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President Richard Nixon, the 37th president, announced he would be resigning from the office on this day in history, August 8, 1974. In a speech delivered to the nation from the Oval Office, Nixon said his resignation would go into effect "at noon tomorrow." On August 9, Gerald Ford would assume the presidency as the nation's 38th president. Nixon was the first U.S. president to resign from the position. He left the highest office in the land in the face of likely impeachment amid the Watergate scandal, which involved his administration's cover-up of spying activities on the Democratic Party's headquarters...

According to this Daniel Calabrese article, Hillary Clinton was fired from her job as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigations for, among other things, lying: 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 her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of...

The multiple criminal charges against former President Donald Trump are often described as unprecedented, and so they are. But Trump is not the first president to be named in a criminal indictment. That distinction, such as it is, belongs to Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, still in office in March 1974 when a specially appointed prosecutor named Leon Jaworski indicted Nixon aides and advisers for their roles in the Watergate scandal. They were all the president's men, but Nixon himself was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator." That phrase was back in the news this week when...

John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, said Thursday on “CNN News Central” if former President Donald Trump is not convicted in the January 6 case, then “we don’t have the democracy we believe we have.” Anchor Erin Burnett asked, “John, as you sit here on this day appeared we watch a former president of the United States heading to Washington to be arraigned, charged formally in a federal courthouse for undermining the U.S. Constitution, how do you even put this in context?” Dean said, “It does not fit in the context because it is bigger and more...

After Billy Graham, the famous preacher and presidential confidante, passed away in 2018, Luke Nichter was one of the first researchers to get a glimpse at previously unseen Graham diary entries kept at the evangelical Wheaton College. Nichter’s new book The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968, out today, is the first to be based on Graham’s personal diaries. The entries reveal that incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson worked behind the scenes that year to help get Republican Richard Nixon elected. In a phone conversation on July 17, Nichter explained how the...

A month before he died in April 1994, former President Richard Nixon wrote a letter to then-President Bill Clinton offering what Clinton later called “wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia.” The contents of that letter have now been declassified by the Clinton presidential library and appear prophetic. In the seven-page letter, dated March 21, 1994, and discussed by history professor Luke Nichter in the Wall Street Journal, Nixon gave a blunt assessment of the political situation in Russia, predicting accurately that relations between Moscow and Kyiv would deteriorate and that someone like Putin could come to power. Nixon, 81...

A month before he died in April 1994, former President Richard Nixon wrote a letter to then-President Bill Clinton offering what Clinton later called "wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia." The contents of that letter have now been declassified by the Clinton presidential library and appear prophetic. In the seven-page letter, dated March 21, 1994, and discussed by history professor Luke Nichter in the Wall Street Journal, Nixon gave a blunt assessment of the political situation in Russia, predicting accurately that relations between Moscow and Kyiv would deteriorate and that someone like Putin could come to power. Nixon, 81...

Many find it shocking the Department of Justice (DOJ) could be capable of ginning up false allegations against a former president in a previous election and would again do the same prior to the 2024 election. This shock, however, is a mark of just how drastically conservatives have failed to recognize the long decline of the DOJ and its ultimate transformation into a political subsidiary of a radicalized Democratic Party. Conservatives would do well to observe seminal moments that have led the country’s top law enforcement entity to its present dire state. In that review, all roads ultimately lead back...

“I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I would have done the same thing.” — Richard Nixon. What Nixon said, Donald Trump could easily say about himself. Of course, he will not. Richard Nixon was the last president who faced anything like the legal jeopardy former President Trump is facing — plus a frothing electronic lynch mob. The end game for both Nixon and Trump has some eerie similarities. Detested by the media, the New York-Washington elites and the left, both...

July 4th, America's Independence Day, is also film and television star Eva Gabor's birthday and the date of the first publication of Leaves Of Grass in 1855. That seminal work was a part of the cultural birth of the USA: ""What is known I strip away, I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown. .............. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety." " ....... after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman, This the bath of birth, this the merge of small and...

The convoluted congressional budget process has few fans. But the 1974 legislation that created today’s system did have one virtue: It reined in Richard Nixon’s claims that the president could simply refuse to spend congressionally appropriated money by “impounding” funds whenever he felt like it, as Kevin Kosar explained in Politico: Presidents since the founding had [refused to spend funds], including Lyndon Johnson. It seldom was a big deal, so long as the amounts were small, the rationales for impoundment were sound, and appropriators were consulted. Nixon, however, didn’t keep it small: He impounded tens of billions of dollars, often...

