Category: USH: Nixon Years & Watergate

NIXON TAPES: Archie Bunker & Homosexuality

In the middle of a discussion on how to fashion their public relations in regard to what the “average man” cares about, President Richard Nixon and his aides White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman and Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman discuss the new television show, All in the Family. The episode that Nixon watched and described to his aides in detail dealt with homosexuality. This leads Nixon into a larger discussion of homosexuality in history and more generally. This conversation is featured in the documentary, “Our Nixon.”

Fresh Air Interview: How Richard Nixon Became 'One Man Against The World'

Richard Nixon’s presidency has always been one surrounded by questions and controversy: Why did he wiretap his own aides and diplomats? Why did he escalate the war in Vietnam? Why did he lie about his war plans to his secretary of defense and secretary of state? What were the Watergate burglars searching for, and why did Nixon tape conversations that included incriminating evidence?

Nixon was consumed by fear, Weiner tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. That fear “turned into anger and that anger turned into self-destruction

A Challenge to Robert Redford

Nixon is back. Back from the dead to haunt us once again with his lies. With his one Big Lie. The one he got away with. The one all too many historians and journalists still complacently accept.

This burst of interest is not really a surprise since—like him or not—Richard Nixon remains one of the great American characters, a Rorschach blot upon which we project our conceptions of American politics and history…

Nonetheless, on the fundamental question—what did the president know and when did he know it?—the vast majority of accounts take Richard Nixon at his unsupported word.

It’s amazing to me that historians of Nixon and Watergate have been so timid on this issue.

It’s not a trivial matter, it goes to the question of the true character of one of the great characters in American history. It goes to the question of whether discovering the whole truth matters

I reiterate my challenge: Give us your answer to the question in this documentary, prove my theory about Nixon’s guilt wrong, or prove someone else gave the order, or admit you don’t care whether Nixon has, in the end, gotten away with his crime.

The Nixon Tapes

Between February 1971 and July 1973, President Richard Nixon secretly recorded 3,700 hours of his phone calls and meetings across the executive offices. These recordings played a leading role in the resignation of our 37th president on August 9, 1974. They remain perhaps the greatest treasure of information ever left by a president, as well as the most complex, controversial set of presidential records in U.S. history. However, today these recordings remain relatively unexplored on non-Watergate topics.

nixontapes.org is the only website dedicated solely to the scholarly production and dissemination of digitized Nixon tape audio and transcripts. This is the only website in the world that makes the complete collection of Nixon tapes available directly to the public in a user-friendly format, free of charge.

Nixon's Failed Attempts At 'Poisoning The Press'

Richard Nixon is remembered as a ruthless politician driven at times by fear and hatred of his perceived enemies. But a new book suggests that Nixon’s paranoia was based at least in part on his own experience.

In Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture, Mark Feldstein describes the epic battle between Nixon and the muckraking syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Feldstein follows the rise of Anderson’s investigative journalism career and explains how his decades-long face-off with Nixon would become emblematic of the relationship between the press and other politicians.

Good Fresh Air Interview with Feldstein.