Richard Nixon

On this day in history August 8, 1974, the 37th President Richard Nixon in a televised address announces to the American public that he is resigning the presidency as of noon on August 9, because of lack of support in upcoming impeachment proceedings Congress was taking against him over his role in covering up the Watergate break-in scandal. To avoid the House of Representatives’ impeachment trial, Nixon decided to become the first president in history to resign from the office, when he did on August 9, 1974, over two years after the Watergate burglary began the president’s descent into a cover-up that consumed his presidency and launched the nation into a Constitutional Crisis. It would take less than a month later when on September 8, his successor Gerald Ford, would pardon Nixon and the “long national nightmare” would truly be “over” left for history to judge the legacies of Nixon and Ford.

In this paper, I examine the American-Hungarian press-coverage of the Soviet-American
exchange exhibitions, which had been organized in 1959. The Soviet Union opened its
exhibition in New York at the Coliseum. For the organizers, the three most important
objects were the models of the Sputnik, the Lenin atomic icebreaker and the “typicalkitchen”.
On the bases of the articles which had been published in the American periodical
press, we are able to reconstruct a rather negative opinion. The American Hungarians had
the most conspicuous opinion in their articles. In Hungary, newspaper-readers were able
to read only positive reactions. The American National Exhibition in Moscow proved to
be different. The organizers intended to introduce the everyday life of American people.
This meant that consumption goods, such as Coke, color-televisions, all kinds of fast
food and cars had been displayed. Although, the Soviet officers made anti-propagandistic
steps, altogether three million people visited this event. In the Hungarian press, more
articles can be found about this exhibition, than about the Soviet Exhibition.

In: Böhm Gábor – Fedeles Tamás (Szerk.): Specimia Operum Iuvenum 2. Szemelvények 2. Válogatás a PTE BTK XXXI. Országos Tudományos Diákköri Konferencián (2013) első helyezést elért hallgatóinak pályaműveiből. Pécs, 2013. 209-231

This essay is divided into two sections. First it will discuss how the current historical narrative attributes the American defeat in the Vietnam war towards the Civil Rights Movement, the Moritoriums and the undercurrent of social tensions in the U.S mainland. Next it will argue how bureaucratic inefficiencies with defence expenditures, and incoherent policy objectives in Washington lead to a long and drawn out war. As the war dragged on in Vietnam this sapped the political support of the war from the populace at home.  By examining how the shift from LBJ's to Nixon's presidencies affected the war. It becomes apparent that Washington had no clear and coherent response to managing a protracted guerilla war.

In his entire political career, and especially the Watergate debacle, Richard Nixon manifested tragic flaws of the type that dominate Greek and Shakespearian tragedies: hubris, jealousy, and excessive ambition. He was an extremely intelligent man, a brilliant if particularly vindictive politician.  But it would not be outside enemies that destroyed him. The enemies that undid Nixon were the demons within the man himself.

The relationship between the United States and drug policy has been tense since the inception of the " war on drugs " in the mid-20th century. This paper will focus mainly on the drug trade around cannabis and cannabis control policies that can reduce international disorder stemming from the war on drugs. I argue that the failure of the war on drugs, joint with the losses it has created, produces an ethical obligation of the United States to pursue alternative policies on drugs, namely the legalization of cannabis. After giving a brief background on the origin of the war on the drugs, I analyze the failure of the war on drugs to achieve its intended goal and highlight the consequences that materialized. I then present evidence of how legalizing cannabis domestically in the United States can end the war on drugs while achieving its initial goals, with the benefit of reducing international casualties. With a cosmopolitan view, I conclude by presenting the United States with an ethical obligation to pursue a policy of legalization instead of placing moral weight on individual drug use.

From 1776 to the Vietnam War, the United States had never lost a war. The loss was an embarrassment, or shame to the military industrial complex, and it exposed the country to its false delusion of endless omnipotence. From perpetual self-confidence, Americans descended into the abyss of self-doubt and interrogation. Politicians continue to banter the view of American exceptionalism and though the United States continues as the most impressive world power ever, it lives in a post-Vietnam era; grappling with the awkward but undeniable fact that President Johnson’s “raggedy ass fourth-rate (Southeastern Asia) country”  had routed it from Saigon. Though the War had been over for 20 years, the haunting ghosts and legacy of the Vietnam war hadn't vanished.  Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in 1995, admitting to being haunted by the government’s mistakes and convoluted role in Vietnam, “People don’t want to admit they’ve made mistakes. We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

The chapter explores John Adams's musical language in Nixon in China.

