Free Republic

The near simultaneous publication of historian Sean Wilentz book “Age of Reagan” and the publication of activist / reporter Rick Pearlstein’s “Nixonland”, previously praised on these pages, has caused a dust-up over who most personified and ultimately transformed the modern conservative age which played out on the New Republic website. Although I am neither historian nor an unbiased reporter, I was a participant in the Nixon realignment which ultimately begat the Reagan revolution. ..... The change in Richard Nixon comes with Goldwater’s sweeping nomination and what Nixon then understands can be salvaged, even nurtured,in the ashes of Barry’s defeat. “You...

The de-racialization of US politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign -- but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed. Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven US...

In the third week of June 1972, Richard Milhous Nixon committed an injustice with which the Western world is still struggling. Yes, two men broke into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building - but we're no longer bothered about that. What still affects us today - or rather tomorrow - is that the then President that week brought the American nation together by making Father's Day a public holiday. For this high crime and misdemeanour, his name should live on in the annals of infamy. Now, of course, it's over here. It's just like Hallowe'en - another American...

Thomas says "Kennedy was a less polarizing figure than Nixon" which ignores the fact that Kennedy's decision to seek the Democratic nomination in 1968 only after Eugene McCarthy drew first-blood against LBJ in the New Hampshire primary caused outraged Liberals to consider Kennedy an opportunist who was splitting the anti-war vote, putting his personal ambition ahead of the need to end the Viet Nam war. In fact, in early 1968 Kennedy announced he would not oppose LBJ "under any foreseeable circumstances," further fueling the charge of opportunism when he "reassessed" his decision and jumped into the race a few days...

You don't have to agree with everything in this monumental account of politics in the 1960s and 1970s to find Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" (Scribner, 896 pages, $37.50) interesting and even engrossing. The book is a masterful retelling of the turbulent period between the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and the equally stunning loss by George McGovern to Richard Nixon in 1972. Mr. Perlstein's use of the elections of 1964 and 1972 as ideological goalposts may be arbitrary, but it is easy to see why he selected them. Could two such different countries really be...

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

HOW AN OUT-OF-CONTROL MEDIA INDICTED NIXON WITHOUT A TRIAL May 18, 2008 -- Swarmed by photographers, former Attorney General John Mitchell - once President Nixon's closest adviser, an awesome figure, with his wintry demeanor and trademark pipe, throughout the capital - emerged shaken and unsmiling from a three-hour grilling before the grand jury. It was April 20, 1973, and the Watergate cover-up was fast unraveling. Federal prosecutors and reporters smelled blood. "Mitchell had good reason to be grim," reported Daniel Schorr. "CBS News learns Mitchell admitted to the grand jury that he authorized payment of legal fees and expenses for...

WASHINGTON - Chinese leader Mao Zedong proposed sending 10 million Chinese women to the United States, in talks with top envoy Henry Kissinger in 1973, according to documents released Tuesday. The powerful chairman of the Chinese Communist Party said he believed such emigration could kickstart bilateral trade but could also "harm" the United States with a population explosion similar to China, according to documents released Tuesday by the State Department on US-China ties between 1973 to 1976. In a long conversation that stretched way past midnight at Mao's residence on February 17, 1973, the cigar-chomping Chinese leader referred to the...

WASHINGTON — One of President Nixon’s daughters, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, apparently supports a Democrat in this year’s presidential contest — Barack Obama. Eisenhower has contributed the maximum amount allowed during the primary season to Obama’s campaign: $2,300. Federal Election Commission records show she gave Obama’s campaign $1,000 on Feb. 4, another $1,000 on Feb. 18 and $300 on March 5. One of her father’s staunchest defenders during the Watergate scandal, she married the grandson of another Republican president, David Eisenhower, just before her father took office. Since her father’s resignation, she has written several books and is now co-chair of...

