Quotes About Nixon

I remember, as a kid, nothing struck me funnier than seeing Richard Nixon look into the camera and sincerely tell everyone he didn't know where the 18 minutes had gone from his tapes. But there was all this sweat on his upper lip. We knew he was lying. He knew we knew he was lying. But he was determined to tell the lie.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but a hundred years later, the Republican Party wasn't Lincoln's. Richard Nixon became president by courting Americans upset by integration, intentionally fueling the racial divide.

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.

If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.

We're not going to lose it. That's all there is to it," Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. "We can't lose. We can lose an election, but we're not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost.

Yeah, it's a cover-up," Nixon said. "The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.

He started the damn thing!" Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. "He killed Diem!

After suffering another insomniac night, Nixon went to the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs showed him maps detailing where Communist forces occupied Cambodia.

Nixon revived the FBI's traditions of wiretaps, bugs, and black-bag jobs. They quickly became a part of the political culture of the Nixon White House. He ordered Hoover back into the field of political warfare.

Some of Nixon's closest aides knew these taps fell into a twilight zone of the law. Nixon thought he had the power to spy on anyone he pleased on the grounds of national security. In 1968, Congress had passed a law saying the president could

For the first and not the last time in American history, a measure was adopted when the leader of the opposing party led the charge for it. The modern cliché is "Only Nixon could go to China"—only such a strong anti-communist could regularize relations with that country.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Later I learned to improve my forecasting—if necessary by asking the visitor in advance what subjects he intended to raise with Nixon. In

Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

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.

Richard Nixon built his presidency on his notorious 'Southern strategy.'

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.

As lawyers, our first responsibility is, of course, to see that the legal profession provides adequate representation for all people in our society. I would suggest there is no subject which is more important to the legal profession, that is more important to this nation, than & the realization of the ideal of equal justice under law for all. RICHARD NIXON, IN HIS SPEECH TO THE NATIONAL LEGAL AID AND DEFENDER ASSOCIATION (OCTOBER 1962) [E]very

He said that he believe that Nixon's visit to China had something to do with his release, because some of the people accompanying Nixon in 1972 showed an interest in political prisoners and had asked to visit prisons. 'Usually, we got one thin slice of meat a week. If the wind was strong it blew away. But just before President Nixon's visit we started to get three pieces. The prison guards were afraid that he might visit and ask how we were being treated.

Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way.

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.

What we saw in Richard Nixon's face was the panic in his soul. – Richard Goodwin