Richard Milhous Nixon (placeholder)

I was just a kid and didn’t know any better. He was the Vice President under Eisenhower at the time. He stopped in South Bend, IN at the airport en route to somewhere else, maybe Chicago. My father had taken me to see him. There was a chain link fence separating the crowd from Nixon and his entourage, but he walked along the perimeter, smiling, waving and occasionally reaching out to shake a hand. My father picked me up high, I held out my hand, and he shook it. As a little kid, that was one of the high points of my life. He’d later go on to be President and I would learn to distrust him. In 1970 I went to Washington, DC to protest the War in Vietnam and “Tricky Dick” was the enemy. The first time I ever voted in a federal election was against him in the pre-Watergate days. History will have its own way of judging Nixon, but I’ll always be ambivalent. He was both a hero and a villian in my book.