History: President Nixon Resigns With This Letter, Initialed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Today, August 9, 1974
Posted: August 9, 2015 Filed under: History, Law & Justice, White House | Tags: 1970s, Henry Kissinger, resignation, Richard Nixon, Watergate 1 CommentThis Day in History, October 10th 1973: Vice President Spiro Agnew Resigns
Posted: October 10, 2014 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Gerald Ford, John C. Calhoun, Nixon, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Tax evasion, Vice President of the United States, Watergate 1 Comment“In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.”
“I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won’t deceive you except in matters of this sort.”
todayinhistory:
October 10th 1973: Agnew resigns
On this day in 1973 the Vice President of the United States Spiro Agnew resigned. Agnew served under President Richard Nixon until he was formally charged with bribery and income tax evasion. Agnew was the second Vice President in history to resign from office after John C. Calhoun in 1832. He was replaced by Gerald Ford, who later became President upon Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal. Thus Ford is the only American President to have not been elected either Vice-President or President.
Pundit From Another Planet (via blondesforreagan)
Nixon’s Dilemma
Posted: August 14, 2014 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Twitter, Watergate Leave a commentCNN Poll: Trust in Government Lower than an Arthropod on a Gravel Parking Lot Low
Posted: August 8, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Democratic National Committee, Democratic Party (United States), Keating Holland, Richard Nixon, United States, University of Michigan, Washington, Watergate, Watergate scandal, White House 1 Comment
“See how low to the ground I am? Research shows that trust in government is even lower.”
“The number who trust the government all or most of the time has sunk so low…”
CNN‘s Paul Steinhauser delivers the bad news: Four decades after President Richard Nixon resigned, a slight majority of Americans still consider Watergate a very serious matter, a new national survey shows. But how serious depends on when you were born.
” …that it is hard to remember that there was ever a time when Americans routinely trusted the government.”
— CNN Polling Director Keating Holland
The CNN/ORC International poll’s release comes one day before the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974. With the Watergate scandal escalating, the second-term Republican president had lost much of his political backing, and he faced almost certain impeachment and the prospects of being removed from office by a Democratic-dominated House and Senate.
There’s a big generational divide over the significance of the scandal, with a majority of those older than 40 describing Watergate as a very serious problem and those under 40 saying it was just politics.
“Just 13% of Americans say the government can be trusted to do what is right always or most of the time.”
The poll also indicates that the public’s trust in government is at an all-time low. Read the rest of this entry »
Nixon White House Crisis Moment
Posted: August 8, 2014 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, White House | Tags: Facebook, Photography, Richard Nixon, satire, Watergate 5 CommentsIRS Destruction of E-mail Evidence: ‘If Nixon Had Burned the Tapes as People Had Advised Him to, He Would Have Served His Full Term’
Posted: June 24, 2014 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, U.S. News, White House | Tags: George Will, Internal Revenue Service, IRS, Nixon, Richard Nixon, Watergate, Watergate scandal, White House 1 CommentThe important question regarding the IRS investigation is how high up in the administration the scandal goes, George Will said on Tuesday’s Special Report.
“That there was targeting of these groups is not disputed…”
“The question that makes this interesting and the question that a special prosecutor would pursue is where does this lead, how high up does this go.”
Will noted that people have been saying that nothing has connected the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups to the White House, but he questions that. He recalled the Watergate scandal, which he said never would have been connected to President Nixon but for the tapes that showed him plotting obstruction of justice.
“Something equivalent to burning the tapes may have happened with the hard drive of Lois Lerner.”
Will explained that if Nixon had burned the tapes as people advised him to, he would have served his full time. “Something equivalent to burning the tapes may have happened with the hard drive of Lois Lerner,” Will said…(read more)
Today in History: 1972, Five Men Were Arrested for Breaking into the DNC Headquarters in the Watergate Complex
Posted: June 17, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Democratic National Committee, Newseum, Richard Nixon, Washington Post, Watergate, Watergate scandal 1 CommentToday in 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. In their possession were cameras, film, and tear gas guns. Ultimately, the suspects were charged with burglary and convicted in January 1973; however, the real scandal as would later be uncovered by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein revealed that the suspects all had ties to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, a support group for President Richard M. Nixon. While Nixon denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of the burglary, a secret tape later surfaced and revealed that Nixon had known about the burglary cover-up and had tried to use the FBI to stop the investigation.
With Woodward and Bernstein’s persistent news reporting, their investigation sparked one of U.S. history’s biggest stories of crime, espionage and cover-up and shed a light on the importance of journalism and a free press – leading to the downfall of a presidency, with Nixon resigning office on August 8, 1974.
