News
Presidential Leadership, Then and Now
This past week saw the 40th anniversary of the "Silent Majority" speech -- a reminder that RN had a couple of advantages that President Obama lacks. The first, as a commenter on an earlier post shrewdly suggested, is that RN had a captive audience when he addressed...
Clinton on Nixon
Just as Nixon was considered the only president who could open diplomatic relations with China, Clinton was the only one who could bestow upon Nixon the kind of public credibility he so desired. ---Monica Crowley “Nixon in Winter” (1998) In my library, I try to keep...
The Silent Majority Speaks
Public response to the 3 November speech was phenomenal. The President, seen above with Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, displayed some of the letters and telegrams on his desk in the Oval Office. In his diary entry for 4 November, Haldeman wrote: Reaction day, and a...
11.3.69
"Very few speeches actually influence the course of history. The November 3 speech was one of them." ---RN in RN Forty years ago today, Richard Nixon wrote and delivered a speech that both changed the course of American foreign policy and altered the course of...
40 Years Ago Today: An Historic Speech
In his introduction to the November 3 speech in his book Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, the late Bill Safire wrote: "There is nothing the president has reflected on with greater anguish,” Henry Kissinger told the Nixon senior staff in the Roosevelt Room...
Subscribe To The New Nixon Podcast Via I-Tunes
You can now subscribe to The New Nixon Podcast via I-tunes, enabling you to listen to the current one and all future editions on your I-Pod or similar device. Here is a direct link - or you can go to I-Tunes and search in Podcasts for The New Nixon.
Echo of 1970?
The upcoming special election in the New York Twenty-third Congressional brings to mind an earlier three way election in the Empire State. The 2009 special election features Democrat Bill Owens, Republican Dierdre Scozzafava and Conservative Doug Hoffman. Identifying...
The Last Of The Watergate Cubans Speaks
In June I wrote here of the death of Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men whose arrest at the Watergate complex on the evening of June 17, 1972, resulted in the unfolding of the scandal that claimed the Presidency of Richard Nixon. At that time I noted that of the...
He Came, He Saw, He Muddled The Facts
Rocco Landesman, who was appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by President Obama last May (as a replacement for Dana Gioia, the eminent poet who was its leader during the Bush administration), comes from an affluent and remarkable - make that...
Ted Sorensen’s Alternate History
This week Theodore "Ted" Sorensen, who was John F. Kennedy's closest aide from 1953 until the president's assassination a decade later, appeared at Canada's University of Western Ontario in London to speak about his career and to promote his recently published...