>>82
Andrew Jackson also publicly told the Supreme Court to go fuck themselves. He was a pretty based guy.
Theodore Roosevelt was a genuine tough guy who was also smart, charismatic, and pragmatic. Some nutbar shot him while he was preparing to give a speech, and he went out to give the speech, with a bullet wound, after telling his bodyguards to stop beating the man who had just shot him, who was obviously so far gone as to not know what he was doing.
Eisenhower is remembered in pop culture as a Dan Quayle level retard because he had trouble saying the word "nuclear." He played football at West Point and still graduated first in his class. He was a very sharp guy who had no tolerance for bullshit. In 1956, when the UK, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, Eisenhower publicly told the British government that the US would sell off all its holdings of the pound sterling and tank their currency if they didn't call it off and withdraw their troops. During a meeting with Anthony Eden, the UK's prime minister, when Eden tried to justify the invasion, Eisenhower called him a bullshit artist to his face, using those words. Eisenhower took no shit from anybody. It is maybe a shame that he chose Nixon to be VP, but nobody's perfect.
I don't hate Nixon, but he should have gotten out of politics after fumbling the debate with Kennedy horribly on live TV in 1960. I don't think he was the cackling loony portrayed in to many bad Saturday Night Live sketches. He was a smart, driven, hard-working, savvy guy, with a history of public service and medals of commendation from serving in the Navy during the war. He also lacked charisma and was openly despised by Hollywood and the newsmedia. Fifty years ago they all had Nixon Derangement Syndrome worse than anyone has Trump Derangement Syndrome today, and he wasn't charismatic enough or well enough liked by the rest of his party to weather that.
Opening diplomatic relations with China in 1972 enraged pretty much his entire party and when the Watergate crisis got manufactured out of rumors and thin air--the Church Commission is mainly remembered for exposing the CIA's dirty tricks, but one of the things uncovered was that Lyndon Johnson also had the FBI spying on and blackmailing thousands of people, opening mail, bugging phones, bugging motel rooms, bugging homes, they spied on Goldwater's campaign, on most of Congress, on journalists, on civil rights activists, on antiwar activists, on "intellectuals" who criticized the Johnson Administration from Timothy Leary to William F. Buckley, and LBJ had just died so it was safe to talk about it for about ten minutes before it got pushed out of the news cycle and dropped down the Memory Hole--all the Republicans in Congress silently turned their backs and let the Democrats gang-rape him over rumors that he was trying to cover up that he'd done, once, something that Johnson had just spent five years doing twice every morning before breakfast. I don't think he was an evil man but for America in the early 1970s, Nixon, with his sweaty, jowly, unshaven face that looked like it belonged on a wanted poster, was the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.