Misunderstood character in history...

[Deco-Doll-1928]

Some people get a bad rap or get too much credit for something they don't really deserve. Who do you think is the most misunderstood character in history? For better or for worse? Why?

I wish I could tell you my opinion, but at the moment my brain is malfunctioning. lol

 

[dhermann1]

Niccolo Machiavelli, for starters. People assume that he advocated the amoral behaviour he describes in "The Prince". Actually he was a highly principled man, and a true patriot.

 

[MikePotts]

Until lions have historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter...


MP

 

[bil_maxx]

Richard Nixon.

He truly loved America and was lambasted by the media from the moment he ran for VP under Eisenhower. Just because he looks and sounds more like Elmer Fudd than a president. He was a super smart patriot who went to China and the Soviet Union to try and deal with the Cold War. He also pulled the Americans out of Vietnam after he went into Laos "illegally" to go after Vietnamese weapons. When he was asked if it was illegal, he said it certainly was, but that he should have done it sooner and harder. He regretted that more "American kids" died from those weapons than had to because he hesitated.

I don't intend to make this a political issue, just a little research will show that the man was terribly wronged by the media his entire life and that in fact he was a very good person who loved his country. He was only connected to the Watergate situation because he chose not to burn the tapes from the Oval Office that showed he knew about the situation. There is no way any politician now would allow that to exist. Compared with some of the characters that have been the Oval Office before and since, Nixon looks pretty good. (JFK, Clinton, Bush, Bush 2, Harding).

 

[MikePotts]

Until lions have historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter...


MP

Boy Oh Boy, I don't remember posting that - sorry!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Will Hays. Despite all the talk about the "Hays Office," he actually had very very little to do with the censorship of films in the 1930s and 1940s. He was the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Directors Association, but the actual enforcement of the Production Code was done by the Production Code Administration under Joseph Ignatius Breen, a pugnacious Catholic layman who was the primary arbiter of taste for the film industry for twenty years.

Hays himself was largely a figurehead, a glad-handing politician best wheeled out for speeches at testimonial dinners. He'd been the postmaster general under Harding and seemed generically-respectable enough a figure to put in charge of the MPPDA in the wake of the scandals of the early twenties, and the original Production Code was drafted under his authority. But he and his office had nothing to do with its ultimate enforcement, and when talking about the post-code era in American film it's proper to talk about the Breen Office, not the Hays Office.