Free Republic

"The biggest defeat in our nation's history!" bellowed Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay while whacking his fist on his desk upon learning the details of the deal President Kennedy cut with Khrushchev regarding the missiles. Aaw come on, Humberto!' Some amigos retort. 'Gen. LeMay was a serious war-monger and NUTCASE!—the model for Gen. Ripper in Dr Strangelove! Are you saying we shoulda started a worldwide nuclear war with tens of millions incinerated to liberate a two-bit Caribbean island of barely 7 million people?!'Nothing of the sort. In fact, the choice at the time was never between nuclear...

"There's an old saying. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If neither the facts or law are on your side, pound the table." So Adam Schiff summarized a quip that has been evolving for at least a century. And so the Democrats did in the Ohio State House when Ohio State Representative Jena Powell proposed an amendment to protect women's sports. It's hard to believe this ruckus took place in what is supposed to be the deliberative, rulemaking body for the state of Ohio. Where do...

<p>Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday trolled President Trump over his recent letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, tweeting a mock archival letter from former President Kennedy to former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that originally appeared on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live."</p>

When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid. In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review, Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not...

With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here. Barack Obama should tune them out and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow. When Red Army tank divisions crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, killing 50,000, Eisenhower did not lift a finger. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech. When Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, LBJ did nothing. When, Moscow ordered Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to smash...

Harold Eberle: "Christianity Unshackled: Are You A Truth Seeker," Destiny Image Publishers, 2009 Stalin was responsible for about 20 million deaths and Mao Zedong's regime for approximately 70 million.  Pol Pot, who led the Communist Party faction known as the Khmer Rouge, killed over 1.5 million of his own Cambodian people.6 Add to these numbers the atrocities committed by Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. Also add atheists like Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il. All total, atheistic regimes have slaughtered more than 100 million people within the last 100 years. That averages to more than 1 million people per year....

The Murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer by Jacob G. Hornberger, April 11, 2012 In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964. The...

The Holy See is the oldest continuing international organization in the world. Its Secretary of State office was established in 1486, and that is also when its first permanent representatives were established in Venice, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and France. Today, the Holy See maintains diplomatic relations with 176 states. It is also the only Permanent Observer State at the United Nations, and it participates in various internationals conventions and agreements. While it is officially neutral, it is not silent.The Holy SeeÂ’s diplomatic prowess was tested severely during the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it played a crucial role in maintaining...

Fifty years ago today, July 24, 1959, Vice-President Richard Nixon engaged in what is called the "Kitchen Debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in which they debated back and forth on the virtues of Capitalism and Freedom and Soviet-style Communism. For all of Khrushchev's bluster, here we are 50 years later, and the United States is still the world's greatest superpower, and the Soviet Union is no more. Below is a video clip of the two debating, and then a longer audio clip of their debate . . . . . (Watch Video)

Fidel Castro, the dictator who came the closest in history to igniting a nuclear war, made several public appearances recently to predict an imminent nuclear conflict. The cataclysm he craved in 1962 will erupt, he warned on Cuban TV, when the Israelis and their American cohorts provoke Iran in the straits of Hormuz. You did indeed read the above account correctly. Castro, the man who co-sponsored the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, is claiming the Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog. Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and docile. The main...

The fact is that we live in a time of fateful challenges. As a people and a nation we are under test. This challenge is, of course, Marxism-Leninism. There is no mystery in its strategies and tactics. It has always been concrete and spelled out in black and white. It has also been openly and actively tested in the economic, political, and ideological struggle for control around globe. Lenin, the founder of the first Communist state, put it simply: "First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United...

Very moving audio of Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson. He is taking about his meeting with Khrushchev: "He indicated that my grandchildren would live under communism....You Americans are so gullible. No you won't accept communism outright, but well keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find out you already have communism. we won't have to fight you. we'll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands."

IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentences “the distinctive note” of the inaugural. They have also been a distinctive note in Senator Obama’s campaign, and were made even more prominent last week when President Bush, in a speech to Israel’s Parliament, disparaged a willingness to...

Sergei Khrushchev is used to having a seat on the front row of history. Not only because his father, Nikita, was a premier of the Soviet Union, but also because he worked as an engineer at the forefront of Russia's space programme. As a young man, he was at his father's side on many of his official visits around the Soviet Union and abroad, including the historic visit to the US in 1959. On 4 October 1957, Sergei was in Kiev, Ukraine, where his father was visiting on military business. What started out as a routine engagement for the...

As promised by President Eisenhower the United Nations Security Council went into emergency session on October 30, 1956. Both the United States and Soviet Union introduced resolutions calling on Israel to cease its attack and pull back to the 1949 armistice lines. The United States resolution called on other nations to not use force or threaten to use force in the situation (clearly aimed at France and Britain). It also called for sanctions against Israel until she complied with the resolution. Both resolutions were vetoed by France and Britain. Eventually the Yugoslav delegate asked the council to use a procudural...

Op-Ed Contributor FIFTY years ago tomorrow — on Oct. 29, 1956 — Israeli paratroops were dropped deep behind Egyptian lines in the Sinai peninsula, opening the way for the ground troops that followed. In a lightning campaign lasting less than five days, the Israelis took control of the entire peninsula. The Israelis had a rendezvous at the Suez Canal with the armed forces of Britain and France. But the British and French stopped short of their goal. Like out of shape ex-champions attempting a comeback, the Europeans were unable to get past the first round in their effort to return...

n history, some events at first appear insignificant, or their significance is hidden, but they turn out to be earthshaking. Such a moment occurred 50 years ago, with Nikita Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech” to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It ranks, I believe, just below the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the start of Hitler’s War in 1939 as the most critical moment of the 20th century. At that moment, the communist movement appeared to be riding the tide of history, and not only for those in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s, communism...

The day Khrushchev buried Stalin By Nina L. Khrushcheva who teaches international affairs at New School University in New York: Los Angeles Times Published February 28, 2006 When Nikita Khrushchev died in 1971, I was still a young girl, but I remember him well. We used to visit him on the weekends on his farm at Petrovo Dalnee, about 30 miles outside of Moscow. I'd work with him among the tomatoes or at his beehives. Although to me he was just my kindly old great-grandfather, my family assured me then and later that he was a great man, a world...

FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret speech" at the 20th Communist Party Congress that changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose God-like status had helped to legitimize Communism in the Soviet Bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary. But it is also a good time to ponder this question: What are we to think of a leader whose great deeds do not bring about the consequences intended? It...

The speech Russia wants to forget By Tim Whewell BBC News It was a speech so shocking that even 50 years on, Nikolai Baibakov refuses point-blank to describe what he heard that day - a devastating attack on the man he worshipped above all others. The retired Communist Party official, now 91, can reel off scores of statistics of industrial production and oil extraction in the 1950s. But he tries every stratagem to avoid recalling the cataclysmic event to which he is one of the very few surviving witnesses. It was the secret final session of the 20th party congress...