<p>Eisenhower has donated $2,300 to the Illinois senator’s campaign, the maximum primary season donation allowed under federal campaign finance regulations.</p> <p>The former first daughter isn’t the only member of the Eisenhower family supporting Obama’s White House run. In February, her sister-in-law Susan Eisenhower endorsed the Illinois senator in a Washington Post op-ed.</p>

There had been nothing quite like it in American history: three former Presidents sharing the cabin of an Air Force jet as they flew to the funeral of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in Cairo. From talks with many of the dignitaries aboard the plane, TIME'S Washington Contributing Editor Hugh Sidey put together the following account of their extraordinary mission of mourning.

HILLARY'S UNETHICAL CONDUCT IN WATERGATE This YouTube will make it easy for even the mainstream media to understand what Hillary did on the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff. To think of this neo-Stalinist who is above the law as the chief law enforcement officer of this nation is a horrific vision. This presentation has a couple home video clips of Hillary filmed by Peter Paul.

What Hillary never mentions (and others fail to ask....)Ann Althouse brings up an important question about Hillary Clinton which so far hasn't received any attention at all in the campaign -- much less the attention it deserves: ...she never mentions her work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry these days either. I wonder why. As a Watergate buff, I don't wonder why at all. (I'm also thinking there might be a sarcastic element in Ann Althouse's wonderment, but I don't want to make unwarranted assumptions which aren't all that relevant anyway, as this is an important issue.) In 1974, Democrat...

http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html Wednesday, April 2, 2008 We touched on this yesterday, and I'm told that we've received a mess-o-emails asking me to put something about it on the Nuze today. Ok .. so here we go with the abbreviated version of Hillary's shenanigans when she was working for the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment mess. If you want the full story click here to read the column by Dan Calabrese. http://www.northstarwriters.com/dc163.htm * Hillary Rodham gets a spot on the legal staff of the House Judiciary Committee upon the recommendation of a lawyer pal of Ted Kennedy. * The man...

Dan Calabrese’s new column on Hillary Clinton’s past may bring the curtain down on her political future. Calabrese interviewed Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, has tried to tell the story of his former staffer’s behavior during those proceedings for years. Zeifman claims he fired Hillary for unethical behavior and that she conspired to deny Richard Nixon counsel during the hearings: As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a...

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying. The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of...

This is ridiculous. We have "President's Day" celebrated today and the only sign of it, other than empty schools and government offices, are the ads for white sales at the department stores and a funny television ad I saw for "Millard Fillmore Soap on a Rope." Thank you, Richard Nixon. Until his President's Day proclamation in 1971, and subsequent legislation, we had separate holidays for both Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and George Washington on February 22. Not all states celebrated both, and the days came close together, but so what? School children routinely made studies about the lives of...

YORBA LINDA – The first Amendment was alive and well today, Presidents' Day, as demonstrators for and against the war in Iraq displayed signs along Yorba Linda Boulevard, in front of the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. The larger group, a dozen strong, set up on a corner waiving signs criticizing the war and handing out slices of "Bring Them Home-made Pie" to passersby. A man driving a yellow Hummer honked at the group and gave it a thumbs up. They responded in kind. One of the demonstrators, Pat Alviso, waved a sign with a picture of her son. "He...

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.” The quote comes from “Nixonland,” [] by Rick Perlstein []. As Mr. Perlstein shows, Stevenson warned in vain: during those years America did indeed become the land...

I have just seen Hillary Clinton and her former Yale law professor both in tears at a campaign rally here in my home state of Connecticut. Her tearful professor said how proud he was that his former student was likely to become our next President. Hillary responded in tears. My own reaction was of regret that, when I terminated her employment on the Nixon impeachment staff, I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate bar associations. Hillary as I knew her in 1974 At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary Committee's...

