The Peacemaker: Nixon: The Man, President, and My Friend - Hardcover

Stein, Ben

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1630062014 ISBN 13: 9781630062019

Verlag: Humanix Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”  – Matthew 5:9

“I don’t think any president has been more wrongly persecuted than Nixon, ever. I just think he was a saint.” – Ben Stein

From Ben Stein, New York Times bestselling author, humorist and former speech writer for both Nixon and Ford administrations – a powerful (and humorous) thinker on economics, politics, education and history and motivation – a personal memoir of his friend Richard Nixon: The man, patriot, president, peacemaker and visionary. 

The Richard Nixon Stein remembers and lovingly describes has almost nothing to do with the Richard Nixon as portrayed in most media. In Stein’s view, Richard Nixon was a born peacemaker, a saint. Stein believes Nixon was tortured, abused, beat up by the Beautiful People, but through it all, above all, he was a peacemaker, a trait he inherited from his Quaker mother. 

Nixon’s goal, as he often explained to Stein and others on his staff, was to create “a generation of peace.” And Stein argues he did it; Nixon gave the United States the longest sustained period of peace since World War II. In Stein’s view, if we no longer have to fear Russian ICBMs screaming out of hell to start nuclear war, we can thank the shade of Richard Nixon.

Why did the media hate him so much? Stein argues it was because Nixon was vulnerable and showed it when attacked. He did not have the tough hide of a Reagan or an Obama. Like the schoolyard bullies they are, the media went after Nixon for his vulnerability.

An insider’s account of Nixon the man, president and peacemaker, The Peacemaker: Nixon: The Man, President and My Friend will make you reconsider the life and legacy of 37th President of the United States.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ben Stein is the most famous economics teacher in America. His comedic role as the droning economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is by far the most widely viewed scene of economics teaching in economics history and has been ranked as one of the fifty most famous scenes in movie history. But in real life, Ben Stein is a powerful thinkers on economics, politics, education and history and motivation – and like his father, Herbert Stein, considered one of the great humorists on political economy and how life works in this nation. 

Stein in real life has a bachelor's with honors in economics from Columbia, studied economics at the graduate level at Yale, is a graduate of Yale Law School ( valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates in 1970), and has as diverse a resume as any man in America. 

His background includes...poverty lawyer for poor people in New Haven, trade regulation lawyer for the FTC, speech writer for Presidents Nixon and Ford, columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, columnist for The New York Times, teacher about law and economics at UC, Santa Cruz and Pepperdine. Stein was the 2009 winner of the Malcolm Forbes Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism. Stein was the co-host, along with Jimmy Kimmel, of the pathbreaking Comedy Central game show, Win Ben Stein's Money, which won seven Emmys, including ones for Ben and Jimmy for best game show host(s); surely making him the only well-known economist to win an Emmy. Presently, he writes a column for The American Spectator and NewsMax, and is a regular commentator on Fox News, CNN, Newsmax TV and on CBS Sunday Morning. Stein has written or co-written roughly 30 books, mostly about investing, many of them New York Times bestsellers, including: The Capitalist Code: It Can Save Your Life and Make You Very Rich and The World According to Ben Stein: Wit, Wisdom & Even More Wit. He lives and works in the Los Angeles metro area.

https://www.mrbenstein.com/

https://www.youtube.com/c/TheWorldAccordingToBenStein/featured

https://www.newsmax.com/insiders/benstein/bio-39/

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CHAPTER ONE of THE PEACEMAKER by Ben Stein

I cannot remember a time when the name “Nixon” was not floating about in the atmosphere of our home and especially of our neighborhood. From 1948 to 1953, our little family lived on Caroline Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland. That neighborhood, of perfectly fine middle class homes but far from mansions, was largely Jewish. In those days, the “good” neighborhoods in Maryland and the District of Columbia were “restricted” against Jews, blacks, Asians, Hispanics―anyone who was not a “real American”, as FDR had put it. He had told one of his Cabinet members that the United States was made by and for Northern European Protestants. No one else, even Jews trying to escape certain death at Hitler’s hell holes, was welcome.

We Jews, some of us incredibly fortunate enough to have been several generations in America, were out in Silver Spring, still a perfectly pleasant place, extremely far from  the horror show that was Europe for us Jews in the Hitler years. 

For some reason which I have not ever been able to figure out, many of those Jews just hated Nixon. When they said the word “Nixon” they spat it out like Jews in the Pale when they were anticipating a visit from the Tsar, always accompanied by the rapine and murder of the accompanying Cossacks. It was almost as if Nixon had done some secret awful thing which could not be specified but was suggested just by the mention of his name.

