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Former President George W. Bush on Wednesday paid tribute to former secretary of state and presidential adviser Henry Kissinger, sharing an oil painting of the “dependable” American diplomat. “America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs with the passing of Henry Kissinger,” Bush wrote in a statement. “I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army.” “I am grateful for that service and advice, but I am most grateful for his friendship,” Bush continued. “Laura and I...

Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday night at the age of 100, was the most enduringly influential secretary of state in the history of the United States. He was also the most controversial. But the influence matters far more than the controversy. His critics have wasted no time in ignoring the old injunction that no ill should be spoken of the recently deceased. The scurrilous magazine Rolling Stone led with the repulsive headline 'Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies'. At a time when anti-Semitism has again reared its ugly head in the wake of the...

WASHINGTON (AP) — All these years later, the scene still is almost too bizarre to imagine: a tearful president and his perplexed aide, neither very religious, kneeling in prayer on the floor of a White House bedroom in the waning hours of a shattered presidency. Until the embittered end, Henry Kissinger was one of the trusted few of a distrusting Richard Nixon. That trust, combined with Kissinger’s intellectual heft and deft manipulation of power, made him a pivotal player in a tense period in American history, a giant of U.S. foreign policy and a fixture in international relations for decades...

Henry Kissinger, the toweringly influential former secretary of state who earned a reputation as a sagacious diplomat but drew international condemnation and accusations of war crimes for his key role in widening the American presence in Vietnam and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, died Wednesday. He was 100. Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, reached the pinnacle of the American political establishment and in turn became an unlikely household name. He was secretary of state and national security adviser under two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and advised powerful leaders in both American political parties for decades.

“Sex and the City” actress Cynthia Nixon joined five US politicians this week in a hunger strike to demand President Biden call for a permanent cease-fire over the Gaza Strip. “None of this is normal. None of this is routine and none of this can be allowed to continue,” Nixon, 57, said at a press conference outside the White House on Monday of the estimated 14,300 Palestinians in Gaza who have been killed since Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, according to Time. Nixon — who is reprising her iconic role as Miranda Hobbes on the “Sex and...

A half-century before Donald Trump dismissed the four criminal cases against him as a “witch hunt,” a defensive President Richard M. Nixon famously declared, “I’m not a crook.” Nixon made the comment 50 years ago Friday, on Nov. 17, 1973, at Disney World in Florida as the Watergate scandal was swirling around him. It came a month after the Saturday Night Massacre, when Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Then Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox. Now Nixon was addressing 400 people...

Just in case you were thinking of giving it a try, be warned: Nobody will be able to write a competent history of 20th-century American politics without absorbing the themes and revelations in the new book by Luke Nichter, The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. A history professor at Chapman University and the biographer of Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, Nichter is widely understood and rightly admired as a tireless researcher—though "tireless" doesn’t quite cover it: In his quest to transcribe most of the hopelessly garbled and obscure audio tapes left behind...

Sadly, US Presidential affairs are not an uncommon occurrence (heck, around 14 were more or less caught cheating on their wives). It seems as though if the world is a stage, then the White House and Hollywood are the main locations. While nearly everyone and their mothers know about the parade of alleged affairs John F Kennedy had with A-list actresses, not much is known about the one Richard Nixon may have had with an actress-turned-socialite, Zsa Zsa Gabor. One of Gabor’s longtime friends Wendy Leigh, who co-wrote her her memoir One Lifetime Is Not Enough, previously told DailyMail back...

When Richard Nixon entered the White House in January 1969, he inherited a war in Southeast Asia, multiple foreign crises, and domestic political turmoil in the form of race riots and antiwar protests. China was in the midst of the brutal and disastrous Cultural Revolution. Soviet Russia had recently invaded and crushed a rebellion in Czechoslovakia. China and Russia were supplying our enemies in Indochina. In the Middle East, another war was brewing that would breakout in Nixon’s second term. Nixon dealt with these matters but never took his eye off the geopolitical prize — the political pluralism of the...

This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a heroic but doomed attempt by President Richard M. Nixon to halt the runaway tyranny of the deep state, the judiciary, and the corporate media before it could usurp fully the government of the people of the United States of America. The episode, like the Watergate scandal as a whole, has been entirely distorted in American memory, with Nixon miscast in the very role of his opponents: a man gone mad with power, an aspiring despot with no regard for the Constitution. It was, in most tellings, the moment...

