Quotations, notes, and comments from "Beyond Peace" by Richard Nixon
"Rampant private enterprise, totally unrestrained by enlightened but limited government, would have a heart full of capital and an empty soul."
"Those on the right and left pursue their extreme convictions too uncompromisingly. But the most disappointing group of political leaders are the mushy moderates. They compromise and temporize < > until they stand for nothing." Richard Nixon writes very well and these immoderate and contradictory sentiments might even be a little bit amusing, but at other times in this book he is not so funny.
"The popular idea that the United Nations can play a larger role in resolving international conflicts is illusory."
"We should enlist U.N. support for our policies but not put the U.N. in charge of them."
"In 1994, for the first time in ten visits to Moscow in thirty-five years, I was able to meet with all the leading opposition leaders." Apparently, in Richard Nixon's annual visits to Russia in 1993 and 1994 he met and talked with at least 14 government and other political people including: Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Zhirinovsky, Rutskoi, Yavlinski, Shahrai, Shokhin, Chernomydrin, Kozyrev, Grachev, Gaidar, Lobov, Zyuganov, and Stankevich. Besides them he met and talked with; Kravchuk, in Ukraine; Gorbunous, in Latvia; Walesa, in Poland; and Havel, in the Czech Republic.
"The grisly history of the twentieth century demonstrates the evil that can be done by governments that try to change human nature. < > Though these attempts ultimately failed, they inflicted death on more than 160 million people through deliberate and "politically motivated carnage.""
"Religious beliefs also help to inoculate Americans against the "idea of the infinite perfectibility of man," to which, Tocqueville observed, democracies are especially prone." Again Richard Nixon refers to "the world's great religions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism - {which} have inspired people for centuries." This is not the only time that Richard Nixon has omitted Hinduism in his list of "the world's great religions." Although Hinduism is often referred to as the world's oldest religion, besides having hundreds of millions of followers, he never gives any explanation.
"Beyond Peace is my tenth book, and my ninth since resigning the Presidency twenty years ago this year. After completing my first, Six Crises, in 1962, I vowed that I would never write another. Since then, I have learned to make less Sherman-like promises. This volume completes a six-volume series with an emphasis on East-West relations that I began in 1979 with The Real War..."
Richard Nixon completed Beyond Peace on March 30, 1994. Nineteen days later, on April 18, Richard Nixon "suffered a severe stroke" and died four days later on April 22, 1994.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Experimental Blog # 192
Quotations, comments, and notes from "In the Arena" - A Memoir of Victory, Defeat and Renewal by Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon writes in very great detail about at least eleven "myths", or falsehoods, that are associated with the whole "Watergate" episode that ended his presidency.
"The most preposterous myth was that I or < > White House staff erased eighteen and one-half minutes of incriminating conversation from one of the White House tapes. < >They ignored the perfectly plausible explanation that, given the design of the tape recorder < > it was possible to erase a tape accidentally. They overlooked the fact that < > complete notes of the meeting, which were turned over to the courts, contained nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, it begs credulity to believe that I or my staff would erase this one segment of tape and yet leave untouched dozens of hours of < > conversations that I clearly would have preferred not to see made public."
"From an intellectual standpoint, the decade between 1978 and 1988 was the most creative period of my life." "My travels during those ten years were extensive." A list of 26 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa follows. "In most of these countries I met with heads of government."
Besides "Six Crises", which was written in 1962, and "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon", Richard Nixon writes about 5 other books that he wrote. Five of these seven books, he says, "were < > international bestsellers, {but} a serious non-fiction best seller at best reaches only about a hundred thousand people."
In his chapter entitled "Religion" Richard Nixon says, "I do not share the views of some well-intentioned anti-Communists that students should not be exposed to courses on Marxism." And, "In the end, it all comes down to whether the individual believes in something greater than himself." And in another chapter; "A student should know the rudiments < > and understand the tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the world's other great religion, Marxism-Leninism."
"I was not a good athlete. I went out for football, basketball, baseball, and track, and never made a letter. But I learned more about life from sitting on the bench with Chief Newman than I did getting As in philosophy courses."
"Marx believed that those who have capital exploit those who don't and that the solution was to give all capital to the state." "Capitalism, unlike communism, is not a religion; it is a morally neutral set of economic principles. It is a tool, not an end in itself, and it can be put to bad uses as well as good ones."
