"A brilliant and flawed president" is a good way to characterize Nixon. I would perhaps characterize him as a president of "failed greatness." He was certainly more pragmatic and centrist in many ways than much of later "conservatism."
On the subject of evangelists, I got to thinking, in contrast to the noble Billy Graham, of the Rev. Dr. Billy James Hargis. Many of you may not know of him now, but in the early 1960s he led a movement called the Christian Crusade (a rather redundant name on reflection). Anyway, he was extremely fundamentalist, racist and violently anti-communist, which latter was his main schtick. Sometime later he founded an institution called American Christian College. However, he came to grief when a newly married coed at the college, wanting to make everything thing right before the Lord and with her groom, confessed that she'd had sex with Dr. Hargis, whereupon the groom confessed that he too had had sex with Dr. Hargis! What makes this especially gross and hilarious is that Billy James Hargis was a hideous fat man. His (sort of) rival George Lincoln Rockwell used to refer to him as "Hoggis." In one of his publications, Rockwell commented that he would derive a certain wry amusement when the Jews, their takeover completed, executed all the nice Christian conservatives. "Poor Hoggis," he quipped, "the Jews will probably have to use an elephant gun on him." (In case you don't know or remember, Rockwell was the founder and leader of the American Nazi Party until he was murdered by an ex-follower, who had joined a faction that considered Rockwell a soft-hearted pantywaist because he didn't want to exterminate all the Jews on biological grounds. Their publication was entitled Kill.)
Hargis left the American Christian College in disgrace and the institution folded a few years later although Hargis/Hoggis continued evangelizing for some years afterward. I was surprised to hear him on the radio sometime in the mid-80s.
