Outpouring for President Nixon

The outpouring of sadness over Richard Nixon’s death is probably more a result over a loss of our past, rather than a loss of the man. Nixon was President when cultural diversity meant either you were part of the Establishment or a member of the hippie counterculture. He was President during a time when Americans feared inflation rather than crime and violence.

He was a President you either loved or ridiculed, and it seemed that all Americans were somehow involved in our nation’s destiny--that is not the case today.

LARRY A. STAHL

Irvine

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* In reviewing the comments made about Nixon, I remember my own personal experience involving his presidency. In 1969, after I and my wife had moved to California, my mother and father (who had remained in Brooklyn, N.Y.) both became critically ill. As a result, my younger brother had to leave college to operate my father’s one-man gas station and to otherwise assist my parents.

By leaving school, my brother lost his student deferment and, predictably, soon received an induction notice to report for the draft. In frustration, I sent a two-page telegram to then-President Nixon setting forth the relevant facts. Within days, I received a response from the President’s secretary, an acknowledgment from the Selective Service System and a notice that the draft board would hold a special hearing in Brooklyn. My brother was then granted a hardship exemption and, as he left the hearing room, he noticed that my telegram to the President was sitting on the top of the board’s file.

We will always be grateful to President Nixon for assisting us in our hour of need. Nixon was many things to many people but, for our family at least, he was presidential and caring in every real sense of the word.

BARRY S. RUBIN

Beverly Hills

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* Whenever I visit the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, I look beyond the thousands of names of Americans inscribed there, and the names of millions of Asians who are not, and I see through tears the face of Richard Nixon reflected in the hard, black granite mirror.

GRAY BRECHIN

Berkeley

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* Now that the concomitant hoopla surrounding the controvertible life and death of a President who did his job impeachably and needed his chosen successor’s clemency has whimpered away, I would like to suggest a moment memorializing an American who did his job well, the Watergate’s security guard Frank Wills.

LEN MACALUSO

Hollywood