Free Republic

Wednesday is the 100th anniversary of Richard Nixon's birth. He remains a controversial figure, and not just on the political left. Last year, I was covering the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington when I came across a stall selling old political pins. Unable to resist, I bought one with a picture of Tricky Dick giving his best crocodile smile beneath the classic slogan "Nixon's The One!"

Will Barack Obama go down in history as our least merciful president? With less than two weeks to go in his first term, this reputedly progressive and enlightened man has a strong shot at winning that dubious distinction. December, a traditional season for presidential clemency, has come and gone, and still Obama has granted just one commutation (which shortens a prisoner's sentence) and 22 pardons (which clear people's records, typically after they've completed their sentences). Barring a last-minute flurry of clemency actions, his first-term record looks weaker than those of all but a few previous presidents. Which of Obama's predecessors...

Early in Ronald Reagan's second term, Bill Rusher, the publisher of National Review, was interviewing the president in the Oval Office for a documentary on the conservative movement. Rusher asked how he would describe Barry Goldwater's role. Reagan thought a moment and replied: I guess you would have to call him the John the Baptist of our movement. I resisted the impulse to lean in and ask, "Sir, if Barry Goldwater was John the Baptist, who would that make you?" The death of George McGovern brought back thoughts of these two men who suffered two of the greatest defeats in...

Mitt Romney was 13 years old and Barack Obama had not been born when an energetic-looking John Kennedy, 43, and a tired-looking Richard Nixon, 47, walked into the WBBM-TV studio in Chicago for the first general election debate between presidential candidates. It is generally held that television viewers felt Kennedy won the first debate, while those listening on radio, unaware of Nixon's improvised makeup, felt Nixon won. That's probably overstated. Contemporary accounts suggest most viewers felt both candidates did well, while the single poll of radio listeners had a small sample possibly tilted toward pro-Nixon rural areas lacking TV reception....

September 22 marked National Hunting and Fishing Day, which dates from 1972 when President Nixon signed it into law. "I urge all citizens to join with outdoor sportsmen in the wise use of our natural resources and in insuring their proper management for the benefit of future generations," wrote President Nixon at the time. Alas, nothing was heard from our current President regarding National Hunting and Fishing Day. But then “people who cling to guns” are not particularly popular with this administration. And speaking of President Nixon’s recommendation, long ago my family found that among the very wisest uses...

Amid the triumphant success of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's successful moon-walk in July 1969, NASA and President Richard Nixon's White House breathed a heavy sigh of relief that he didn't have to deliver a speech to the nation entitled 'In Event of Moon Disaster'. The speech and a memo were prepared in the event that the two Apollo 11 astronauts did not manage to reconnect with their command module piloted by Michael Collins and could not return safely home to Earth. The memo laid out a list of instructions for President Nixon, among which was the tragic task of...

Historian Lamar Waldron is out with his new book Watergate: The Hidden History which exposes Nixon's role as the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia in their failed plots to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, and it was files on this subject which the Watergate burglars were seeking as reported by Thom Hartmann for the Huffington Post: As one of the Watergate burglars admitted, and Senate Watergate Committee investigators indicated in their secret questioning of Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, Nixon was worried about a Cuban Dossier of CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Those attempts began in earnest in...

It was, they said, the crime of the century. An attempted coup d'etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from The Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor. The 1976 movie, "All the President's Men," retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate? In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in "Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee," Bradlee himself dynamites the myth: "Watergate ... (has) achieved a place in...

Bill O’Reilly spoke to economist Ben Stein about a potential Mitt Romney presidency, as well as what Stein thinks of President Barack Obama. Going beyond wanting Romney to win, Stein said Obama isn’t particularly smart. Smarter than “the average bear,” but not of the likes of President Richard Nixon. Stein began by speaking about he riots in Greece, warning those who think it can’t happen in America. Young people without jobs who are angry, and have nothing better to do, may riot, he said. It’s “fun for them. They can be provoked into doing it at a drop of a...

