One of the biggest regrets in my life
I know I will probably live longer than Dolt45 and one of my biggest regrets is that Hunter S. Thompson will not be around to write his obituary. He would probably out do the one he wrote for Richard Nixon.
A scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994
Hunter S. Thompson July 1994 Issue
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
<SNIP>
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
More, much more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/
Maybe The Ferret will do the honors for those of us here on DU.
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I'll bet most people under 35 will not, unless they pass by a building named after one of them, or something like that. Lots of people know that there's a Dirksen Senate Office Building. Only a very few know who Everett Dirksen was, let alone met him.
My dad would be horrified at the idea of a biography of himself. He was a true journalist to the end. He considered his job to be to report the news, not to be the news. As for me, I was more like passing through, rather than doing the moving and shaking on my own. I met up with a famous acquaintance one December and we exchanged what we had been doing in the past year. I said, same old stuff for me, and how about you? "Oh," he said, as if he had gone to the store for a jar of pickles, "I was building a couple of cities in China." Now THERE'S a guy whose biography would sell. At age 16, in Barcelona, I once was asked to play music for a reception for Salvador Dalí. He, on the other hand, WAS Salvador Dalí. There's a very good reason biographies get written about guys like him, and not about guys like me 