This thesis aims assess the dramatic success of Nixon in China and examine the work’s place in twentieth century opera and American culture. The Introduction presents biographical material on the composer, librettist and director, followed by a discussion of their collaboration, and a brief summary of the performance history of the work. The opening chapter explores the libretto. Chapter Two examines John Adams’s musical language, including the basic procedures by which the music operates. Chapter Three discusses the critical reception of the opera with analyses of selected passages. The fourth and final chapter provides an examination of the place of Nixon in China in the history of opera and contemporary American culture.

Crime surged in the 1960s and 1970s, a time of economic, social and political upheaval in the United States. Crime defined the era, from high level political assassination, abuse of power and corruption in government, to murder, robbery, burglary, and drug abuse on the streets. The surge itself was dramatic but relatively swift. It occurred with increasing intensity from the mid 1960s and started to abate in the early 1970s. The consequences however would last for at least a generation even after crime began to decline in the 1990s. The potential causes are discussed and evaluated. The economic transition, and with it the changing nature of cities, altered status relations, and demographics were all important factors but drug abuse and in particular heroin was a trigger. A ‘drug economy’, emerged reaching from the poppy fields of Turkey and South East Asia, to the inner cities in America where heroin was distributed and consumed. Furthermore, crimes from murder to larceny were a natural by-product. The policy narrative considers the drug abuse and crime prevention policies of the Nixon Administration. The President had run on a law-and-order platform in the election of 1968; it was a political imperative for his Administration to bring the crime problem under control. Drug abuse prevention policy emerged as the principal weapon. This narrative is complemented by an empirical investigation into the links between crime surges and heroin epidemics, looking at selected cities from 1963-74. This is tested using graphical methods and multivariate regression analysis. It is clearly demonstrated that the spread of heroin was mirrored by the crime surge. Finally the consequences for law enforcement, penal and drug abuse policy are considered, showing that only now are the adverse effects of the crime surge being resolved with the downplaying of crime and drugs in the national conversation.

American prevailing perceptions of the Cold War serve current US national foreign policy process goals that emphasize the expansion of US global influence. The prevailing view in the American polity remains that the Soviet Union was an aggressive, imperialist threat that the US defeated through its containment strategy. The validity of this ultimately self-serving assumption requires critique because Communist state postwar foreign and public policy behavior patterns did not conform with this prevailing position. Failure of the academy generally to predict the remarkably peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union is further evidence that this politically prevailing viewpoint was fundamentally flawed. Current dissent is in effect tied to the New Left that emerged partly as a critique to Cold War assumptions that produced the Vietnam debacle. This article analyzes the political interests that support the prevailing belief that the US nevertheless won the Cold War despite this left dissent. These interests overwhelm current critique of US global dominance that continues to rely on Cold War-era formulated hard power containment prescriptions. By accepting the validity of this assumption that the US won the Cold War, the academy weakens its ability to critique US foreign policy behavior in the so-called war on terror.

In 1973, Norman Mailer published a work of creative nonfiction about the life of the actor Marilyn Monroe, entitled Marilyn: A Biography. Released amid a wave of American nostalgia for the 1950s and during the Watergate investigation, the book was upheld as evidence of a 'witch-hunt' Watergate culture. In this article, I will analyse the initial reception of Marilyn and its affective history. Situating Marilyn at the intersections of biography, New Journalism, and Watergate discourses demonstrates the important role historical context can play in analysis of celebrity biography. Considering Marilyn in its political, cultural, and literary context illuminates the ways in which the project's destabilisation of truth aligned with New Journalist pursuits while clashing with Watergate era longings for stability, a collision which excited the ire of many of its initial critics and an early reception that continues to shape responses to the work to this day.

This paper examines the reasons behind the normalization process of U.S. - China relations in the 1969 - 1976 periods, when the U.S. was under the Nixon Administration. The paper refer to declassified documents from the U.S. Department of State to explore the reasons why the United States decided to normalize relations with China, despite facing risks in doing so.

A través de siete apartados se analiza la cronología de Star Wars, el contexto histórico-social que la determina y cómo se evidencia en la saga. También por qué se puede considerar Star Wars como un mito moderno y cómo refleja el viaje del héroe. Son estudiados aspectos religiosos que gira alrededor del concepto de la Fuerza, los aprendizajes biopedagógicos, la interculturalidad manifiesta en la saga y los elementos que ésta posee para que se desarrolle un nuevo camino espiritual llamado jedismo.
Abstract Through seven sections the chronology of Star Wars, the historical and social context that determines it and how is evident in the saga are analyzed. Also in which way Star Wars is a modern myth and how the hero's journey is reflected. Eeligious aspects that revolves around the concept of the Force, the biopedagogy learning, interculturalism manifested in the saga and the elements that this series of films has to develop a new spiritual path called jedism are studied.