"I am reputed to have a pretty good memory for people's names. In fact, when I was in the House and even in the Senate, I could almost unerringly remember the names of hundreds of county chairmen, city chairmen, precinct chairman, volunteer workers, newspaper reporters and publishers, and prominent business people. As President < > whenever I knew I was going to meet people at a reception, a dinner, or other function, I thought that the least I could do was to remember guests' names, occupations, family backgrounds, and hometowns."
The above is very remarkable. However:
"After eight years of a popular President{Ronald Reagan} in the White House and three Republican Presidential landslides..." And, "In 1952, when Eisenhower was elected by a landslide..." The elections of 1952, 1980, and 1988 were not generally considered to be landslides according to the popular vote.
"In Marxist-Leninist theory, the Communist Party has a unique understanding of the inevitable processes of history and has the right to rule society without the consent of the people ..."
"To operate optimally, capitalism requires that all enjoy equality before the law and equality of opportunity. < > No society, including our own, has fully succeeded in establishing full equality in either sense."
"In the West, the non-socialist welfare state is committed to the proposition that the poor or unemployed will not become destitute."
" ...600,000 South Vietnamese perished in the South China Sea as they fled their country in anything that would float." According to other sources the number of people who died, although still very high, was somewhere between 50,000 to 200,000.
" ... no one had the power or the courage to tell him{Mao Tse-tung} to retire until the grim reaper called him to meet Marx a few months later."
Richard Nixon writes in very great detail about at least eleven "myths", or falsehoods, that are associated with the whole "Watergate" episode that ended his presidency.
"The most preposterous myth was that I or < > White House staff erased eighteen and one-half minutes of incriminating conversation from one of the White House tapes. < >They ignored the perfectly plausible explanation that, given the design of the tape recorder < > it was possible to erase a tape accidentally. They overlooked the fact that < > complete notes of the meeting, which were turned over to the courts, contained nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, it begs credulity to believe that I or my staff would erase this one segment of tape and yet leave untouched dozens of hours of < > conversations that I clearly would have preferred not to see made public."
"From an intellectual standpoint, the decade between 1978 and 1988 was the most creative period of my life." "My travels during those ten years were extensive." A list of 26 countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa follows. "In most of these countries I met with heads of government."
Besides "Six Crises", which was written in 1962, and "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon", Richard Nixon writes about 5 other books that he wrote. Five of these seven books, he says, "were < > international bestsellers, {but} a serious non-fiction best seller at best reaches only about a hundred thousand people."
In his chapter entitled "Religion" Richard Nixon says, "I do not share the views of some well-intentioned anti-Communists that students should not be exposed to courses on Marxism." And, "In the end, it all comes down to whether the individual believes in something greater than himself." And in another chapter; "A student should know the rudiments < > and understand the tenets of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the world's other great religion, Marxism-Leninism."
"I was not a good athlete. I went out for football, basketball, baseball, and track, and never made a letter. But I learned more about life from sitting on the bench with Chief Newman than I did getting As in philosophy courses."
"Marx believed that those who have capital exploit those who don't and that the solution was to give all capital to the state." "Capitalism, unlike communism, is not a religion; it is a morally neutral set of economic principles. It is a tool, not an end in itself, and it can be put to bad uses as well as good ones."
"I am reputed to have a pretty good memory for people's names. In fact, when I was in the House and even in the Senate, I could almost unerringly remember the names of hundreds of county chairmen, city chairmen, precinct chairman, volunteer workers, newspaper reporters and publishers, and prominent business people. As President < > whenever I knew I was going to meet people at a reception, a dinner, or other function, I thought that the least I could do was to remember guests' names, occupations, family backgrounds, and hometowns."
The above is very remarkable. However:
"After eight years of a popular President{Ronald Reagan} in the White House and three Republican Presidential landslides..." And, "In 1952, when Eisenhower was elected by a landslide..." The elections of 1952, 1980, and 1988 were not generally considered to be landslides according to the popular vote.
"In Marxist-Leninist theory, the Communist Party has a unique understanding of the inevitable processes of history and has the right to rule society without the consent of the people ..."
"To operate optimally, capitalism requires that all enjoy equality before the law and equality of opportunity. < > No society, including our own, has fully succeeded in establishing full equality in either sense."
"In the West, the non-socialist welfare state is committed to the proposition that the poor or unemployed will not become destitute."
" ...600,000 South Vietnamese perished in the South China Sea as they fled their country in anything that would float." According to other sources the number of people who died, although still very high, was somewhere between 50,000 to 200,000.
" ... no one had the power or the courage to tell him{Mao Tse-tung} to retire until the grim reaper called him to meet Marx a few months later."
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