Free Republic

The second terms of the latest three presidents have not been successful. Bill Clinton was impeached after his infamous lie to Americans, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." George W. Bush was blamed for the postwar violence in Iraq. Barack Obama's scandals -- with his accompanying "limited hangout" denials -- are ruining his second term: the growing IRS messes, the Associated Press monitoring, the NSA embarrassments, the Benghazi killings, the Syria bluster and backdown, and, of course, the Obamacare fiasco and the misleading statements about it. What are other common denominators of this collective tenure of our...

It’s been a disastrous couple of weeks for President Barack Obama. His signature legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is a slow-motion train wreck. His poll numbers have tanked. Now, things have gotten so bad for Obama that former president Jimmy Carter has called President Obama incompetent in the family-friendly pages of Parade magazine. “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances,” Carter said of Obama in an interviewed published on Thursday. “His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.” Carter presided over what was, until the current recession, the...

John F. Kennedy is lionized by liberals. He inspired LBJ to push for landmark civil rights laws. His “New Frontier” promised new spending on education and medical care for the elderly. His champions insist he would have done great liberal things had he not been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. But what if we judge him by the lengthy record of his actual political career, in historical perspective? What if this hero of liberals was, in fact, the opposite of a liberal? As Ira Stoll convincingly argues, by the standards of both his time and our own, John F. Kennedy...

Full title: The great woman behind the Kennedy men: Rare and never before seen pictures shed light on Rose Kennedy as the matriarch of America's celebrated dynasty A month before the nation marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, a new photo book put together by Caroline Kennedy tells the story of her remarkable family through the eyes of her indomitable grandmother. Rose Kennedy's Family Album, which went on sale Tuesday, features a trove of 300 images - many of them never made public before - taken between 1878 and 1946, when John F. Kennedy won the...

WASHINGTON — Shortly before the federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, a small group of top White House officials huddled in the West Wing for what turned out to be a discussion of critical importance: how to run the place. They listened as soon-to-be-furloughed junior staff members showed them how to send a news release, issue a proclamation and distribute daily reports of President Obama’s activities. One crucial piece of information was how to clear someone through the security gates for Oval Office appointments. “I didn’t know how to do that before Monday night,” said Josh Earnest, the...

Vandals torched a bronze, life-size statue of Ronald Reagan in an apparent arson fire in a Southern California sports park named after the 40th president, The Press-Enterprise reported.

NEW YORK – Was the JFK assassination a revenge killing masterminded by CIA Director Allen Dulles? The provocative question is raised by WND’s Jerome Corsi in his new book “Who Really Killed Kennedy,” published by WND Books. Corsi’s extensive research shows JFK may have signed his death warrant the day he fired Dulles, accusing his spy chief of lying and manipulating him in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “Who Really Killed Kennedy,” released this week as the 50th anniversary of the assassination approaches, is bolstered by recently declassified documents. Corsi sorted through the mountain of evidence, including tens of thousands...

The actor will both act in and produce a new film about the President. The movie is based on a biography of Wilson by A. Scott Berg, centering on Wilson's two terms in office from 1913 to 1921.

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there never were commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year's Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba. … In 1972, the Bay of Pigs made a cameo appearance in the Watergate shambles, which involved some Cubans and Americans active in the invasion. On the June 23...

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...