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, and lawyer, has written a very troubling piece, here, about his professional experience with the young lawyer, Hillary Rodham, in the course of the Nixon Impeachment hearings. Candidate Hillary Clinton now speaks non-stop about her work at the Children's Defense Fund, after Yale law school. In doing so, she stretches the truth by claiming that she spent her time "fighting for abused women and children" (advocating for larger welfare benefits is more like it). But the job that brought her to the attention of the political universe, to which she no longer refers, was serving...

I just finished watching The Hoax the story of Clifford Irving's autobiography of Howard Hughes. As I understand the movie, Clifford Irving alledged that he was authorized by Hughes to write his autobiography, but this was all a scam. My questions is this: Can someone provide a fair analysis of the Hughes, Iriving, Nixon, TWA relationship? Especially with regards to contracts that were ultimately provided to Hughes and the subsequent watergate breakin. Is it likely that Hughes contracted Iriving to write the book in an attempt to pressure Nixon?

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, trying to warm up an image some voters perceive as cold, starts a drive Monday to showcase her personal side with testimonials from friends, associates and constituents she has helped. The online and in-person campaign, complete with a website called TheHillaryIKnow.com, comes a day after Clinton won a key endorsement from The Des Moines Register and her chief rival in the Democratic nomination race, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, was endorsed by The Boston Globe. The rush of endorsements comes as candidates angle for advantage in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses and New Hampshire's Jan. 8...

'Nixon was concerned over Israeli nukes' By ABAYE SILBER In 1969, the Nixon administration was concerned about Israel's alleged possession of nuclear weapons and the possibility of an arms race in the Middle East, The New York Times reported Thursday. "The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons," Henry Kissinger, former US president Richard Nixon's national security adviser, warned in a memorandum dated July 19, 1969, part of a newly released trove of documents. The Nixon administration's concerns were...

Jordan's King Hussein sent a secret message to President Richard Nixon in 1970 pleading with him to attack Syria, according to declassified documents released Wednesday by the former president's library. President Nixon works at his desk in the Oval Office in a June 1972 photograph. The papers are among about 10,000 documents released by the Nixon Presidential Library, some of which offer harbingers of present-day events, such as concerns about terrorism and Saudi Arabia. Library director Timothy Naftali said the documents describe challenges such as how to get the Saudis more involved in solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how to get...

After reading the two new bio's by Bernstein and Gerth & Van Natta as well as watching the various debates and press coverage I began to wonder who is more Nixonion Hillary Clinton or Richard Nixon himself. With her wiretapping, enemies lists and other activities prior to being elected as president I think it's Hillary. She doesn't have the 5 O'clock shadow but she does have the jowls.

Hands clasped behind his back, he was a silent silhouette as he gazed out the window overlooking the Washington skyline. Hearing our entrance, former President Richard Nixon turned and crossed the room to greet us. "You didn't all go to Harvard, did you?" he asked with a smile. None of us had, something that clearly appealed to the graduate of Whittier College. Ironically, the only Harvard graduate in our midst was Hugh Hewitt, a Nixon aide (and ex-Reagan aide as well) who today is a radio talk show host.

WHAT MADE SAMMY RUN? Writing last week about the time when Elvis met Nixon put me in mind of Nixon's equally surprising connection to Sammy Davis. I originally discussed it in a post back in 2003 that I thought might be worth another look. I don't recall a time when Sammy Davis was not a celebrity along with the rest of the Rat Pack. Although I learned as a teenager that he had overcome obstacles galore on his way to the top -- I read his memorable autobiography, Yes, I Can -- the story stopped with his marriage to May...

The world changed dramatically in 1980 on the day former California Governor Ronald Reagan trounced the hapless Jimmy Carter in the Presidential election.  This was perhaps the Democratic Party's and the US media's worst nightmare ever.  Not only did America reject the "malaise" of the Carter years, but they embraced a California 'cowboy' who believed that America's best days were yet to come.  And Reagan's coattails provided the opportunity for a number of staunch conservatives to invade the halls of congress, among them, a 33 year old Vietnam combat veteran who would prove to be one of President Reagan's most...

