10 Times Captain America Outsmarted Everyone
7. Making Richard Nixon Kill Himself
The fact that Captain America is canonically responsible for the suicide of Richard Nixon in the Marvel universe is too surreal to seem true - like a fever dream you had after reading a comic, a history book, and then downing two bottles of cough syrup.
Yet it's also exactly the case in the original run of Captain America, where issue #175 finds our hero discovering the shocking secret identity of the leader of the evil Secret Empire - which is never explicitly stated in the comic, but has been confirmed by writer Steve Engleheart to be Nixon himself, in reaction to the Watergate scandal which was occurring at the time.
While Cap's discovery of this foul secret isn't genius work, he does manage to find out a secret that literally nobody else in the world knows - even if it does lead him to quit being a superhero for an issue or five.