Richard Nixon watches [transcript] 'All in the Family.'
posted by geos on Mar 3, 2009 - 50 comments

The man who provided Bob Woodward with the critical leads on the story that eventually saw the resignation of Tricky Dick Nixon has died: W. Mark Felt, aka. Deep Throat, was 95.The NYT has a little feature on why he was such a big deal. Only in 2005 did Felt finally admit to being Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair article. [more inside]
posted by krautland on Dec 19, 2008 - 31 comments

Snippets of a taped conversation between Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Richard Nixon.
posted by gman on Dec 8, 2008 - 23 comments

It's been a busy week for presidential libraries. The Nixon Library released 200 hours of tape (excerpts) and 90,000 pages of documents (excerpts) that detail his obsessive attempts to destroy his political enemies. The LBJ library released MP3s of dozens of phone calls, including one where he accuses Nixon of treason for stalling Vietnamese peace talks in advance of the 1968 election. Finally, the Reagan Library released 750,000 pages of documents (NYT, reg. req.) to researchers. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Dec 7, 2008 - 20 comments

America has come a long way. There is the official version of history or the peoples' version. There are artifacts and rankings. They had some quirks and were occasionally men of their time. If you prefer audio or visual references those are available as well. Common knowledge has it that one GW was our first President but the title of first is under dispute. 230 years later another GW is making a run for worst. That is also under dispute by the nations best brains. For better and worse, the story of the Presidency is the story of America.
posted by Glibpaxman on Dec 4, 2008 - 24 comments

According to political scientist Wayne Parent, “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.” Are we finally seeing the end of Nixon's infamous Southern Strategy? For years Republicans have depended on the region to win elections. Some now argue that the G.O.P. has "transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln into the Party of the Old Confederacy." In any case, playing to racism and resentment [PDF] isn't as effective as it used to be. Furthermore, many Republicans have publicly disowned such tactics.
posted by 912 Greens on Nov 11, 2008 - 75 comments

Soon to be a Ron Howard movie (trailer here), portions of the Frost/Nixon interviews can be found online. More Nixon interviews can be found here. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on Nov 2, 2008 - 14 comments

Richard Nixon had his nemisis and his name was Dick Tuck . Is Inventive, high quality campaign pranking a thing of the past? [more inside]
posted by salishsea on Aug 8, 2008 - 26 comments

Bush had Karl Rove. But the original wiretapping President needed brains too. Introducing Kevin Phillips. He predicted the prolonged Republican dominance of Washington 1970-present and advised the Ford and Reagan presidencies. He predicted a more liberal 1990s and when the Bushies killed his party he became uttery disgusted. Recently he spoke about the influence of the christian right, our addiction to oil, and America's debt (public and private) at the University of California Santa Barbara. [more inside]
posted by Parallax.Error on Jun 28, 2008 - 57 comments

Gravelter Skelter [video, WTF content].
posted by digaman on Apr 1, 2008 - 20 comments

John Adams. NIXON IN CHINA. Excerpts: News has a kind of mystery. Act 1 Scene 3. Act 2 Scene 2a. I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung. Chairman Dances.
posted by wittgenstein on Jan 4, 2008 - 16 comments

Arthur Bremer was released from prison today, after serving a 35 years of a 53-year sentence for the attempted assassination of George Wallace. After Harper's Magazine published Arthur Bremer's diary in 1973, the manuscript inspired both the character of Travis Bickle in the film Taxi Driver and the Peter Gabriel song "Family Snapshot". After Bremer shot Wallace, Nixon obsessed about the shooting on his audio tapes and pestered FBI agent Mark Felt for information, which Felt a.k.a. "Deep Throat" leaked to cub reporter, Bob Woodward. Woodward's relationship with Felt would later crack the Watergate scandal wide open, but Nixon's plan to portray Bremer as a George McGovern supporter remains less well-known.
posted by jonp72 on Nov 9, 2007 - 18 comments

Weird political junk on eBay. Traffic lights from Dealey Plaza, President Garfield's funeral shroud, Yitzhak Rabin's Scandalous Greek Vase. And here is the boat which Brezhnev gave Nixon (after Nixon gave him a Cadillac). No bids yet at $1m.
posted by tombola on Dec 20, 2006 - 8 comments

Some old news regarding Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Further proof that tigers don't change their stripes. Tiger Force in operated in Vietnam, led by the recently-deceased Colonel David Hackworth), with the task of out-guerilla-ing the guerillas. Their attrocities were covered up by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and James Schlesinger, who most recently headed an independent panel probing Abu Gharib. Others incidents inside...
posted by rzklkng on Jul 10, 2006 - 63 comments

