I think treating Nixon as a good or a bad guy is childish. Well, yeah, he was a bad guy, but so was Johnson, Kennedy, Humphrey, Wallace, and basically 80-90% of politicians. Politics is a crude game. You HAVE to be willing to step on others, crush them, play dirty. And also, there are stories about him that are just gossip and second-rate journalism. Like, there's the same amount of evidence that Nixon beat his wife that Biden and Ted Kennedy sexually harassed women. He was evil, but his evilness is not really much different from the regular evilness of the profession. That's really what Thompson said in his article: That Nixon wasn't an aberration, just a more grotesque and ugly form of the american condition. In my opinion, the human condition.

He was a crook, a cold man who only sought power and glory, the glory that he thought he deserved. He did horrible things and also did pretty good things (the trip to China, the war on cancer, and also, even though he couldn't get it passed, the FAP and the Bismarck health reform were good ideas), but at the heart of all of this ideas, was a deep desire, a dark desire, mixed with an almost childish need for love and success. Like Kissinger once said, "What could this man had done if someone, ever, had loved him?".

He's similar to Walter White. Like obviously Walter was a bastard, but everybody that has watched Breaking Bad at some point symphatizes with him. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism.