| | It is true that in George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith's job was to bring backfiles up to date with the changing Party Line by adding or deleting facts. With electronic media, that is all too easy. I like old books. I have histories by William Graham Sumner and James Ford Rhodes.
On the other hand, history is always being rewritten. Past events take on different meanings as we change.
Harding is routinely ranked one of the worst presidents of all time and Coolidge usually falls in line right behind Nixon.
Actually, there is some left revisionism about Nixon now. He made peace with China. Kissinger handed secrets over the the Chinese. Nixon wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs about "Asia after Vietnam" before he was president, even though the war was only winding up at that point under Johnson. The wage and price controls and the emergency import tariffs were both interventionist, of course. Nixon proposed and signed into law the Environmental Protection Agency.
Perhaps our history does need to be rewritten occasionally.
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