President Nixon Quotes

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

So far as Im concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.

Being on President Nixon's enemies list was the highest single honor I've ever received. Who knows who's listening to me now and what government list I'm on?

The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

Some people thought we were presenting Archie as a false character. President Nixon thought we were making a fool out of a good man.

One of the glories of doing the book So You Want to Be President? was the shifts in tone, where I was able to be humorous and then very serious. And the impeachment page is certainly the best example of that. I didn't have to think too much about how to present this one. I got the idea right away that a good way of showing the shame of President Nixon would be to put him down in the shadows under the Lincoln Monument, with Lincoln sort of glaring down at him from an elevated, better-lit position.

I firmly believed throughout 1971 that the major hurdle to winning the presidency was winning the Democratic nomination. I believed that any reasonable Democrat would defeat President Nixon. I now think that no one could have defeated him in 1972.

I think I understand the Constitution a little bit because in 1971 we went off the gold standard under President Nixon into the Federal Reserve notes because we were a worldwide currency.

Newly released transcripts reveal that President Nixon was drunk during the Arab-Israeli crisis of 1973. After hearing this, President Bush said, 'Hey, so was I!'

When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2-3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different and vastly counterproductive.

Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values.

If President Nixon's secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been Moses' secretary, there would only be eight commandments.

When President Nixon said that the American people don't want their foreign policy dictated from the street, unfortunately, he said the most clever political statement I think he's ever said.

(President Nixon,) in the face of a vote to impeach he might try, as "commander-in-chief", to use military forces to keep himself in power.

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.

In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.

I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations.

Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents - Nixon, Ike, and Reagan - you see them failing on this score.

Egyptian President Sadat had a belly dancer entertain President Nixon at a state dinner. Mr. Nixon was really impressed. He hadn't seen contortions like that since Rose Mary Woods.

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the 'smoking gun' tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

I think the Republicans and conservatives generally were alienated by America's unsuccessful effort in Vietnam, and a lot of them, as Henry Kissinger admitted the other day, never got over President Nixon's impeachment, and didn't think, even though there was a pattern of illegal conduct there, sanctioned by the White House and proved by the tapes and other documentary evidence and testimony, they didn't believe that the impeachment was justified, and they didn't think he should have resigned.

If we had pursued the war on cancer which President Nixon declared in 1970, Jack Kemp might be alive today.

As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!

There is the case of Henry Kissinger who was a known scholar who later became the National Security Advisor to President Nixon and later on Secretary of State. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing relations between the U.S. and China. At the same time that he was doing that he was also encouraging all sorts of covert actions against Cuba including political assassinations. This contradiction is one that is hard to understand.

I became a Republican in the summer of 1972. I was involved in running President Nixon's re-election campaign in California and became part of his administration at the start of his second term.

President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.

We want accountability. We just buried a president [President Gerald Ford] who did not hold another president [President Nixon] accountable for war crimes and that's why we're in Iraq right now. Our leaders who get us into these messes are the ones who need to be held accountable.

Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I'm not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. I was proud when President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor, which we should have done long ago, because I think we're helping a brave little country defend herself against Communist invasion. That's what I tried to show in The Green Berets and I took plenty of abuse from the critics.

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.