Nixon on Race Relations
(aired on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart )
On March 9, 2006, Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart aired an excerpt from the Nixon White House tapes March 9, 2006.
In this Oval Office conversation on May 13, 1971 with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and chief domestic policy adviser, John D. Erlichman, President Nixon elaborated on his view of race relations.
From the Nixon Tapes:
From the White House to the Supreme Court
On September 3, 2005, President Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to become Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Over the past decade, Bush has appointed Ms. Miers to several positions, and at one point retained her as his personal attorney.
Forty years ago, President Johnson nominated his longtime attorney and confidant to replace Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg. Fortas demurred, but Johnson was not deterred. While he considered several other candidates, including a number of Republicans, Johnson did not stop pressuring Fortas and eventually got his man.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Other resources:
Prelude to Faith-Based Initiatives?
In late 2002, President George W. Bush issued an executive order that expanded federal funding for faith-based social programs. This presidential action marked a new stage, if perhaps not the conclusion, of a dispute that has simmered for much of the last decade regarding the appropriate role of religious organizations in the delivery of federally supported social services.
The contemporary debate over the expansion of federal funding for faithbased social services, however, has proceeded on an assumption that such initiatives represent a clear break from past patterns of American social policy. During the debate overthe Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, which formed the legislative cornerstone of the War on Poverty, President Johnson, his key domestic policy advisers, and leading members of Congress engaged in an intense series of discussions and political maneuvers that eventually defined the conditions of participation for church-affiliated organizations and programs.
From the LBJ Tapes:
LBJ, Louisiana, and Hurricane Betsy, September 1965
On the evening of September 9, 1965, Hurricane Betsy came ashore near Grand Isle, Louisiana, as a Category 4 storm, with the National Weather Service reporting wind gusts near 160 mph. As the storm tracked inland, the city of New Orleans was hit with 110 mph winds, a storm surge around 10 feet, and heavy rain. Betsy devastated low-lying areas on the eastern side of the city and eventually led to the expansion of an already impressive levee system to protect a city that lay mostly below sea-level. After the storm passed, Louisiana Senator Russell Long called President Johnson to get the President to tour the devastated areas.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Eugene McCarthy dies, aged 89
Former Senator Eugene McCarthy (Democrat, Minnesota) died November 10, 2005. McCarthy's surprising success in the 1968 presidential primaries, running on a stridently anti-Vietnam War platform, helped convince President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election.
McCarthy and Johnson had long sparred on the Vietnam issue. In this February 1966 call, President Johnson tried to convince McCarthy to tone down his public attacks. He wanted an end to the war, Johnson said, but "I just can't be the architect of surrender."
From the LBJ Tapes:
Other resources:
Chief Justice William Rehnquist
On September 3, 2005, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died. He had served for 33 years on the Supreme Court, having been nominated by President Richard Nixon in late 1971 to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of John Marshal Harlan, II. Rehnquist had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in late 2004.
From the Nixon Tapes:
Murder of Civil Rights Activist Jonathan Daniels, August 20, 1965
On August 20, 1965, Jonathan Daniels and several other civil rights activists wanted to buy a coke after getting out of jail. A few minutes later, the 26-year-old Episcopal seminary student lay dead in Alabama, having stepped in front of a shotgun blast intended for a fellow activist, Ruby Sales. Daniels, a native of New Hampshire and a 1961 graduate of Virginia Military Institute (VMI), had come to Alabama to support the movement in Selma, Montgomery, and then in Lowndes County. The shooter, highway worker and volunteer deputy sheriff Tom Coleman, who had also turned his gun on a Catholic priest named Richard Morrisroe after shooting Daniels, was later acquitted by an all-white jury.
From the LBJ Tapes:
40th Anniversary of the Watts Riots
Forty years ago on August 11, 1965, a routine traffic stop deteriorated into the so-called Watts riots or rebellion in Los Angeles, and in the following week, 34 people were killed, 4,000 were arrested, and an estimated $35 million in property was damaged. The sight of burning buildings, looting, and National Guardsmen with bayoneted rifles shocked the nation. In the aftermath, on August 18, President Lyndon B. Johnson called former CIA Director John McCone to cajole him into heading up a commission to investigate the previous week’s disorder.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Related Resources:
Fly Me to the Moon
On September 19, 2005, NASA unveiled a program to carry out President Bush's earlier promise to return to the moon before the end of the next decade. The announcement comes at a time of intense debate and scrutiny of federal government spending, especially with large expenditures on the Iraq War and the redevelopment of the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
On May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy made the bold promise that Americans would go to the moon before the end of the decade. Acknowledging that his interest in the space program was fueled more by the political motives, especially the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, than any scientific gains, Kennedy struggled to justify the expense of NASA's Apollo lunar landing program in the context of other needs.
"We’ve wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs," Kennedy complained in a meeting on November 21, 1962, "and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind it [them], as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us."
From the JFK Tapes:
Peter Jennings and Edward R. Murrow
On April 5, 2005, Peter Jennings, the longtime ABC news anchor, announced on-air that he was suffering from lung cancer. His death four months later produced an outpouring of admiration for the 67-year-old former Canadian. Although he had little formal education, Jennings was hired as the ABC early evening anchor on Christmas Eve in 1964 at the age of 26 and would begin broadcasting in February 1965. Ironically, at the time that the young Jennings was breaking into one of the most coveted spots in television news, Edward R. Murrow, one of the pioneers of the genre, was slowly dying from what President Lyndon B. Johnson called “cancer of the lung.” [+ more]
From the LBJ Tapes:
Edgar Ray Killen Sentenced to 60 Years for Manslaughter in 1964 Freedom Summer Killings
Exactly 41 years after the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, the state of Mississippi obtained its first homicide conviction in the case. On Tuesday June 21, 2005, 9 white and 3 black jurors convicted 80-year-old Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen of manslaughter for his role in orchestrating the nighttime roadside lynching, which occurred approximately a half-mile from his house. Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
The murders of these activists at the beginning of Freedom Summer in 1964 became a landmark moment in the history of the civil rights movement. There are extensive resources for studying the events, including oral histories, court records, FBI files, and many others. One of the most poignant sources is the collection of President Lyndon Johnson’s once secret White House recordings. On approximately 40 calls, Johnson tracks the investigation known as Mississippi Burning, speaking with Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, the parents of two of the activists, Mississippi politicians, and several other political leaders.
From the LBJ Tapes:
Related Resources:
Watergate Breakthrough: Deep Throat Revealed!
Mark Felt, former deputy associate director of the FBI, revealed in the July issue of Vanity Fair (released May 31) that he was Deep Throat, a key source for the investigation by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the Nixon administration's links to the Watergate break-in. The identity of the source has been a hotly debated mystery for 30 years. PRP historian Ken Hughes made his own unique contribution to the debate in a 2002 article, available here.
The 3,700 hours of Nixon's secretly recorded tapes cover a remarkable range of issues--Bob Woodward, a member of the Miller Center's Governing Council, has been known to refer to them as "the gift that keeps on giving"--and indeed, captured on the tapes are conversations from the early days of the Watergate saga between Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, about how to handle Mark Felt and whether he was leaking information to the media press. Synchronized transcript and audio clips for some of these segments are below.
From the Nixon Tapes:
Related Resources:
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