Talk:Presidency of Richard Nixon

Worst President in History

What is the dispute here? Whoever undid my edit did not give any reason. What was deleted was the sentence in the opening paragraph: "Nearly all historians now agree Nixon was the worst president in US history." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.11.80.156 (talk) 03:11, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

Unless you can provide many, many sources from reputed historians calling him the "most terrible president" directly, it would be 1)Unsourced and 2)Unencyclopaedic language.I was not the person who undid your edit, but the revert seems correct.Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 16:27, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Can't we find someone (anyone!) other than Jonathan Aitken to provide a positive quote about Nixon?

The section Presidency of Richard Nixon#Historical reputation presents a somewhat negative quote from a historian (Stephen E. Ambrose) about Nixon, followed by a more positive one from Jonathan Aitken. It's possible that from a US/global perspective, Aitken is just known as a biographer of Nixon, but from a UK perspective he is remembered for a range of other things, including the abrupt termination of his prominent political career when he was jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice. In 2021 I added a few words [1] which I thought added some context to him being the source of a positive view of Nixon, but these were swiftly reverted for WP:SYNTH. While I understand and (grudgingly) accept the reversion, I still feel that it is ironic, to say the least, for a positive quote about a disgraced politician to be sourced (without comment) from another disgraced politician. I accept that it is reasonable for the article to include something to contrast with the Ambrose quote, and wouldn't go as far as to say that we shouldn't quote Aitken, but rather that it would be preferable to use someone else who doesn't themselves have such a chequered history regarding the truth. (At the risk of committing another WP:SYNTH, I might also direct anyone interested in Mr Aitken's reliability as a biographer to the section in his Wikipedia article that deals with his more recent biography of the ex-President of Khazakstan: Jonathan Aitken#Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan: From Communism to Capitalism) JA 1961 (talk) 18:47, 10 January 2024 (UTC)