On Oct. 17, 1974, forty-nine years ago today, President Gerald Ford made an historic appearance before Congress to testify about his pardon of former President Richard Nixon, which he had issued on Sept. 8. Nixon had resigned on Aug. 9 to avoid certain impeachment and removal from office for his cover-up of the Watergate break-in and other misdeeds. As a member of the subcommittee hearing Ford’s testimony, I challenged the president about the pardon, the only one to do so, asking him about a “deal” and the suspicious way the pardon was issued. Now, nearly a half century later, I...

Most of former President Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have given full-throated support for him in his current criminal travails, even saying they would pardon him if he is convicted of any – or all – of the 90-something charges. The notion that a president could be pardoned for criminal offenses would have been unthinkable at one time. But the precedent for doing so — which helps fuel the blessing given to a Trump pardon by his GOP opponents — occurred about a half century ago. On a September Sunday in 1974, President Gerald R. Ford issued a...

On Feb. 6, 1974, the House of Representatives considered a historic question: Should it authorize an investigation that might lead to the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon? House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) argued for the initiation of a probe under his committee’s purview. “We are going to work expeditiously and fairly,” he told his colleagues. “When we have completed our inquiry, whatever the result, we will make our recommendations to the House. We will do so as soon as we can, consistent with principles of fairness and completeness.” When the resolution to launch the inquiry came to...

Fox News host Tucker Carlson talks about the Kennedy assassination and the resignation of Richard Nixon:TUCKER CARLSON: Joe Biden alone is responsible for this crime. He alone took home classified documents. He didn't have help in doing that, but allowing the country to be invaded, that's not something you can do by yourself. So, if Biden were to be taken down for opening the southern border, a lot of other people would go with them. He had a lot of accomplices. Permanent Washington doesn't want that and ultimately and here's the point: Permanent Washington is in charge. It's not the...

With former President Donald Trump now facing four indictments, one recalls Lloyd Bentsen’s famous remark that Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy. The appropriate parallel today is to say that Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon. The Trump-Nixon comparisons are facile but superficial and in crucial respects wrong. They ignore fundamental differences between a serious and accomplished public servant whose overwrought ambition led him astray, and a self-centered dilettante whose main interest in government service is to feed his boundless ego. The contrasts between the two men are far more significant than the similarities. Confronted with clear indications that his...

I remember when Richard Nixon resigned. Even though I was only 12 at the time, I had a general understanding that our country’s president had done something wrong, got caught, and needed to step aside. “By taking this action,” Nixon said in his national address on August 8, 1974, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.” Fast forward to 2023: A former president faces 91 felony charges for crimes ranging from falsifying business records to the “willful retention of national defense information,” from violating the Georgia...

In the first Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley got in a pretty effective jab at Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech tyro who was informing the American people of his strange views on world affairs: “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Never mind that Haley’s foreign-policy experience as Donald Trump’s mouthpiece at the United Nations hardly makes her Henry Kissinger. She’s right about Ramaswamy. His erratic suggestions for selling out Ukraine and Taiwan as part of some Risk-style geopolitical maneuver have now been revealed as reflecting a factually undernourished version of U.S. foreign policy that the candidate explained in a...

The U.S. State Department released portions of two formerly classified Nixon-era intelligence reports that offer insight into the information former President Nixon received amid Chile’s 1973 coup. The two documents from September of 1973 include portions of the Central Intelligence Agency’s daily briefs with Nixon on the events occurring in Chile. The documents suggest Nixon may have had intel on the extent of a possible coup. The documents come shortly ahead of the 50th anniversary of the coup against President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. The document from Sept. 8, 1973 indicates Nixon was informed on a number of...

Florida State Representative Rep. Angie Nixon (D) said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Yasmin Vossoughian Reports” that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has “blood on his hands” after a shooting in a Jacksonville Dollar General store on Saturday left three people dead. DeSantis said, “Florida, the state, and its people condemned the horrific racially-motivated murders, perpetrated by a deranged scumbag in Jacksonville at the Dollar General Store. Perpetrating violence of this kind is unacceptable. And targeting people due to their race has no place in the state of Florida.” Nixon said, “This is a governor who has done nothing but fan these types...

n the final morning of his presidency, America’s 37th president spoke to a gathering of young White House staffers. It was the lowest point in his career—and arguably, his life—yet still Richard Nixon sought to impart one final piece of wisdom to those assembled: It is only a beginning, always. The young must know it; the old must know it. It must always sustain us, because the greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes and you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes, because only if you...