Presidential Misconduct

Presidential Misconduct
Author: James M. Banner Jr.
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1620975505

Named a best book of the year by The Economist and Foreign Affairs "A whole book devoted exclusively to the misconduct of American presidents and their responses to charges of misconduct is without precedent." —from the introduction to the 1974 edition by C. Vann Woodward, Pulitzer Prize–winning Yale historian The historic 1974 report for the House Committee on the Judiciary, updated for today by leading presidential historians In May 1974, as President Richard Nixon faced impeachment following the Watergate scandal, the House Judiciary Committee commissioned a historical account of the misdeeds of past presidents. The account, compiled by leading presidential historians of the day, reached back to George Washington's administration and was designed to provide a benchmark against which Nixon's misdeeds could be measured. What the report found was that, with the exception of William Henry Harrison (who served less than a month), every American president has been accused of misconduct: James Buchanan was charged with rigging the election of 1856; Ulysses S. Grant was reprimanded for not firing his corrupt staffer, Orville Babcock, in the "Whiskey Ring" bribery scandal; and Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration faced repeated charges of malfeasance in the Works Progress Administration. Now, as another president and his subordinates face an array of charges on a wide range of legal and constitutional offenses, a group of presidential historians has come together under the leadership of James M. Banner, Jr.—one of the historians who contributed to the original report—to bring the 1974 account up to date through Barack Obama's presidency. Based on current scholarship, this new material covers such well-known episodes as Nixon's Watergate crisis, Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, Clinton's impeachment, and George W. Bush's connection to the exposure of intelligence secrets. But oft-forgotten events also take the stage: Carter's troubles with advisor Bert Lance, Reagan's savings and loan crisis, George H.W. Bush's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Obama's Solyndra loan controversy. The only comprehensive study of American presidents' misconduct and the ways in which chief executives and members of their official families have responded to the charges brought against them, this new edition is designed to serve the same purpose as the original 1974 report: to provide the historical context and metric against which the actions of the current administration may be assessed.

Without Honor

Without Honor
Author: Jerome M. Zeifman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1995
Genre: Impeachments
ISBN: 9781560251286

Peopled with key players such as Spiro Agnew, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, this insider expose of Nixon era intrigue, written by a man who played a key role during the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment proceedings, details the behind-closed-door deals, embarrassments, and illegalities of the Nixon administration.

Comparative Constitutional Law

Comparative Constitutional Law
Author: Tom Ginsburg
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0857931210

This landmark volume of specially commissioned, original contributions by top international scholars organizes the issues and controversies of the rich and rapidly maturing field of comparative constitutional law. Divided into sections on constitutional design and redesign, identity, structure, individual rights and state duties, courts and constitutional interpretation, this comprehensive volume covers over 100 countries as well as a range of approaches to the boundaries of constitutional law. While some chapters reference the text of legal instruments expressly labeled constitutional, others focus on the idea of entrenchment or take a more functional approach. Challenging the current boundaries of the field, the contributors offer diverse perspectives - cultural, historical and institutional - as well as suggestions for future research. A unique and enlightening volume, Comparative Constitutional Law is an essential resource for students and scholars of the subject.

Richard M. Nixon

Richard M. Nixon
Author: Elizabeth Drew
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2007-05-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 142998127X

The complex man at the center of America's most self-destructive presidency In this provocative and revelatory assessment of the only president ever forced out of office, the legendary Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew explains how Richard M. Nixon's troubled inner life offers the key to understanding his presidency. She shows how Nixon was surprisingly indecisive on domestic issues and often wasn't interested in them. Turning to international affairs, she reveals the inner workings of Nixon's complex relationship with Henry Kissinger, and their mutual rivalry and distrust. The Watergate scandal that ended his presidency was at once an overreach of executive power and the inevitable result of his paranoia and passion for vengeance. Even Nixon's post-presidential rehabilitation was motivated by a consuming desire for respectability, and he succeeded through his remarkable resilience. Through this book we finally understand this complicated man. While giving him credit for his achievements, Drew questions whether such a man—beleaguered, suspicious, and motivated by resentment and paranoia—was fit to hold America's highest office, and raises large doubts that he was.

The Politics of Presidential Impeachment

The Politics of Presidential Impeachment
Author: Daniel P. Franklin
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438480032

The Politics of Presidential Impeachment takes a distinctive and fresh look at the impeachment provision of the US Constitution. Instead of studying it from a legal-constitutional perspective, the authors use a social science approach incorporating extensive case studies and quantitative analysis. Focusing on four presidents who faced impeachment processes—Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton—they examine the conditions under which presidential impeachment is likely to occur and argue that partisanship and the evolving relationship between Congress and the president determine its effectiveness as an institutional constraint. They find that, in our contemporary political context, the propensity of Congress to utilize the impeachment tool is more likely, but given the state of heightened partisanship, impeachment is less likely to result in removal of a president. The authors conclude that impeachment is no longer a credible threat and thus no longer an effective tool in the arsenal of checks and balances. The book also offers a postscript that discusses the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump.

