Plan B Forum

Today would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday

If he were alive, today it would have been the 100th birthday for Richard Milhous Nixon. There have been few political leader in this country who have stirred more emotion that the 37th president of the United States.

Born in a farmhouse in Yorba Linda, Calif., in 1913, Nixon is perhaps best known for his leading role in the scandal at the Watergate hotel, immortalized in American pop culture through the book-turned-movie by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein called "All the President's Men." As former White House correspondent Donald Fulsom put it, Nixon "said, 'I'm not a crook,' but he was."

He served as president from 1969 to 1974, when he became the only president to resign the office. Nixon had previously served as a Republican U.S. representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961.

Woodward believes now that the Watergate scandal was much worse than he realized as a young Washington Post reporter, chasing the story in the 1970s, according to Politico.

"Those tapes are a tire iron wrapped around the Nixon legacy that no one's going to ever get off," he said in an interview. "You listen to those tapes, and he literally is using the presidency as an instrument of personal revenge and reward."

A larger legacy:

But ABC News political analyst Cokie Roberts and Nixon scholars insist: Nixon's legacy is larger than Watergate. He revolutionized foreign relations, set a foundation for modern environmental regulations and even advanced women's rights.

Nixon was also associated with campaign reform, according to the Huffington Post. In 1971, he signed into law the Federal Election Campaign Act, limiting the amount of money that could be donated to congressional and presidential campaigns and requiring that those donations be reported. And he was also responsible for the strengthening of that law: The Watergate scandal that drove him to resign on Aug. 9, 1974, in the middle of his second term, also prompted Congress to pass more regulations on campaign contributions and to create the Federal Election Commission.

The last liberal?

Nixon is many things to many people, but 40 years after his crushing 1972 reelection victory, it becomes clearer to Fox News that he is also something few would have imagined: America's last liberal.

Though Nixon, and other Republicans in the 1970s, would never have expressed it in this way, our 37th president was a pro-big government, pro-public spending, and pro-social safety net president.

Nixon was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level; he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. The creation of the EPA represented an expansion of government that would face fierce opposition were it being debated today. The EPA is also one of the agencies on Capitol Hill that the business community most detests--along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which polices working conditions. OSHA is another Nixon creation.