For my blog post today about Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990,
I'll quote something that Stephen Ambrose says on page 368. The topic
is the reaction of foreign countries to President Richard Nixon's
scandals.
"Even Western Europeans, living in democratic states and
accustomed to political scandals, were bemused by Watergate. They
could not understand what all the hullabaloo was about. To the British,
with their Official Secrets Act, nothing that Nixon had done seemed
that out of the ordinary, much less illegal. The Italians simply threw
up their hands at the crazy Americans. To the French, Watergate
confirmed their suspicions about the na[i]ve Americans. In West
Germany, the frequent comparison of Nixon to Hitler by his enemies in
America showed either how little Americans understood Hitler, or how
little they understood Nixon, or both. Nixon's friends in China,
meanwhile, could not understand why he just didn't shoot his
critics...The general attitude was that Nixon was the best President the
United States had had since World War II. It was unbelievable that the
American people were trying to throw him out of office, simply because
he wanted a little inside information about what his political opponents
were up to, and had told a fib or two about the break-in."
That
reminded me of when I was a college student during the Clinton
impeachment proceedings. A lady who worked at the cafeteria, who also
attended my church occasionally, asked me if I was ashamed to be an
American, due to what was being said about Bill Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky's relationship. She thought that other countries considered
what Bill and Monica did to be scandalous! But I was reading the
opposite----that a number of other countries wondered why the Americans
were so prudish!