Makale, ABD yöneticilerinin konuşmalarından ve yazılarından yola çıkarak ABD'nin Vietnam Savaşı'nda izlediği politikanın analizini yapıyor. Birincil kaynakların önemli bir yer tuttuğu makale özellikle savaşın haklılığı ve ABD politikalarının gidişatı arasındaki ilişkiye dikkat çekiyor. Yazı Teori dergisinin Şubat 2016 tarihli sayısında yayınlanmıştır.

Who is winning in the Taiwan Strait? What is China’s strategy towards North Korea? Today, the American media space is increasingly dominated by anti-Chinese headlines, alleging either Chinese aggression or non-action. However, do these stories see the full picture? Is it truly Chinese aggression, or simply self-protection and a different diplomatic strategy?

Western-based American and Chinese military philosophies are fundamentally different, such that looking at Chinese decisions through a Western lens will not reveal fundamental truths behind the Great Wall. Since China embarked on the mission of national development in 1978, there has been a revival of interest in Sun Tzu and other classical Chinese military thought in China. To see beyond the wall, we look at Sun Tzu and his famous Art of War which has permeated Chinese military history for the last 2,500 years and continues to play a large role in strategic decision-making today.

By replacing Aristotle and Machiavelli with Confucius and Sun Tzu, we are able to understand both Western and Chinese military styles. The West assumes that China measures it’s power strategy and model based on western notions and concepts of war. However, while western concepts of war are based on ideas developed during Greek and Roman empires, echoing strategies and logic from Aristotle and Machiavelli, Chinese concepts of war are based on philosophers such as Confucius and Sun Tzu, whose teachings hold several key differences in approach to war. According to Sun Tzu, it is in China’s best interest to avoid war.

It is vital for the current U.S. administration to understand Chinese ancient philosophy when evaluating China’s diplomatic moves. While the U.S. views the Taiwan Strait situation as China sparring for military power and capabilities, China views the situation in their favor based on strategy, encirclement and terrain. The ancient game of wei qi is being used as a model for China’s encirclement by using the string of pearls in the Indian Ocean and military action in the South China Sea. 

Chinese foreign policy is directed by the concept of ‘shi’, present and future energies used for long-term strategic planning. Implementing ancient Chinese thought to game theory, we are able to understand that China will naturally strive to a state of perfect information, as told from Sun Tzu’s text in understanding the opponent’s plan. Based on mutual interdependence, game theory helps isolate principles of abstract decision-making when the outcome of people’s choices depends on what others decide.

Applying Sun Tzu thought to game theory places a strong advantage of moving away from simultaneous games and thus shifting to sequential ones. Cyber hacking should not come as a mystery to the West, as the Chinese are striving for a state of perfect information. These key differences can be seen through Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the popular Chinese strategic game similar to chess called wei qi. China’s objective of understanding the opponent thoroughly, otherwise known as cultural salience, is an important strategic advantage described in “The Art of War”.  It is virtually impossible and extremely dangerous to play the game of wei qi with a chess mindset. Different from western thought, Chinese thought stresses subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.

En este trabajo se abordarán los sucesos más destacables ocurridos en la década de 1960 en Estados Unidos desde una perspectiva política y social. Una vez entendido su contexto, es necesario explicar de forma individual los movimientos sociales y contraculturales para comprender el cambio producido en la sociedad estadounidense y su posterior relevancia.

La etapa del colonialismo ha (casi) terminado, sin embargo ha quedado vigente la colonialidad, como forma de regulación de las existencias de los territorios colonizados y, por otra parte, el neocolonialismo, última etapa del capitalismo avanzado, que impone condiciones de subjetivación que se vuelven inapelables, dada su configuración. Imposible rebelarse ante sus nefastos efectos. Desde África hasta México, el neocolonialismo y su régimen de explotación y opresión decide sobre la forma de existencia e incluso sobre la vida y muertes de mujeres y hombres. ¿Cómo podría el psicoanálisis no interrogarse al respecto?

