Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (869859)	7/2/2015 11:59:02 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578436

Oh, of course. The old Subversion Play. Why didn't I think of that? When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends Henry Griffin/AP Jeffrey Frank 01.21.134:45 AM ET Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon had one of the most unlikely political friendships, but it came apart over an arrest with serious consequences for Nixon’s legacy and civil rights. I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with RN, as Richard Nixon liked to refer to himself in his more imperial moods. It may sound odd, but the more I immersed myself in his pre-presidential life in the course of writing a book (in other words, before Watergate, Vietnam, and China), the more annoyed I became with him. Sometimes I had an urge to scold him—to tell him to do what he surely knew was right rather than go for the quick political advantage. This urge was never stronger than when it involved his relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday (he would have been 84 on Jan. 15) is commemorated this month as a federal holiday—the same month as Nixon’s centennial was marked. There once was a real connection between the two men, but it more or less ended with RN’s spineless behavior during the 1960 presidential campaign, after Dr. King was arrested on phony charges stemming from a traffic violation. Coretta Scott King had been terrified; she worried with good reason that her husband might be killed en route to Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, and she appealed to the Nixon and John F. Kennedy campaigns to intervene. Nixon, however, demurred; he said that it would be “grandstanding” to speak out, according to his aide William Safire. Nixon’s real motive, though, seems clear: it was a close election and he was willing to lose black support if it meant gaining a new harvest of white votes in the once-Democratic south. Eight years later, this approach became the carefully considered “Southern strategy.”... Even as a matter of practical politics, Nixon made a bad bet. John and Robert Kennedy helped to win Dr. King’s release, and soon enough their campaign distributed two million copies of a pamphlet titled “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy” to well chosen voters. It can’t be proved that this made the difference in an election in which the popular vote turned out to be the closest ever (Nixon and Kennedy were separated by about 112,000 votes out of sixty-nine million cast), but it’s a fact that President Eisenhower in 1956 got some 40 percent of the black vote and that Nixon in 1960 won just 32 percent—not bad by modern Republican standards, but still a steep drop. Four years later, facing Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson won 94 percent of the black vote, which set a demographic pattern that endures. thedailybeast.com