Free Republic

Richard Nixon's imposition of wage and price controls in 1971 were among the biggest regrets of his presidency—and he had plenty to regret. Now, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris has announced similar economic plans, signaling that the "passage of time" that has "been unburdened by what has been" will make her impervious to the doom loop promised to those who do not learn history. That is, if she remembers we've seen this dog-and-pony show. Her plan calls for more money giveaways, vows to regulate business even more, usher in national rent control, make housing more expensive by putting the government...

Fifty years after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon is back. At least, some people on the right would like us to believe that he is and that it’s time for conservatives to embrace his legacy wholeheartedly and to reject the stale leftist narratives about Watergate (among other things) that have sullied his reputation. It is necessary to reject the standard left-wing gloss on Nixon. But doing so hardly absolves Nixon of his sins. From a conservative perspective, there was good to the man and his presidency, but also bad — and ugly. Conservatives will only learn the right lessons...

Richard Nixon, America’s 37th President, resigned his office on August 9, 1974, in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Considering the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 2024, Geoff Shepard, a Nixon White House official and the youngest lawyer to serve on Nixon’s Watergate defense team, reflected on the rise and fall of the president in an intimate exclusive interview with Andrew Muller for The New American magazine.Shepard, who also personally transcribed the Nixon tapes and ran the White House document room, said the legal attacks against Nixon and his people “ended up a coup.”“I didn’t have a...

From 1974, excerpts from 60 Minutes' hour-long retrospective of former President Richard Nixon's political career. Mike Wallace and Morley Safer reported on Nixon's campaign, presidency, and the Watergate scandal that led to his historic resignation.

Five decades have now passed since Richard Nixon tendered his resignation as president on the morning of August 9, 1974, in the climax to the Watergate scandal. In announcing his resignation in an Oval Office speech the previous evening, Nixon said little about the scandal itself, instead highlighting his own achievements in bringing peace to the Middle East and reopening relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. He attributed his resignation to the loss of his political base in Congress. That was true: a few days earlier, a delegation of Republican senators had visited the White...

When Richard Nixon resigned and left the White House in August 1974, it wasn’t the only unprecedented action that shook the country. For the only time in U.S. history, both an unelected president and an unelected vice president served in the nation’s highest offices. A chain of events led to President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in the White House. Less than a year earlier, in October 1973, with Nixon already reeling from the Watergate scandal, his vice president, Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to income tax evasion. For most of American history, the position would...

William Calley, the army officer who was the only person to be convicted in relation to the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, including children, in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, has died at the age of 80. The Washington Post on Monday first reported Calley's death, which happened in April, according to a death certificate the newspaper cited. The New York Times, citing Social Security Administration death records, also reported Calley's death. Neither paper reported a cause of death. Calls to numbers listed for Calley's son, William L. Calley III, were not returned. William Calley,...

President Richard Nixon had threatened the head of the CIA, saying: “I know who killed JFK.” When he was driven out of office, Nixon refused the protection of the Secret Service. This recent attempted assassination was according to their proven playbook. Use a claimed lone shoot, kill him to make sure there is never a trial, and the problem is eliminated. I have often said that history is merely a map to the future, for human nature never changes. ... There were assassinations and attempted assassinations of Roman emperors by rivals and sometimes bureaucrats who were trying to weasel in...

An unpopular president finds his path to reelection untenable. Forced out, he hands the reins over to a vice president whose previous try at the party nomination ended in defeat. His polarizing opponent looks to ride a wave of national discontent and end a brutal war, but won’t tell anyone what that plan is. This scenario describes both the elections in 1968 and 2024. Add to it the presence of a Robert Kennedy and significant third-party support and the similarities are downright eerie. More than that, however, 1968 provides both hope and warnings to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Just...