The prominence of racial and antiwar movements in the 1960s left important legacies to American society, but they also provoked the rise of a powerful conservative movement in the United States. This paper will examine three circumstances in the 1960s United States: the government’s institutionalization of civil rights reforms, the government’s handling of the Vietnam War and the characteristics of the antiwar movements. Together, these three state of affairs aroused notable responses from different domestic groups in the 1960s, leading to a change of partisan alignment for white southerners and working-class Americans. Overall, the series of racial and antiwar movements of the 1960s brought a fundamental change in the constituency of partisanship and marked the beginning of the modern conservative American society from the late 1960s and onwards.

Forthcoming in a shortened version in Coady &  Lippert-Rasmussen eds  Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy '
Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? Not necessarily, not always, and maybe not even usually. But it IS intellectually vicious to be a consistent conspiracy skeptic. The broad-band skeptic commits intellectual suicide whilst the restricted skeptic blinds herself to facts which, as an active citizen, she really needs to know. Both are vicious, though self-imposed blindness is better than epistemic suicide. As in other areas, so with conspiracy theories: the virtuous policy is to proportion belief to the evidence.

The paper contains an extended cirque of a recent paper by Quassim Cassam in in Aeon Magazine and of Sunstein and Vermeule (2008) 'Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures' .

Throughout his career, John Williams has set the musical tone for the American presidency, most elaborately with his scores for Oliver Stone's controversial films JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). While invested in capturing the character of these commanders in chief through musical codes, Williams's soundtracks are equally engaged in the act of the evocation and telling of “history.” Specifically, they construct a tragic myth of 1960s America in which the promise represented by JFK is destroyed from without, and Nixon from within, both by the malevolent forces of the military-industrial complex. In considering the thematic and dramatic means by which Williams paints his orchestral portraits, I reveal the extent to which music supports Stone's paranoiac narratives, especially in cases where the director's collage-like visual aesthetic puts pressure on the otherwise nostalgic traits of Williams's default tonal style.
I offer a music-analytical approach to JFK and Nixon informed by interviews, studies of political mythology and paranoia, and musicological appraisals of Williams's music. Stone's 1960s-as-lapsarian-metanarrative positions Kennedy as a romanticized absence, an image of the fabular fallen King, and Williams renders him as a public recollection rather than a human being with interiority. Nixon, by contrast, is a tragic antihero, consumed by dark forces of history and an abundance of ambivalent thematic material. Particular attention is paid to the dismantling of Kennedy's noble leitmotif during JFK’s prologue and motorcade sequence and to the near-fascistic musical accompaniment of Nixon's speeches. Having demonstrated the active role these scores play, I conclude that Williams's music constitutes an authoring of history in a strong, albeit postmodern, sense, consistent with but independent from Stone's screenplay.

l presente lavoro è il risultato di un percorso di ricerca, di natura storico- politica, dedicato ai rapporti tra Stati Uniti e America Latina intercorsi dai primi anni Sessanta fino a metà degli anni Settanta. Tale ricerca si sofferma principalmente sulle relazioni inter-americane avvenute nel contesto mondiale della Guerra Fredda. La presente ricerca prova, quindi, a dare una spiegazione ad alcune questioni centrali: quale fu l’atteggiamento nei confronti dell’America Latina, rispettivamente, delle Amministrazioni Kennedy, Johnson e Nixon; in che misura gli Stati Uniti abbiano effettivamente cercato di aiutare lo sviluppo del subcontinente; quanto le decisioni prese da Washington furono condizionate dall’obiettivo di frenare l’avanzata del comunismo nella regione.

Paper given at the 2017 HOTCUS Annual Conference at University College Dublin.

The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) saw an unprecedented display of international cooperation in space when American and Soviet spacecraft docked together in orbit. Outer space had long been synonymous with the future in both the American and Soviet imaginations and Apollo-Soyuz drew on these associations. The “handshake in space” was intended to be a visionary dramatisation of detente, Nixon and Ford’s policy of reducing Cold War tensions by entangling the USSR in a web of cooperative agreements. Detente’s supporters contended the project’s three years of intense cooperation between the former space race adversaries was an exemplary form of US-Soviet collaboration. If we can live and work together in space, went the argument, why not on earth?

