New Nixon Tapes and Files Released .

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WASHINGTON — On Jan. 23, 1973, when the Supreme Court struck down state criminal abortion laws in Roe v. Wade, President Richard M. Nixon made no public statement. But privately, newly released tapes reveal, he expressed ambivalence.

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

Nine months later, after Nixon precipitated the resignations of two top Justice Department officials and forced the firing of the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate affair, Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California and would later be president, told the White House that he heartily approved.

Reagan told the White House that the action — which would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” — was “probably the best thing that ever happened — none of them belong where they were,” according to a Nixon aide’s notes of the private conversation.

Those disclosures were among the revelations in more than 150 hours of tape and tens of thousands of pages of documents from the Nixon administration made public on Tuesday by the National Archives. The audio files were all posted online, as were a sampling of the documents, the rest of which are available in reading rooms.

The newly disclosed tapes were recorded by the secret microphones in the Oval Office from January and February 1973, and they shed new light on an intense moment in American history. The period included Nixon’s second inauguration, the ceasefire agreement for Vietnam, and the criminal trial of seven men over the burglary of the Democrats’ headquarters at the Watergate complex amid mounting revelations about their close ties to the White House.

reply to post by ChemBreather


Very interesting thanks for posting this topic . While Nixon views on abortion are racist his support for abortion in the event of rape is sensible . Nixon would be seen as being to Liberal today because he was pro choice and supported the creation of Legal aid and the Environmental Protection Agency .

Cheers xpert11 .

I was reading an online news item about this earlier today and one of the items Nixon mentioned having the Republican Party doing was having more women running for office on the Republican Party Ticket because they would sometime get more votes than the male Republican Party Candidate would get. It was, for Nixon, a rather novel idea.

reply to post by Wally Conley


Do you have a link to the story you mentioned ?
I would like to read it . Nixon paranoia aside he had a lot of political smarts and could even in some cases maybe said to be pragmatist unlike today Republican Party .

Cheers xpert11 .

Originally posted by xpert11
reply to post by ChemBreather

 

Very interesting thanks for posting this topic .

While Nixon views on abortion are racist his support for abortion in the event of rape is sensible . Nixon would be seen as being to Liberal today because he was pro choice and supported the creation of Legal aid and the Environmental Protection Agency .

Cheers xpert11 .

I'd like to point out racist the remarks are by today's standards back then it was pretty much unheard of a white and a black person having a child.

My parents use to tell me of how those that did have children (the children) where ridiculed, scorned and treated no better than a dog just because of their color. School was heck for them because a good majority of schools where still either black or white schools and a mixed child had no place to go without getting taunted, ridiculed and scorned by their classmates of course perpetuated by their upbringing. Only difference was adults kept it in the home but the kids of course didn't.