https://twitter.com/dick_nixon/status/418244279677366272

Richard M. Nixon @dick_nixon

Dec 31, 2013

I've said it before: Jack is dead, Bobby is dead, Teddy is dead, Lyndon is dead, poor damn dumb Reagan is dead. But I'm still here.


dick_nixon is Justin Sherwin.

He loves baseball, politics done right, and hates Marco Rubio with the heat of 1000 suns. He's an interesting read, even though he's more than a few times been wrong about politics. (E.g. he thought Kamala was a terrible choice for VP.)

https://www.vox.com/2015/10/8/9464035/dick-nixon-first-person

The joke was easy — perhaps too easy. But it made me wonder how Nixon would operate today.

At age 13, Richard Nixon’s grandmother encouraged him to leave his "footprints on the sands of time," and I imagined him making a final "big play" for respect. He’d fight for difficult, forward-thinking realism over the ideological purity that dominates our politics. As he did in the Checkers speech, following his defeat in 1962 and his pardon by President Ford, Nixon wouldn’t allow himself to be turned into a byword for criminality and disgrace. In his mind he was a great man, and they never backed down from a fight.

I understood that Nixon couldn't be frozen in the world of the tapes — he belonged "in the arena." And that made him a natural for Twitter.

Words, tics, and mannerisms are easy to imitate. Thinking isn't.

My goal was to get into Nixon's head, let him comment on the political world he created and plot the way forward. I had to bring him back. So I dug into books, transcripts, and interviews, looking for what drew America to him.


Cheers,
Scott.