As a small child, I picked up that it had something to do with someone named “Hiss”, who was apparently a Soviet spy, but who also might have been a super hero heartily slandered and persecuted by the evil “Nixon.” I was a precocious reader, especially of The Washington Post, and well informed on current events, but I never could figure out at that stage of my life, what Hiss had done and what Nixon had done. But it was something mysterious and powerful and almost otherworldly. 

I do not recall having any discussions with my parents about the subjects of Nixon or Hiss at that time. I do know that they were affected by the fears of Communists in high positions in government, and of Communists generally. 

One small detail of that fear was that in those halcyon days before there was “racial profiling”, we children, even of very young age, were asked to fill out detailed forms about our families, where they were from, and ( of special interest ) what our father’s occupations were. ( In those days, few mothers worked. Yes, many of our teachers at our beautiful Parkside elementary school were women. But few indeed of them were married.) By the way, in those far off days, Montgomery County, Maryland, schools were racially segregated by law. It was a crime for black people to attempt repeatedly to enroll at a whites only school. Yes. A crime. The only black person we ever saw at school was “Willie”, a black former US Army soldier who had found work as the school janitor. The school was heated in winter by a coal furnace. Willie had to get up very early on frosty mornings and drive in from his home far out in the forests of upper Montgomery County ( which we thought of as being as forested and far away as if they were in Maine ) to get to Parkside. 

There, he shoveled coal into the furnace to keep us white boys and girls warm all through the day. Between the shoveling,  he walked up and down the hallway at our school tossing out resin and using it to sweep up the floors.

Even then, I was repulsed by the mistreatment of Willie. For him to have been in the Army fighting as a truck driver and then to be working at a school which would not have allowed his children to attend it was disgusting to me. He retired when I was a sixth grader. I gathered money and bought him a trophy.) As I said, I had to write down on a form what my father’s occupation was. We were then to read the form to our classmates and teachers in a facet of elementary school life called “show and tell.” My mother was so concerned that out of my little mouth would come a word which sounded too much like “Communist” instead of “economist”. So, she had me say to the class of elementary school kids that my Pop was a “statistician” instead of an economist.

It was a mouthful but I did it.

Meanwhile, back on Caroline Avenue, on our brand new Magnavox TV in its immense blond wood cabinet, there were stories about something called “HUAC”, the House Un-American Activities Committee. This entity was deeply hated in our neighborhood, as far as I could tell. I was not sure why. I had no clear idea at all what it did, only that it was hated by the same people who hated Nixon. What the connection was, if any, I did not know.

Then there were TV news stories about Richard M. Nixon, who was starting to become truly famous. Again, it had something to do with the mysterious “Hiss”. But I still did not know what that was. ( More about that to come. )

And I started to see images of Mr. Nixon on the TV screen and also on the pages of The Washington Post and our afternoon newspapers, The Daily News ( a tabloid ) and The Washington Star. The photos in The Post often were accompanied by text that noted what a horrible human being Nixon was. There was also a famous political cartoonist at The Post named Herbert Block, whose nickname, or “nom de plume” was “Herblock”. He simply loathed Nixon and drew him with a gangster style slobby beard, sometimes wielding aa dripping meat cleaver.

The pictures and the “cartoons” mystified me. Mr. Richard Nixon did not look like a bad guy. He did not in fact have a beard or a “five o’clock shadow” as they were then called. He was not wearing a Nazi uniform. He was not wearing a Swastika armband. The images behind him were not in German or Cyrillic. He just looked like an ordinary solid citizen American. He looked a lot like the few male teachers we had at Parkside. He looked astonishingly like our next door neighbor on Caroline Avenue.

Why did his name call forth such sneering hatred? It certainly didn’t at our house, at least as far as I recall it.

Then came my first encounter with the real Richard Nixon. I do not recall the exact date or even the approximate date. I just recall that the 1952 Presidential election was going on. As everyone knows, the Republican ticket was General Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe in World War II. His Veep would be Richard M. Nixon, then a US Senator from the Golden State of California.

That, in itself, was cause for further hatred and sneering at Mr. Nixon in our little neighborhood. Why? Who knew? Apparently, according to overheard snippets of conversation from neighbors, amply fortified by angry accusations in The Washington Post, especially by Drew Pearson, a columnist who's widely read words appeared on the same pages as the comics in The Post, Richard Nixon had done some terrible things to win his election for The US Senator against a much beloved woman named Helen Gahagan Douglas.

What these terrible things were was never clear to me. He had apparently called Mrs. Douglas a Communist. But there was never any clear evidence of those comments. And The Star...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Humanix Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1630062014
• ISBN 13: 9781630062019
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland