Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Richard Milhous Nixon. Just the name still sends vibrations of hate and malice in countless Americans. Our 37th U.S. president, as well as being our only president to voluntarily resign in disgrace, Richard Nixon was a bundle of oddities and eccentricities.
Nixon made an appearance on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and he once played host to Elvis Presley in the Oval Office. These are two of the more well-known facts of Nixon's life and career. Let's take a look at a few other facts you may not have known about Richard M. Nixon.
* The Watergate break-in is not the only break-in to which Richard Nixon is connected. When he was a student at Duke law school, he and two accomplices broke into the dean's office to check their grades before they were posted.
* His favorite TV show was Gilligan's Island and his favorite movie was Patton.
* One of teenaged Nixon's jobs was as a barker at the wheel of fortune booth at the Slippery Gulch Carnival in Prescott, Arizona.
* A Secret Service agent once saw Nixon taste one of his dog biscuits.
* Nixon originally wanted to be an FBI agent. He was rejected by the bureau.
* Nixon always wore a suit and dress shoes when he walked on the beach.
* He had motion sickness and hay fever his entire life. One cannot help but wonder how he dealt with the multitude of vehicles and traveling he had to do as president.
* Nixon meditated, although he probably would not have described his practice as such. He greatly enjoyed long periods of silence during which he would simply sit still and not speak. This almost certainly would qualify as a form of meditation.
* Nixon's nicknames included Gloomy Gus, the Iron Butt, the Mad Monk, the New Nixon, and Tricky Dicky.
* He was so paranoid he once ordered the Secret Service to tap his brother Donald's phone.
* Nixon holds the record for most times appearing on the cover of Time magazine, with 55.
* A student protester once gave Nixon the finger. The president gave him one back.
* He was the first president to visit all 50 states. No president before Nixon had taken the time to travel to every state.
* Nixon refused to shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.
* Nixon claimed to never have had a headache his entire life.
* He is responsible for having the words s**t and f**k published in the pages of the New York Times. During the Watergate scandal, it was discovered that some of the secret tape recordings Nixon made in the Oval Office included him uttering those four-letter words, and others. The New York Times actually printed verbatim transcripts of the tapes, with the obscene words included.
Eisenhower was only president for five months, so he can be excused. Kennedy was assassinated in the second year of his presidency, so that's probably a pass. And Johnson had only six years to do it, and was a little busy with civil rights, the Vietnam War and, you know, taking over for an assassinated president.