The Last Liberal Republican

The Last Liberal Republican
Author: John Roy Price
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2023-11-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0700636137

The Last Liberal Republican is a memoir from one of Nixon’s senior domestic policy advisors. John Roy Price—a member of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, a cofounder of the Ripon Society, and an employee on Nelson Rockefeller’s campaigns—joined Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and later John D. Ehrlichman, in the Nixon White House to develop domestic policies, especially on welfare, hunger, and health. Based on those policies, and the internal White House struggles around them, Price places Nixon firmly in the liberal Republican tradition of President Theodore Roosevelt, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and President Dwight Eisenhower. Price makes a valuable contribution to our evolving scholarship and understanding of the Nixon presidency. Nixon himself lamented that he would be remembered only for Watergate and China. The Last Liberal Republican provides firsthand insight into key moments regarding Nixon’s political and policy challenges in the domestic social policy arena. Price offers rich detail on the extent to which Nixon and his staff straddled a precarious balance between a Democratic-controlled Congress and an increasingly powerful conservative tide in Republican politics. The Last Liberal Republican provides a blow-by-blow inside view of how Nixon surprised the Democrats and shocked conservatives with his ambitious proposal for a guaranteed family income. Beyond Nixon’s surprising embrace of what we today call universal basic income, the thirty-seventh president reordered and vastly expanded the patchy food stamp program he inherited and built nutrition education and children’s food services into schools. Richard Nixon even almost achieved a national health insurance program: fifty years ago, with a private sector framework as part of his generous benefits insurance coverage for all, Nixon included coverage of preexisting conditions, prescription drug coverage for all, and federal subsidies for those who could not afford the premiums. The Last Liberal Republican will be a valuable resource for presidency scholars who are studying Nixon, his policies, the state of the Republican Party, and how the Nixon years relate to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

Richard M. Nixon

Richard M. Nixon
Author: Conrad Black
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 1169
Release: 2008-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786727039

From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, Richard Nixon was a polarizing figure in American politics, admired for his intelligence, savvy, and strategic skill, and reviled for his shady manner and cutthroat tactics. Conrad Black, whose epic biography of FDR was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, now separates the good in Nixon -- his foreign initiatives, some of his domestic policies, and his firm political hand -- from the sinister, in a book likely to generate enormous attention and controversy. Black believes the hounding of Nixon from office was partly political retribution from a lifetime's worth of enemies and Nixon's misplaced loyalty to unworthy subordinates, and not clearly the consequence of crimes in which he participated. Conrad Black's own recent legal travails, though hardly comparable, have undoubtedly given him an unusual insight into the pressures faced by Nixon in his last two years as president and the first few years of his retirement.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon
Author: Roger Morris
Publisher: Owl Books
Total Pages: 1024
Release: 1991-11-01
Genre: Presidents
ISBN: 9780805018349

Chronicles Nixon's rise to political prominence, from his pre-World War II government service to his under-the-table stab at the vice-presidency in 1952, in the first of a projected three-volume biography

The Nixon Defense

The Nixon Defense
Author: John W. Dean
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 786
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0143127381

Based on Nixon’s overlooked recordings, New York Times bestselling author John W. Dean connects the dots between what we’ve come to believe about Watergate and what actually happened Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate. In The Nixon Defense, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it? Through narrative and contemporaneous dialogue, Dean connects dots that have never been connected, including revealing how and why the Watergate break-in occurred, what was on the mysterious 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s recorded conversations, and more. In what will stand as the most authoritative account of one of America’s worst political scandals, The Nixon Defense shows how the disastrous mistakes of Watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

The Nixon Conspiracy

The Nixon Conspiracy
Author: Geoff Shepard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1642937169

Geoff Shepard’s shocking exposé of corrupt collusion between prosecutors, judges, and congressional staff to void Nixon’s 1972 landslide reelection. Their success changed the course of American history. Geoff Shepard had a ringside seat to the unfolding Watergate debacle. As the youngest lawyer on Richard Nixon’s staff, he personally transcribed the Oval Office tape in which Nixon appeared to authorize getting the CIA to interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation, and even coined the phrase “the smoking gun.” Like many others, the idealistic Shepard was deeply disappointed in the president. But as time went on, the meticulous lawyer was nagged by the persistent sense that something wasn’t right with the case against Nixon. The Nixon Conspiracy is a detailed and definitive account of the Watergate prosecutors’ internal documents uncovered after years of painstaking research in previously sealed archives. Shepard reveals the untold story of how a flawed but honorable president was needlessly brought down by a corrupt, deep state, big media alliance—a circumstance that looks all too familiar today. In this hard-hitting exposé, Shepard reveals the real smoking gun: the prosecutors’ secret, but erroneous, “Road Map” which caused grand jurors to name Nixon a co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up and the House Judiciary Committee to adopt its primary Article of Impeachment. Shepard’s startling conclusion is that Nixon didn’t actually have to resign. The proof of his good faith is right there on the tapes. Instead, he should have taken his case to a Senate impeachment trial—where, if everything we know now had come out—he would easily have won.