Former GOP senior strategist Kevin Phillips wrote the political Bible of the New Right, The Emerging Republican Majority. He coined the term "Sun Belt." He voted for Reagan twice and still considers himself a staunch Republican. But now Phillips, the author of a new book called American Theocracy, is warning that the party of George Bush and Karl Rove ("W brand Republicans," in the phrase of GOP pollster Jan van Lohuizen) has become "God's own party" -- the champion of a convergence of "petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex." Phillips also cautions that the W-brand party's "sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution." [Phillips was also discussed here.]
posted by digaman on Apr 2, 2006 - 27 comments

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald says emails relevant to the Valerie Plame leak investigation have gone missing from the White House. "In an adundance of caution," Fitzgerald wrote [PDF] to "Scooter" Libby's lawyers on January 23, "we advise you that we have learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." Might this help explain why Alberto Gonzales -- now the Attorney General, and lately so busy mustering arguments to assert that Bush's NSA domestic-spying program is "legal" -- waited 12 hours before instructing White House staff to preserve documents relevant to the leak investigation after telling Andrew Card about it? Shades of the late, great yoga instructor, Rose Mary Woods. [More on Plame here.]
posted by digaman on Feb 1, 2006 - 54 comments

Come Home, America: Pat Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative, prints a passionate defense of George McGovern. (via)
posted by pandaharma on Jan 27, 2006 - 8 comments

Now that Discovery is home safe and well, let's take a moment to remember some anxious moments 36 years ago, when President Nixon had a contingency memo prepared to read in case that Neil Armstrong et al. were somehow unable to return to Earth. The forgotten memo, written by William Saffire, is from the National Archives.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Aug 9, 2005 - 18 comments

Former Nixon speechwriter (and Ferris Bueller's economics teacher) Ben Stein loses his mind over Mark Felt: "There is a lot of debate about whether or not Mark Felt was a hero. Obviously, I don't think so. I think the hero was Richard Nixon, fighting for peace even as he was being horribly mistreated and crucified just for his fight for peace." And that's not nearly the worst of it.
posted by Ty Webb on Jun 4, 2005 - 107 comments

Mark Felt is Deep Throat. W. Mark Felt, former assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has agreed to come public in an upcoming article in Vanity Fair.
posted by XQUZYPHYR on May 31, 2005 - 158 comments

George Washington University's National Security Archive carries a collection of declassified US documents and articles on Saddam Hussein; Mexico, Cuba and other Latin American countries; Nixon's meeting with Elvis; the CIA and Nazi war criminals; etc.
posted by plep on Feb 10, 2005 - 8 comments

"Rose . . . is as close to us as family". Rose Mary Woods, who died Saturday at 87, was Richard Nixon's private secretary. In 1973 Woods was transcribing secretly recorded audiotapes of Oval Office conversations , working on a June 20, 1972, tape of a conversation between President Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, that might have shed light on whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in three days earlier. While she was performing her duties (.rtf file), she said, the phone rang. As she reached for it, she said she inadvertently struck the erase key on the tape recorder and kept her foot on the machine's pedal, forwarding the tape. More inside.
posted by matteo on Jan 24, 2005 - 16 comments

War on Drugs - Do you remember it? A call for support of this amorphous war has been trumpeted by every American President from Nixon through Clinton. The current guy, has associated himself (at least a little bit) with the Drug War in the previous campaign but current policy, not so much. What I’m curious about is the actual phrase, the concept of War on Drugs. It looks like we still dedicate large sums of money to the effort. It seems to me that we just don’t use the phrase much anymore. Did we win? Did we lose? Do we just want to forget about it? Or, did we repackage the endeavor under a new name? I tend to think we are not capable of waging more than one war against the nameless other at a given time. It would just be too scary. So, I think maybe we're bundling the War on Terror and the War on Drugs under a new brand name.
posted by Crackerbelly on Dec 8, 2004 - 31 comments

Campaign Contributions and U.S. Ambassadors
In 1972 President Nixon appointed thirteen noncareer ambassadors to Western European countries; eight of them had contributed at least $50,000 to his reelection campaign...(-Source, scroll to item 2.)
In 1980 a federal law was created to combat this, stating that ambassadors must "possess clearly demonstrated competence, including, to the maximum extent practicable, a useful knowledge of the principal language or dialect of the country in which the individual is to serve, and knowledge and understanding of the history, the culture, the economic and political institutions and the interest of that country and its people. … Contributions to political campaigns should not be a factor in the appointment."
Currently 1/4 to 1/3 of U.S. Ambassadors are noncareer appointees, not experienced diplomats, causing criticism since the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Critics point out that neither the Pentagon, the CIA nor any other U.S. government agency must shoulder the burden of a significant cadre of "nonprofessionals" encumbering senior field positions. (-Source.)