In addition to his former role on NBC's "Law & Order" as tough-talking, gruff-but-lovable and fair District Attorney Arthur Branch, pending presidential candidate and former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee has benefited from a reputation for having served as an aggressive prosecutor while serving as minority counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, officially known as the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C. Thompson's own exploratory committee Web site, ImWithFred.com, even lauds this bit of his history. "He gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White...

Rove memo found in Nixon archive WASHINGTON, July 14 (UPI) -- Even as a 22-year-old, U.S. Republican political operative Karl Rove had a propensity for slicing and dicing the electorate, it was reported Saturday. The New York Times said it found early evidence of Rove's organizational ability tucked inside 78,000 pages of Nixon administration documents released last week by the National Archives. Within those pages is a nine-page memo written in 1973 by Rove, who would go on to become the architect of George W. Bush's rise to political power. Rove outlines for Anne Armstrong, then co-chairman of the Republican...

Long before Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes became one of the most powerful men in television, he was a Republican media consultant concerned with Richard Nixon's excessive perspiration, five o'clock shadow, upper lip makeup, and habit of not paying attention to wife Pat during public appearances. In a May 1970 memo to Nixon aide Bob Haldeman, Ailes critiqued a series of Nixon TV appearances and detailed his efforts to stage manage the president's on-air look. The Ailes memo, a copy of which you'll find below, was released today by the Nixon presidential library. In one passage, Ailes described how...

WASHINGTON - Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes. Thompson, now preparing a bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, won fame in 1973 for asking a committee witness the bombshell question that revealed Nixon had installed hidden listening devices and taping equipment in the Oval Office. Those tapes show Thompson played a behind-the-scenes role that was very different from his public image three decades ago. He comes...

WASHINGTON - Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes. Thompson, now preparing a bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, won fame in 1973 for asking a committee witness the bombshell question that revealed Nixon had installed hidden listening devices and taping equipment in the Oval Office. Those tapes show Thompson played a behind-the-scenes role that was very different from his public image three decades ago. He comes...

The writer of this piece surely knows that Thompson’s book, ‘At That Point in Time’ has been out of print for at least 20 years, making it very difficult for regular readers to verify his claims. However, I have a copy of the book... First of all, Thompson has NEVER claimed to have broken the case wide open with his questioning. Yes, the question was known to the White House… because the committee let the defendant’s know the line of inquiry before the questioning on National Television. Second, Armstrong is hardly a reliable witness. Thompson had this to say about...

On the official Web site for his anticipated presidential run, former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) says that during the Watergate hearings he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." A former assistant U.S. attorney in Tennessee, Thompson served as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee. But a story published in yesterday's Boston Globe reveals details about his role in the Watergate probe that suggests Thompson was something other than the good-government crusader he now makes himself out to be. It begins: The day before Senate...

The story began in the fall of 1971, when differences in the Nixon administration over the White House China policy posed little threat to a major transformation in China-US relations. The recently declassified US official records throw new light on the anger and frustration that seized President Richard Nixon during the 1971 Indo-Pak war and how Washington secretly pleaded with China to "menace" India by moving troops to the Indian border. Poring over thousands of pages of national security files and telephone transcripts of the then US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and 2,800 hours of Nixon tapes, well-known American...

William Hungate, a former federal judge and Missouri congressman who introduced an article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, died Friday at age 84, his family said. Hungate, who was living in the St. Louis suburb of Town and Country, suffered complications from a June 6 surgery after he had a blood clot to the brain, they said. The Democrat represented Missouri's 9th District from November of 1964 to January of 1977. He was the Chair of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on criminal justice, which investigated the presidential pardon of Nixon by his successor, President Gerald Ford. It the only...

The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information...

Former Senate Republican leader Howard Baker said Friday he is urging his friend Fred Thompson, a TV actor and former U.S. senator, to run for president and is encouraging others to draft him. Among potential complications in a Thompson race is that he is good friends with McCain, a current presidential candidate. Thompson endorsed McCain for president in his 2000 bid. Baker said his wife, former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, R-Kan., already supports McCain for president and Baker said he too might back McCain if Thompson does not run.

