Word: nixons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Washington used to get a good chuckle from a gag about life in the White House with Dick and Pat Nixon. On a typical evening in the mansion, the phone rings and the caller asks the President what he is doing. Answers Nixon: "I'm just sitting here reading the Constitution, and Pat is knitting an American flag...
...doubtful that Pat Nixon ever knit the flag, but the pervasive involvement of every modern President in interpreting the powers granted by the U.S. Constitution is now a hard and often bruising fact of life. If a President does not actually curl up by the fire at night to ponder his copy of the Constitution, in all likelihood he has read some of its phrases during the day and confronted its words in the rush of events...
...major arguments have always taken place between Congress and the White House, but now special interests also use the courts to nibble at Executive power. Environmentalists filed suit in 1971 to prevent Nixon from conducting an underground nuclear test on Alaska's Amchitka Island. The Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 in the President's favor, but the battle left a bitter residue. Patrick Buchanan, then a White House aide, recalls asking Nixon what he would have done had the court gone against him. The President's angry response: "I was going to fire it anyway." That, perhaps...
Though these visitors were out of office, they still formed quite a data bank. Melvin Laird had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense and John Vessey the Chairman of Ronald Reagan's Joint Chiefs. James Schlesinger had run the CIA for Nixon and then the Defense Department for Nixon and Gerald Ford. Richard Helms had spent his career as one of the nation's top spooks. Together they were on two study missions to investigate the security breaches in the old and new American embassies...
...more complex and difficult for Americans to follow than the Watergate tragedy, but according to New Jersey Congressman Peter Rodino, the newer scandal illustrates a similar "arrogance of power." Rodino knows the subject better than most; he chaired the House Judiciary Committee that voted articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. No similar threat imperils Ronald Reagan, and there are many differences between the two events. Still, as the hearings demonstrated, the Iran-contra misdeeds in some ways are more far-reaching in their implications, placing U.S. foreign policy in the hands of private citizens and arms merchants whose yearning...