This paper explores ideas that I hope to adapt into a journal article and was commended with an “Honourable Mention” from the HOTCUS Committee in the competition for best postgraduate conference paper. It examines the ideology behind Apollo-Soyuz and how its architects claimed its extremely specific form of scientific-technical cooperation was a blueprint that could be followed in wider US-Soviet relations. Apollo-Soyuz was held as the realisation of astronaut-cosmonaut kinship, an emotive and unbreakable bond between spacefarers that transcended ideological rivalry. Detente was construed as politicians catching up to a certainty that space travellers were supposedly well aware of: all men were brothers.  Ultimately, though, Apollo-Soyuz’s model of cooperation was not robust enough to survive the challenge posed by a decline in US-Soviet relations.  NASA had characterised space cooperation as a unique “window” to the USSR’s scientific-technical elite but, in an increasingly tense and mistrustful atmosphere, detente’s critics were able to caricature the ASTP as a conduit for Soviet technological espionage. The Apollo-Soyuz blueprint collapsed under the weight of the grand expectations placed on it and proved to be an anomaly during the Cold War rather than the beginning of a new cooperative paradigm.

The fall of the Bretton Woods international monetary system, in 1971, has often been interpreted as a defeat of politics – namely the choices of United States – on the part of economic forces. The documents of the Nixon presidency (1969-74), declassified at the National Archives of the United States, allow the adoption of a different perspective. The monetary instability of the second half of the 1960's, made it possible for the new republican administration to develop, since 1969, lines of thought and policies, aimed at abandoning the “embedded liberalism”of Bretton Woods, in the name of a return to more traditional laissez faire practices. Influenced by important foreign policy considerations as well, the neo-liberal international economic choices of the Nixon administration anticipated by a decade those of Ronald Reagan, and contributed to pave them the way. The contents of this essay have been analyzed in greater detail in the monograph "Il governo del dollaro. Interdipendenza economica e potere statunitense negli anni di Richard Nixon" (Firenze, 2006).

The Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate a fundamental controversy between the two superpowers of the cold war.
the kitchen figured both as symbol and as material fact of modernism and of technology.
To discuss the kitchen was to discuss the technological innovations and promises of the twentieth century.

Se hace una revisión crítica del Premio Nobel de Economía, con una recopilación del papel de Yanus Varoufakis en las negociaciones con la Unión Europea en 2015, con el apoyo de Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman y Thomas Piketty, a partir de una crítica realizada por el economista colombiano Guillermo Maya Muñoz, en el que se muestra la farsa, que hay tras el Nobel de Economía.

Vice-President Richard Nixon’s 1953 diplomatic mission to Asia was a watershed in the development of his understanding of the Eastern world, extending the goodwill of the United States to a number of countries and providing Nixon a background in the region’s geopolitical processes and affairs in the wake of the Chinese communist revolution. Through analysis of publically-available primary documents located at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, this paper examines and analyzes the ideological framework located within Nixon’s 1953 diplomatic trip in the broader context of the Cold War. In mainland Southeast Asia, namely the countries of Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), Nixon’s visits illustrate the significant influence of the communist threat on American foreign policy directives in the region. Evidence indicates that this trip provided Nixon on-the-ground insight into the political dynamics of the region, including a deeper awareness of the features and functions of communism in the societies that he was visiting, and helped to shape the public perceptions of him at home and abroad. Nixon’s trip enabled him to recognize Southeast Asia’s growing significance on the world’s stage, providing important insights about the implications of the rise of the People’s Republic of China, the intensifying Cold War against communism in Southeast Asia, and the importance of American involvement throughout the region that would last throughout his career and into his presidency. The evidence presented here also suggests that Nixon’s trip enhanced public perceptions of his abilities as a policy maker, and thus in turn his rise to the U.S. presidency, where his own understanding of Asia, developed especially during his 1953 trip, took on new but old directions with massive global implications.

While scholarship in carceral studies both credits and blames Richard Nixon for starting the war on drugs, this paper’s focus on youth politics and the marijuana controversy during his first term shows a more complicated story. At first, Richard Nixon’s politics of youth continued the law and order approach that had shaped his campaign in 1968. Nixon railed against the drug culture’s role in the youth revolt as he cheered his aides to “hit it hard,” opting to, “Enforce the law, you've got to scare them.” However, marijuana laws required some leniency after Kent State, when the Ohio State National Guard shot at protesters and killed four students. After Kent State, some polls showed Nixon’s approval rating as low as thirty-one percent on campuses. This problem became even more acute when the voting age fell to eighteen in 1971, allowing over fourteen million youth to vote for the first time. Through his own PR offensive, Nixon also offered an alternative political culture – “square power”– defined as “the fall in a community’s tolerance of moral looseness.” Thus, though Nixon’s marijuana policies may have fallen short of his conservative law and order agenda, he still used the “gateway theory” to link various groups ranging from women, Sunbelt suburbanites, religious voters and ethnic, blue collar whites to expand his constituency.