So far as I’m concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.
Think about one of the most powerful influences on a young child’s life – the absence of a father figure. Look back on recent presidents, and you’ll find an absent, or weak, or failed father in the lives of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests.
Nixon started auditing late-night show hosts because they were making jokes about him. Then, every single one of their staff got tax audits.
President Nixon has lost his effectiveness as the leader of this country, primarily because he has lost the confidence of the people.
Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.
Richard Nixon was the best thing that ever happened to journalism. I mean this guy was wonderful. Just when you thought he could get no worse, he got worse.
The language has changed. When I grew up and watched the campaigns of John Kennedy, even with Richard Nixon, there was a lot higher level of civility. Now we describe a disagreement as an attack.
Having served in the Nixon Administration, I am well aware of how the political leadership of an administration can try to politicize the civil service, including law enforcement.
More than four decades after Nixon met Mao, the relationship between the U.S. and China has reached a pivotal moment. To date, even as China has become more powerful and present in our lives, Americans have generally found it to be an unsatisfying ‘enemy.’
After the 1970s, when President Nixon’s illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.
Successful presidential campaigns follow a two-part strategy. For Republicans, Richard Nixon described it as running to the right in the primaries and running back to the center in the general election. For Democrats, the idea is to go to the left in the primaries, then to the center.
Nixon was kind of a loner, he had a cold personality.
I’ve said it before: Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. You know, he’s been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we’ve fought for decades.
Social issues have been used to distract Americans from their own self interests since Nixon’s southern strategy, and now people are paying the price.
Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny – and yes, a good man.
Edward Heath and Richard Nixon took personal awkwardness with each other to new and excruciating levels.
I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon’s trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.
Nixon was always willing to be bipartisan, so there are a lot of surprises in the man.
After the 1960s and ’70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country’s highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.
Decades before President Richard Nixon bet his re-election on winning the Dixiecrat vote, Wilson worked out his own Southern Strategy. Even as he was moving the nation to war, Wilson re-segregated Washington and purged African-Americans from federal jobs.
I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.
The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show… Cops would come by – often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.
John Kennedy won the first televised presidential debate among those watching it, while Richard Nixon won among those listening on the radio.
Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.
Media runs the world, and it all changed, I think, when the debate between Kennedy and Nixon happened, and first of all we saw them on television, and that changed everything.
It became evident to me that there was a very serious political element at work. I know that the term impeachment was bandied about. I do not believe, however, that the word was used with the ferocity it was more recently or that it was in the Nixon years.
What makes me laugh? Richard Nixon always made me laugh.
Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.
If Obama’s vision of the public sector is socialism, then so too were the visions of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.
In the late ’60s, Senator Charles E. Goodell, Republican of New York, spoke out against the Vietnam War, bringing on the wrath of the Nixon administration and, as it turned out, the disaffection of conservative voters.
I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.
Paul Nixon taught me to break a run chase down into little targets. I suppose I stole his cues and took them into my own game.
The biggest difference between Kennedy and Nixon, as far as the press is concerned, is simply this: Jack Kennedy really liked newspaper people and he really enjoyed sparring with journalists.
Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power.
Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I’ve met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.
Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.
I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.
Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
I don’t listen to the news or read newspapers. I don’t know what’s going on in this world, or why I should vote for George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I don’t have enough time.
If George W. Bush is given a second term, and retains a Republican Congress and a compliant federal judiciary, he and his allies are likely to embark on a campaign of political retribution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Richard Nixon.
I believe that President Nixon was right in what he did at Watergate. Lack of respect for authority and things like socialism are turning this into a weak, effeminate country.
Roger Ailes’s effect on politics was much longer-lasting than Richard Nixon’s, even though Nixon was elected president twice.
If ‘Mystery Train’ is my Nixon book and ‘Lipstick Traces’ my Reagan book, ‘Invisible Republic’ is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he’d done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.
I would have to say that Richard Nixon is probably the most gifted and skilled political practitioner, in his pre-presidential years, of all of the American presidents in the 20th century.
My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.
Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan – and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.
It was so interesting to discover Nixon was a Californian. I always think Nixon should come from a cold place.
Nixon’s shifty eyes and perpetual 5 o’clock shadow made him a natural fit for caricatured villainy.
I woke up one morning with this song in my head, and the opening line of the song is, ‘My name was Richard Nixon, only now I’m a girl.’
The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.
The roots of Nixon’s political descent lay at least as far back as May 1970, when the shooting of four young Americans at Kent State University began to turn the president’s moderate supporters against him.
We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.