76% of all personal income tax last month went to servicing the $34 trillion national debt. How did we get here? Two men: FDR and Richard Nixon. Together, they broke the dollar. And put the American people into debt slavery. (3 minute and 46 seconds video in the link below) https://x.com/profstonge/status/1816813562771255713

Rehoboth Beach, Delaware CNN — In the end, President Joe Biden exited the political stage in isolation. After weeks of fighting for his political life – insisting he wasn’t going anywhere following a disastrous debate performance – the president’s about-face did not come in an Oval Office address or a speech on the campaign trail. Instead, it came in letter posted to social media as he recovered from Covid-19 at his beach house in Delaware. It was a low-key way to reveal one of the most historic decisions in modern American politics, but time was not on Biden’s side to...

June 30 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's train-wreck debate with Republican opponent Donald Trump followed a series of decisions by his most senior advisers that critics now point to as wrong-headed, interviews with Democratic allies, donors and former and current aides show. Trump, 78, repeated a series of well-worn, glaring falsehoods during the 90-minute debate on Thursday, including claims that he actually won the 2020 election.

Amid calls for President Joe Biden to withdraw as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, many people are drawing comparisons to 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to run for reelection, citing conflicts caused by the Vietnam war, violent inner-city protests, and widespread poverty. Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, earned the nomination and ended up losing to Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee. On July 18, the X account for MSNBC’s Morning Joe posted a clip of hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski discussing the 1968 election. Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter for the New York Times Magazine and...

In 1974, the Supreme Court seemingly approved a special prosecutor’s authority in then-President Richard Nixon’s case over the Watergate tapes subpoena. But in dismissing the classified documents case against Donald Trump on Monday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected language from that Supreme Court ruling to find that Jack Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel against the former president. How could she have done so? Putting aside for a moment that she may be reversed on appeal, the answer lies in something called dicta, meaning language in an opinion that isn’t necessary to the ruling. Cannon deemed the language...

As the nation’s capital broiled in the summer heat, the president found himself increasingly isolated in the Oval Office. During his decades in politics, he had charted a career from the Senate to the vice presidency, though after two terms in the nation’s second-highest office, most believed his political career to be over. Even so, he shocked the political establishment by winning the presidency, largely by promising to return a sense of calm following a time of crisis and public protest. Suddenly, however, the president found himself fending off calls from members of his own party to step aside, as...

Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend, including 18 fatally. Mayor Brandon Johnson blamed it on Richard Nixon in his press conference today. No, that is not a joke.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Donald Trump v. United States — in which a majority of the justices found that presidents are immune from prosecution for many actions taken during their presidency — is a legal earthquake. One way to see what a huge difference this new ruling will have is to look back at Watergate to see what behavior the Supreme Court excused for all presidents. I wrote about ex-President Trump’s ongoing criminal exposure in my new book “Corporatocracy.” I worried in that book that Trump would not be held accountable by the courts. As it turns out,...

With Reagan in home rehab after the assassination attempt, the White House planning began for a dramatic return and major address to a joint session of Congress. It was no secret; we were going to exploit all his heroic national goodwill to sell this economic plan. *** I returned a call from Nixon, and he offered wide-ranging advice. “Ken, on the economy, don’t go to the well too often, and don’t worry about minor GOP defections,” he advised. As for Reagan’s health, “I’ll be quite direct. It’s hard to come back from an operation. Don’t waste the asset [public sympathy]....

John Dean, former White House counsel for the Nixon administration, said he believes former President Nixon “would have survived” the Watergate scandal if the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling issued Monday, which largely shields former presidents from criminal prosecution for actions in office, existed at the time. Asked what would’ve happened with Nixon if the immunity ruling was in place during the fallout from Watergate, Dean pointed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who split from the other conservative justices on a portion of the majority opinion regarding the use of president’s official acts as evidence in criminal prosecution against a former...

In a July 2014 panel hosted by the Post, Woodward called the pardon “an act of courage.” He had talked with Ford decades after the pardon and said the former President made a “very compelling argument” for his actions based on national security and economic needs. The late Senator Ted Kennedy said in 2001 that while he initially opposed the pardon, he had come to accept it as the best move for the country. And Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and a Democrat, wrote about the pardon shortly after Ford’s passing in 2006. “Did Ford make the right decision...