Part of The Richard Nixon Foundation
At The Dallas Morning News, Jim Mitchell writes: In 1968, Richard Nixon swept into office with something called “the southern strategy,” which many Republican candidates have used as a wedge issue to attract white southern voters. It is a main reason GOP candidates have made little progress with African-American voters despite some natural affinity on [...]
Years after losing to RN in the 1972 presidential election, George McGovern started a small business. In part because of taxes and government regulations, it went bust. At the Houston Chronicle, Chris Ladd writes: McGovern described the lessons he learned from his business venture in a 1993 article titled, “What I Know Now: Nibbled to [...]
Although saying that “All in the Family” was a fun show, an article in the International Business Times notes its shortcomings as sociology: Archie Bunker claimed he was Republican, as reflected by his admiration of President Richard Nixon; and later President Ronald Reagan. While it is true that many white working-class men in the Northeast [...]
Forty years ago today, RN spoke to Midwestern news executives. In The New York Times, Tom Switzer quotes that speech to suggest that RN embraced American decline: Not only had the Soviets matched U.S. military might, the old cold warrior conceded, but Japan and Western Europe were competing vigorously with U.S. companies for markets. The [...]
At the Christian Science Monitor, Ruth Walker explains how RN helped popularize the term “news conference” as an alternative to “press conference.” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke held the Fed‘s first-ever official press conference April 27. It struck me most, aside from the fact that it took place at all, by the way it was so uniformly [...]
At The New York Times “Caucus” blog, Matt Bai compares Newt Gingrich to RN: [I]f Mr. Gingrich is looking for hopeful historical comparisons, the more apt one might be Richard Nixon. Unlike Mr. Reagan, who even in his lower moments retained a certain celebrity appeal, Mr. Nixon was humiliated and all but exiled after publicly [...]
Representative Darrell Issa, chair of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, has suggested that the Obama adminstration is too “Nixonian” in its approach to government transparency. But when it comes to foreign policy, says Mr. Issa, it is not Nixonian enough. More here.
Brian L. Frye and Penny Lane are making a documentary about RN, using a previously-untapped source: EVERYBODY KNOWS that during the Watergate investigation, the FBI confiscated more than 3700 hours of Nixon’s secret tape recordings. But the FBI also confiscated 204 reels of Super-8 film. The confiscated films were home movies made by Chief of [...]
In The Nation, Greg Mitchell says that Ronald Reagan’s shift to the GOP started with the 1950 California Senate race between Richard Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas. Reagan initially backed Douglas, Mitchell says, but then moved in RN’s direction. He writes: One night, not long before election day, actor Robert Cummings received a phone call [...]
David Frye has passed away at the age of 77. He did a variety of impressions, and the New York Times obituary explains his most famous: It was Nixon, however, who kept Mr. Frye a regular on the top television variety shows and at the big Las Vegas casinos, perhaps because he was one of [...]
“We will move forward together, or not at all,” said President Obama in his State of the Union address. Readers of this blog may have noticed that this line echoed one from RN’s 1969 inaugural: “To go forward at all is to go forward together.” The similarity is not a coincidence. RN took office after [...]
In a tribute to Sargent Shriver, his father-in-law who just passed away, Arnold Schwarzengger recalls their first meeting: Sarge was a political man, so around the dinner table when the conversation turned to politics, I was ready to participate. With passion and vigor and a thick accent, I avidly praised Richard Nixon.
In The Washington Post, Mark Feldstein tells how the 1960 Kennedy campaign did opposition research on RN’s links to Howard Hughes. How did JFK’s campaign obtain this incriminating evidence? By paying the contemporary equivalent of $100,000 to a Los Angeles accountant named Phillip Reiner, one of the Hughes middlemen used to conceal Nixon’s role in [...]
On this day in 1970 , RN met Elvis. Okay, that’s not the most substantive historical observation that one could make today. The Orange County Register offers some very good advice about history: Beware of anachronisms. An anachronism in its broadest terms is an intentional or unintentional historical error in time. When you compare an [...]
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