Nixon decided that, if he had a chance to run for president again, he’d not just consider a CIA-Mafia plot but would embrace far more extreme measures.
Thus began the first Republican plot to commit full-out treason to win a presidential election.
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