HERE is the current tally of Embassy Row and their campaign contributions, including Clark Randt, Jr, former Geo W Yale fraternity brother who defended Bush against drug allegations during Bush's last campaign. "Rangers" and "Pioneers" abound. Mauritius is sunny, tropical, and expensive. (Inspired by this AskMe question.)
posted by Shane on Oct 14, 2004 - 14 comments

"The President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment." - James D. St. Clair, arguing before the Supreme Court in 1974.

The court didn't agree, returning an 8-0 decision and as a result, thirty years ago today Richard Nixon announced his resignation. The next day at 11:35AM it became official and Gerald Ford, the first unelected Vice-President in history was sworn in under the provisions of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution as the 38th President of the United States.

But what if Nixon had chosen to respond differently? What if he had vowed not to resign? Article II of the Constitution makes the President the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. Could the Supreme Court really have forced Nixon to comply with their order? What if the President had viewed the Court's order as an attempted coup d'etat?
posted by snarfodox on Aug 8, 2004 - 17 comments

Watergate: The Scandal That Brought Down Richard Nixon , at watergate.info. Extensive.
posted by plep on Jan 7, 2004 - 10 comments

What if Bush is a Nixonian liberal?
posted by monju_bosatsu on Dec 29, 2003 - 47 comments

The President Calling: American Radioworks (MPR) explores the secret phone tapes of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. AFAIK, the content is all previously available, but online, they've packaged and annotated it for ease of use. It's not exhaustive, but the moments picked out are often illuminating, showing "how each man used one-on-one politics to shape history." You might want to start here.
posted by soyjoy on Nov 20, 2003 - 5 comments

Nixon Ordered the Watergate Break-in. Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of Nixon's 1972 campaign, revealed in a PBS documentary to air on Wednesday that Nixon personally ordered the bungled break-in at the luxury Watergate Hotel complex. It took 30 years, but the truth finally comes out.
posted by zaelic on Jul 27, 2003 - 18 comments

Don Swaim has posted numerous unedited interviews recorded in the 1980's with famous authors, including Anthony Burgess (who has some troubles recalling "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), Douglas Adams, William S. Burroughs, and many more... even Richard Nixon. (RealAudio)
posted by starkeffect on Jun 27, 2003 - 6 comments

Since it's Elvis Presley's 68th birthday today and Richard Nixon's 90th birthday tomorrow, it's only natural to herald the December 21, 1970 meeting that has inspired a novel, a Showtime made-for-cable movie, musical novelties, and a mini-memoir from a Nixon staffer. The National Archives has received so many requests for photos of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon that they posted this online exhibit.
posted by jonp72 on Jan 8, 2003 - 8 comments

Is Gore the New Nixon? The disembodied heads of Al Gore and Tricky Dick shared the screen in Futurama's season premiere. But the kinship between the two men goes deeper. Nixon won the White House twice, in spite of his critics and his own lack of charisma. Gore's done it once -- why not a second time? The Situation Room's analysis (which was inspired by Frank Rich's piece on Gore in Saturday's NY Times) offers food for thought, as the first outlines of the 2004 campaigns begin to take shape.
posted by Artifice_Eternity on Nov 25, 2002 - 44 comments

Nixon's Last Secret The race is on to try to recover the missing 18 1/2 minutes of the infamous Tape 342. While it will be interesting to see what's on the tape (if it can be recovered) the big question is this: Why erase part of one tape and leave all the others intact?
posted by Irontom on Jun 19, 2002 - 14 comments

"I'd rather use the nuclear bomb," Nixon responded. "That, I think, would just be too much," Kissinger replied. "The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?" Nixon asked. "I just want you to think big."
posted by aaronshaf on Feb 28, 2002 - 13 comments

So Nixon supposedly took drugs and beat his wife? If that's true, he was really going for the trifecta with the whole Watergate thing.
posted by muffin on Aug 27, 2000 - 1 comment

Enough of these pansy-assed candidates. Gore? Bush? Nader? Feh on them all, clueless newbies, no real experience. It's time for a candidate who's been there. A candidate who's a true stateman. A candidate who is tan, rested and ready! It's time for us to rise up and say Nixon 2000!
posted by aaron on Aug 14, 2000 - 9 comments

Nixon caught with his pants down Selected Watergate tapes & other audio items of historical interest, including the smoking gun.
posted by lbergstr on Feb 10, 2000 - 1 comment