[BOOK] Preview: Nixon Tapes and Transcripts
Posted: February 28, 2014 Filed under: History, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Douglas Brinkley, Henry Kissinger, National Archives and Records Administration, Nixon, Oval Office, Richard Nixon, Salvador Allende, Soviet Union, Watergate, White House 3 CommentsComing this August, on the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, a new book, “The Nixon Tapes“ by Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter. From the Amazon description, here’s a preview:
President Nixon’s voice-activated taping system captured every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and other key locations in the White House, and at Camp David — 3,700 hours of recordings between 1971 and 1973. Yet less than 5 percent of those conversations have ever been transcribed and published. Now, thanks to professor Luke Nichter’s massive effort to digitize and transcribe the tapes, the world can finally read an unprecedented account of one of the most important and controversial presidencies in U.S. history.
The Nixon Tapes offers a selection of fascinating scenes from the
year Nixon opened relations with China, negotiated the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union, and won a landslide reelection victory. All the while, the growing shadow of Watergate and Nixon’s political downfall crept ever closer. The Nixon Tapes provides a never-before-seen glimpse into a flawed president’s hubris, paranoia, and political genius.
[Look for the Kindle edition of The Nixon Tapes, or pre-order the hardback book from Amazon]
Nixon could never have imagined that people with home computers and smartphones would someday have instant access to a digitized library of audio and transcripts, representing thousands of hours of his White House recordings. Here’s the introduction from nixontapes.org:
nixontapes.org has the most complete, digital collection of the Nixon tapes in existence, which includes approximately 2,950 hours of the nearly 3,000 hours of tapes currently declassified and released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In addition, we have transcribed approximately 3,000 pages of conversations on many topics, from conversations dealing with the installation of the taping system in February 1971 to Cabinet Room conversations recorded in July 1973.
NSA having flashbacks to Watergate era
Posted: August 25, 2013 Filed under: War Room | Tags: Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Flashbacks, Kissinger, leaks, Nixon, NSA, Secrets, Snowden, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Watergate Leave a commentWASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations.
Thanks to former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden’s flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration’s uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA’s powers.
“This is a secret intelligence agency that’s now in the news every day,” said Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and later led the CIA. “Each day, the workforce wakes up and reads the daily indictment.”
President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s largest intelligence agency. “There’s no doubt that, for all the work that’s been done to protect the American people’s privacy, the capabilities of the NSA are scary to people,” he said in a CNN interview.
Obama’s Watergates
Posted: August 6, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Associated Press, Jay Carney, John N. Mitchell, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, Nixon, Richard Nixon, Ron Ziegler, Watergate Leave a commentDenial, evasion, “Let me be perfectly clear” — is this 2013 or 1973?
The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known. Almost a year after the attacks on our Benghazi facilities, we are only now learning details of CIA gun-running, military stand-down orders, aliases of those involved who are still hard to locate, massaged talking points, and the weird jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
We still do not quite know why Eric Holder’s Justice Department went after the Associated Press or Fox News’s James Rosen — given that members of the administration were themselves illegally leaking classified information about the Stuxnet virus, the Yemeni double agent, the drone program, and the bin Laden document trove, apparently to further the narrative of an underappreciated Pattonesque commander-in-chief up for reelection.
The NYT kept the Libya hearing off the front page because “It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing…”
Posted: October 15, 2012 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Dean Baquet, JPMorgan Chase, Lance Armstrong, Libya, New York Time, Richard Nixon, Washington Post, Watergate Leave a commentWhy, yes, it is a politicized thing, isnt it? Oh… you didnt mean your coverage of the news, did you?
The NYT managing editor Dean Baquet was explaining to the NYT public editor why the decision was made to go with the 6 stories they did put on the front page……
one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis.
Baquet said:
“I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it.”
And:
“There were six better stories.”
They put the story on page 3.
To be fair: The NYT put the original news of the Watergate break-in on an inside page. Was it page 18? Sorry, Im not finding that fact as easily as I think I should. I did come up with the information that when Deep Throat/Mark Felt wanted to communicate with the Washington Post, Bob “Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20.”
So the myth of the inside pages of the New York Times looms large in the annals of presidential scandal.
Is the Libya scandal as big as Watergate? The substance of it may be much worse than Watergate, and the Obama administration seems not to have heeded the old Watergate lesson that its the cover-up that gets you, but if Obama loses the election, that will limit the dimension of the scandal. If he wins the election — especially if its very close or contested in some way — Republicans may work themselves into a frenzy going after Obama. Remember that Richard Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal broke. The break-in was 5 months before the election, and the first stories had come out. The next 2 years were hell for Nixon, and he was drummed out of office. And Nixon had won by a landslide.
via Althouse
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- EXCEPT NOBODY DIED AT WATERGATE: Jennifer Rubin on Watergate Redux – “In hearing, the Libya scandal… (pjmedia.com)
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