Free Republic

Steven F. Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley and Kiron K. Skinner are Ronald Reagan historians. One cold evening in Dixon, Ill., in the early 1930s, a young man known as Dutch Reagan brought home two African American teammates from his Eureka College football team. The team was on the road, and the local hotels had refused the two black players. So Reagan invited them to spend the night and have breakfast with his family. In November 1952, in one of his final meetings as president of Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan called upon the entertainment industry to provide greater...

When we first started getting messages at the Facebook page of “Reagan: The Movie,” objecting to our (allegedly) having chosen Jane Fonda to play the role of Nancy Reagan, we were mildly nonplussed. There were angry calls for boycotts, heartfelt pleas that we change our minds, and the occasional expletive from furious Vietnam veterans. At first we attempted to set the record straight. “Wrong movie,” our Facebook team would write back. “You’re thinking of a movie called ‘The Butler.’” But in time, the trickle turned into a flood and it seemed that no amount of corrections could stop the misunderstanding....

George Washington retired as a lieutenant general and so was technically outranked by the four- and five-star generals of later wars. Thinking this unseemly, Congress passed a resolution in 1976 arranging that Washington be promoted posthumously to “General of the Armies of the United States” and that no officer in the U.S. Army ever be considered to outrank him: Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington of Virginia commanded our armies throughout and to the successful termination of our Revolutionary War; Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington presided over the convention that formulated our Constitution; Whereas Lieutenant General George Washington twice served as...

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan. This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet. ... “A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is...

Marilyn Monroe called Jackie Kennedy at the White House and confessed she was having an affair with her husband, to which the First Lady responded 'that's great... I'll move out and you'll have all the problems,' according to an explosive new book. In 'These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie,' author Christopher Andersen claims Jackie 'knew everything' about Jack's cheating and turned a blind eye, but his relationship with Marilyn 'seemed to bother her the most.' And she was right to fear the bombshell actress, because Marilyn's sights were firmly set on becoming the President's second...

REAGAN takes viewers on a journey through the life of one of the most consequential men in American history, Ronald Wilson Reagan. From his hometown of Dixon, Illinois, to Hollywood where he became an actor and President of the Screen Actors Guild, to Sacramento and on to Washington DC where he led a revolution for the things he believed in, REAGAN follows the life of an ordinary man with extraordinary vision who accomplished extraordinary things. When asked in a recent poll to rate American Presidents, 18% of Americans chose Ronald Wilson Reagan as the best President the nation has ever...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29th President of the United States. It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister. Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the...

"I think every president in the intense media environment we have now, certainly every two-term president, gets to a point where the American people stop listening, stop leaning forward hungrily for information. I think this president got there earlier than most presidents. And I think he's in that time now." So said the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan on ABC's This Week Sunday. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, HOST: You are seeing (ph) more populist Democrats, I agree with that, but Peggy Noonan, you know, the president going back to the country one more time, it's unclear that these speeches are doing much...

Americans voted twice for a big-government President, and now we’re beginning to experience the impact of big government. Are you shocked? It’s been nearly five years of the President and Congress spending future generations into the oblivion of debt, the Executive Branch securing control over huge chunks of the private economy (two car companies, multiple banks and the health care industry are only part of it), and a dramatic expansion of both the defined role, and the powers of the IRS. At this point in the Obama presidency, we the people should not be surprised by a government that has...

We have listened to President Obama's comments about the verdict in the Zimmerman Case. People are focusing on this quote: "Trayvon Martin could've been me 35 years ago." To focus on this one line misses the nuances of the President's message, which includes comments about how African Americans view the Zimmerman Case in the context of the history of racial disparity in America. For more than a year, we have been listening to the conversation about this case – from voices on every side – and we have become very sensitive to the racial context that surrounds this case. We...

In an Interview today with an Atlanta news anchor, former president, Jimmy Carter, said the Jury in the case against George Zimmerman made the right decision in finding him not guilty.

Little known is it that FDR is not the first president to have relocation camps, and Japanese Americans were not the original target. Nearly 30 years prior to World War two, German Americans were the targets and the most interesting thing is that very little is written about this. History has been virtually expunged of this topic. Historians do not write about it, so history books don't contain it, and even from various news journals at the time it was largely unreported. When it was reported, some of the blurbs on it were small and not noteworthy. The first American...

INDIANAPOLIS — A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death. Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while conducting unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library couldn’t say for certain if other such footage exists but both said it is at least rare.

Bad enough that James Earl Carter, Jr. is the worst president this country has had not named James Buchanan or Barack Obama, but he is also an anti-Catholic bigot as his latest mind droppings amply demonstrate: Former US President Jimmy Carter has disclosed that he had angry exchanges with Pope John Paul II about liberation theology and about the ordination of women. The former president said that he complained to the Pontiff about the Church’s “perpetuation of the subservience of women” while Blessed John Paul II was visiting the US in 1978, and “there was more harshness when we turned...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,121883,00.html

Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse people feel to appropriate Lincoln for their own political agendas. Anyone who has watched Barack Obama, who as a senator wrote an essay for Time magazine entitled “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes” and swore the oath of office as president on Lincoln’s Bible, will be familiar with the phenomenon. Democrats like to claim Lincoln as, in effect, the first Big Government liberal, while Republicans tout him as the founder of their party. But the reflex identified by Donald isn’t...

Who is the real Barack Obama? Had the media done its job in 2008 we’d have a sense of the man. But it didn’t, so, even after five years in office, he remains an enigma. We’ve been told he’s one of the smartest men to ever occupy 1600 Pennsylvania, but we only have the word of fawning sycophants to back that up. He’s been called a brilliant, hands-on manager and a policy wonk, but the extent of his brilliance reaches only to the teleprompter screen. Off script, like nearly every Hollywood actor, he comes across quite dim. Barack Obama loves...

As Biden speaks at event named for Old Hickory tonight, more appalling stories show party should dump him as icon Spring means that appeals for money are bursting forth from both major political parties. It also means Democratic officials in states and counties around the country are busy getting people out to their major fundraiser, the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. And theyÂ’re bringing in the big guns: Vice President Joe Biden will keynote the South Carolina DemocratsÂ’ dinner tonight.But after an election in which Democrats rode a wave of minority support to keep the White House and Senate, party activists should...

U.S. President Barack Obama embraces former president George W. Bush following remarks at the dedication ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, April 25, 2013. Obama is in Texas to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush in what could serve as a powerful reminder of the ongoing struggle against terrorism, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Boston Marathon bombings.