Sources close to former President Trump say he has a plan for keeping Congress from ever again forcing him into “disgraceful” and “ridiculous” spending situations. If he returns to the White House, Trump will seek to resurrect authority that Congress stripped from the presidency almost a half century ago. What President Nixon squandered, his campaign promises, Trump will restore, namely the impoundment power. “A lot of you,” the former president told a New Hampshire crowd Thursday, “don't know what that is.” Indeed, few now remember it. Impoundment, if restored, would allow a president, in theory, to simply refuse to spend...

No admission in former President Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes was "as clearly illegal" as that of Donald Trump in audio first published by CNN where the latter describes having "highly confidential" papers in his possession, a leading historian of the period has said. The audio, in which Trump appeared to admit some of the documents in his possession hadn't been declassified, was published on Monday. In response, a Trump campaign spokesperson said the former president had been "speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously," and hadn't committed any wrongdoing. Earlier this month, Trump was charged with 37 counts related to his...

It's easy to view the 1932 Pulitzer Prize award to N.Y. Times reporter Walter Duranty "for his series of dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan". It seems the Pulitzer Prize Board will never rescind Duranty's award, though he was a willing tool of Stalin, whose government is ranked by the University of Hawaii "Democide" (People Killing) website in the "Deka-Megamurder" category with 61.9 million murders between 1917-1987. (Stalin was only in power between 1924 and 1953.) We have a clear picture of how Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Pres. Richard Nixon, each individually behaved, and...

It regularly happens that I’ll strike on the seed of an idea for a column that attempts to connect the current news cycle with an analogous event from history, only to discover that the anniversary of that past milepost falls on or near my deadline. I always take this as a sign from a beneficent universe that I am on solid journalistic footing. And so it was last week as I was reading the section of the 44-page federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump that dealt with the fateful July 2021 meeting in Bedminster, N.J., between Trump and...

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz warned of the "dangerous" consequences posed by the federal charges launched against former President Donald Trump, arguing the indictment's "weak" appearance does not meet historic precedent. "It has to be at least as strong as the case against Richard Nixon, which we will remember led not to Democrats to demand his resignation, but Republicans, his own colleagues came to him and said, this case is so strong that we can't support you," Dershowitz said Friday on "Mornings with Maria." "I haven't seen any suggestion that Republicans agree with this indictment," the professor continued....

President Joe Biden, when asked how those viewing the indictment of Donald Trump as politically motivated could trust the Department of Justice, insisted he hasn’t swayed their decision-making and that Americans could believe him because he is “honest.” That declaration of honesty came on the same day Biden was embroiled in a multi-million dollar bribery scheme, something the public has heard little about since the conveniently-timed indictment. The former President Trump, Biden’s chief political opponent in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, was charged Thursday following Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into alleged improper handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago...

Donald Trump “understood that he got power when he was elected, but didn’t understand that he had obligations,” presidential historian Timothy Naftali said Friday of Trump’s indictment for mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House. “We live in a Constitutional democracy. Everybody, including the president, is bound by the Constitution and there are limits to their power,” Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon presidential library, told “CNN This Morning.

Bill Clinton was busy filling Cabinet positions and shaping his economic agenda when a memo landed from a team of political advisors. Although Clinton was still more than a month away from becoming president, the topic was his reelection nearly four years off. Marked confidential and spilling over nearly eight pages, the document outlined a strategy considered vital to Clinton’s hopes for a second term: Lock down California and its generous share of electoral votes so his campaign could "concentrate its energy on other, more tightly contested, states.” In 1992, Arkansas’ five-term governor became the first Democratic presidential candidate in...

Among both his friends and his enemies, there is a tendency to think of Donald Trump as sui generis: a political figure, and certainly a president, unlike any other. In some respects, including his incessant mendacity and his tendency to publicly insult everyone who doesn’t bow down to him, he may truly be without equal in U.S. history and more comparable to foreign political strongmen from Juan Perón to Viktor Orban. But at the New York Times, Ross Barkan suggests that as Trump pursues a comeback after his 2020 defeat (which, of course, he will not acknowledge), he may actually...