Newly unsealed grand jury testimony by ex-President Richard Nixon shows he warned prosecutors and grand jurors not to probe an episode from 1971, when he discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been spying on him and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. “Don’t open that can of worms,” Nixon told his interrogators in June 1975, when he spent roughly eleven hours over two days’ time fielding – and sometimes deflecting – questions put to him by lawyers for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and two grand jurors flown in from Washington. *** And he confided what his predecessor in...

In January of this year, an African-American man living out his life in a Maryland nursing home succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. Because he was not a sports hero or a member of America's brain-dead entertainment industry, the nation barely noted either his life or his passing. His name was Samuel Frederick Yette. Born into the segregated South in 1929, Mr. Yette earned a bachelor's degree from Tennessee State University and a master's from Indiana University. Then, following his U.S. Air Force service in the Korean War, he became an award-winning journalist who worked for several newspapers and magazines. In 1964,...

A few months ago, I had dinner with a journalist who knows President Obama somewhat well and admires him in several respects. He told me something that didn’t particularly surprise me – but which was useful to have confirmed. This person’ said Obama is enormously thin-skinned, he remembers and keeps track of negative things said and written about him, and he is a person filled with many more grievances and resentments than one might imagine. He feels sorry for himself – and he is inclined to lash out, in his own emotionally contained way, at even slight criticisms. I was...

Recently, Herman Cain made the comment that, “Many African-Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view.” For this statement he was vilified, especially by the black liberal establishment. It may have been imprudent for him to say, especially if he wishes to garner a significant portion of the black vote, but it is the truth. Blacks have been brainwashed by the myth of the Southern Strategy. There was a point in our history in which the black community voted overwhelmingly Republican. After all, the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, freed the slaves....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivVcfSBVSM

Original title: "Egyptian"Karagandan took part in the last Arab-Israeli war Karaganda resident Danakan Nurgaliev is a man with a rare history. He is the only one in our city with the rights and benefits of a soldier-internationalist, though he was never in Afghanistan. Danakan Kasymovich did his duty in a country a bit further away - in Egypt, during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. "I was born in the Taldykurganskaya district in 1952," Danakan said. "When called up for military service, I was sent first to Amur, in the air defense forces. After about a half-year they sent us through...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJEvxgfcOFw The conspiratorial connection that will blow your mind! ;)

I'm writing to offer my resignation from the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Docent Guild. While the decision was tough, the reason is simple: The president, who admirably redeemed himself in the sunset of his life from the monstrous shadow of Watergate, is now being enthusiastically dishonored at his own library by a "Manchurian" figure, Dr. Timothy Naftali, director of NARA. Naftali is so driven by his personal ideology that none of his unquestioned brilliance and tireless audacity is now capable of producing an ounce of basic common sense. What is that basic common sense? That presidential libraries are built,...

Library Throws Book at Nixon by Brian Calle Some controversy over the recently revised Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda has provoked some questions over presidential libraries, their value, purpose for public consumption and their role in the remembrance of past presidents. One docent at the Nixon library, my Register colleague Will Alexander, opted to resign in protest of the new exhibit after 10 years of volunteer service. And friends and former colleagues of Richard Nixon have been critical of the museum's new director, Timothy Naftali. Some critics have even suggested that the...

Roll out the bunting. Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the modern global economy. That's right: come Monday morning we will have managed to survive four decades of fiat money – though, given the chaos in markets in recent weeks, it is anyone's guess how much longer it will last. On 15 August 1971, with the US public finances straitened by the cost of the war in Vietnam, Richard Nixon finally cut the link between the US dollar and gold. Until then, the US Treasury was duty bound to exchange an ounce of gold with central banks willing to pay...

~ EXCERPT ~ Friends and former colleagues say Lawrence S. Eagleburger, the only career foreign service officer to rise to the position of secretary of state, has died. Word of Eagleburger's death Saturday came from representatives of former President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker. No other details were immediately available. Eagleburger, who was 80, was a straightforward diplomat whose exuberant style masked a hard-driving commitment to solving foreign policy problems.