Retired U.S. Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton -- a towering figure in national and state politics for half a century and the person for whom the federal courthouse downtown is named -- died late Sunday morning. He was 77. He had been ill for several months with various health problems. He died at St. Mary's Health Center in Richmond Heights.

A new thesis about the end of the Vietnam war is making the rounds in the context of the debate over Iraq. It holds that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger — not the Democratic Congress and public opinion — were chiefly culpable in America's betrayal of South Vietnam. The managing editor of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Rose,

Everette Howard Hunt, the man who helped plan the Watergate break-in and wiretapping operation, is dead at age 88, FOX News has learned... With his involvement in Watergate and the Bay of Pigs, Hunt became a magnet for conspiracy theorists of all kinds. Those researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy began claiming in the mid-1970s that Hunt and Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis appeared in photographs dressed as tramps and being arrested by Dallas policemen near the site of the assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Hunt vigorously contested the charges publicly and in court, and he and his second...

A Ford, Not a Lincoln By James P. Estrada January 18, 2007 The passing of President Ford has led to the seemly unavoidable melancholy look back to his presidency with an inevitable comparison to presidencies past and present. Ford himself once said that he was “a Ford and not a Lincoln”, and so we got a Ford and not a Lincoln Presidency out of this man. There are those that would say Ford was a great president and cite reasons from his unifying the country after Nixon to his seamless handling of the Mayaguez incident, where US Marines boarded and...

For the Republicans, there are two ways out of Iraq. They can either go out like Eisenhower or like Nixon. As the first Republican to occupy the White House since the coming of the New Deal, Dwight Eisenhower could have chosen to divide the public and try to roll back Franklin Roosevelt's handiwork. In fact, he didn't give that option a moment's consideration. Social Security and unions, he concluded, were here to stay; any attempt to undo them, he wrote, would consign the Republicans to permanent minority status. Ike also ended the Korean War without attacking Democrats in the process....

President Bush should take a look at the history of Vietnam under Richard M. Nixon, who won reelection in a landslide while conducting a much larger war with far greater casualties, and in the face of massive opposition from the press and a wildly active left wing that took to the streets.I lived through that era, and the first thing you need to know is that Vietnam was won by Nixon and he got our troops out with aggressive military action. The post-war was then lost because Nixon resigned over Watergate and the democrat Congress prohibited Ford from aiding our...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Embittered by career diplomats during his first term, President Nixon said he wanted to "ruin the Foreign Service" before leaving office, according to newly released State Department documents. ... Days after his re-election on November 7, 1972, Nixon vented his frustrations about the diplomatic corps during a meeting with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Just before saying he was going "to take the responsibility for cleaning up" the department, the president told Kissinger on November 13 that he was determined that "his one legacy is to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it -- the...

Ford's big mistake It's time to turn down the volume on Gerald Ford's funeral rites.....

Death Does Wonders for a Legacy By Michael Reagan FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2006 Saddam Hussein is a lucky man – in no time at all he can expect to have his reputation vastly improved. And he can thank the hangman who awaits him on the gallows. Prior to that moment when he breathes his last, his reputation will be in shreds. He has, rightly, been seen as a monster. The mere act of his dying, however, will enable his supporters to smooth over his role in those troublesome times when he was slaughtering his own people by the hundreds...

Months before Richard Nixon set Michigan congressman Gerald Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called himself the embattled president's "only real friend," to get him out of trouble. During one of the darkest days of the Watergate scandal, Nixon secretly confided in Ford, at the time the House minority leader. He begged for help. He complained about fair-weather friends and swore at perceived rivals in his own party. "Tell the guys, goddamn it, to get off their ass and start fighting back," Nixon pleaded with Ford in one call recorded by the president's...