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The world of TV debates is antiquated. What looked smart and modern in 1960, with Kennedy versus Nixon, looks quaint and over-rehearsed between Obama and Romney. We need a new format; even if we have the same moderators and candidates, there needs to be a more nuanced way for audiences to connect with and shape presidential debates.
More than 40 years after the war on cancer was declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, we are not much closer to preventing the disease. The National Cancer Institute has spent some $90 billion on research and treatment during that time. When have Americans ever waged such a long, drawn-out and costly war, with no end in sight?
We actually found some home videos, some really funny footage of me when I was around 3 years old. I come up to the camera to do a Nixon impression. I don't know who taught me that, but I come up to the camera and said, 'I am not a crook.' I got a really good laugh. You see me register that bringing joy to people is a positive thing.
Nixon's attempts to order subversion of various departments was bound to come out in some form.
It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.
Kennedy was a lot of fun, always. He had something going on. But not Nixon.
The difference was you worked for Nixon, and with Ford.
Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.
The upshot of the Nixon tapes case was that any president is going to have an extremely hard time resisting a request from a law enforcement officer.
I don't remember a big fight between the Republicans and Democrats in the Nixon administration or President Gerald Ford and so on.
Roger Ailes's effect on politics was much longer-lasting than Richard Nixon's, even though Nixon was elected president twice.
A Democrat who had been JFK's Secretary of the Navy, Connally believed that as many as 20 million Democrats would cross over to vote for Nixon because George McGovern wasn't qualified to lead the nation, particularly because of his proposals for military cutbacks.
I thought Nixon was the worst President we had ever had, save only perhaps Andrew Johnson.
I don't believe President Nixon ordered a break-in, but people working for him were doing it. And then that dragged the president in. And then you have the cover-up. And before you know it, the president's gone.
It's Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency. Clean Air and Water Acts. Endangered Species Act. Promoted affirmative action. One could go on and on with Nixon as a New Deal liberal on domestic policy and a hawk, but one with great geo-political skills.
Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.
Nixon's shifty eyes and perpetual 5 o'clock shadow made him a natural fit for caricatured villainy.
He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
The Democrats' drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court - a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson.
I never believed that Nixon could fully resurrect himself. And the proof of that was in the obits.
I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo - a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on 'Laugh In' in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
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.
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.
Anyone who listens to the Nixon White House would recognize that Nixon, who was in the Navy, was no stranger to profanity.
The truth is that for a Democrat to triumph in a presidential election, it needs to come on the heels of 'the dark times' of an unpopular Republican administration. Carter followed the Nixon era, Clinton succeeded after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and Obama was a direct result of eight years of Bush/Cheney.
Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.
I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.
Self-destruction is such an interesting thing for a dramatist, and what's particular to Nixon is how human the failings were that led to his downfall.
I can remember when President Nixon basically said, 'All troops have been withdrawn from the delta.' And I said, 'Wait, I'm still here.'
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.
In many ways, Nixon started the modern notion of 'compassionate conservatism,' which as we all know is neither 'compassionate' nor 'conservative.'
Since cable got the power and freedom it has, you can explore someone in a way you couldn't in the old days when Mannix was Mannix was Mannix. I thought maybe that Nixon would be an interesting series.
Richard Nixon was a very complex man. I don't think he was a conservative, nor liberal, not even a moderate. He was a pragmatic politician. He loved politics.
Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon's own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office.
You and I are stuck with the necessity of taking the worst of two evils or none at all. So-I'm taking the immature Democrat as the best of the two. Nixon is impossible.
Nixon knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish in his four interviews with David Frost, quite apart from having his agent Irving Paul Lazar negotiate a terrific deal for him, with cash up front.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.
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.'
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.
Few politicians did much to move the needle toward anything resembling gender equality, but it was President Nixon who first threw women under the political bus of Movement Conservatism.
A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.
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.
When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.
The old Court you and I served so long will not be worthy of its traditions if Nixon can twist, turn and fashion If Nixon gets away with that, then Nixon makes the law as he goes along - not the Congress nor the courts.
There's a basic law, Klein's second, or third, or fourth law of politics in the TV age, which is warm always beats cold, with the exception of Richard Nixon. The nicer guy usually wins.