Hiram Revels was the first African-American to serve in the United States Senate. But it would be almost a century before an African-American would win election to the Senate by a popular vote, another Republican. In 1967, Massachusetts would send Edward William Brooke III to the Senate, for two full terms. He represented Massachusetts in the ( Read more... )

In 1972 incumbent President Richard Nixon sought re-election to the Presidency, after winning the office in a close contest four years earlier. It was the second election in which Nixon had been in a tight race, losing narrowly in 1960 in an election he believed had been stolen from him. In 1972 Nixon believed that his rise to power constituted a ( Read more... )

On December 26, 2006 (just 17 years ago today) Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., the 38th President of the United States, and the only person to hold the office without ever having been elected President or Vice-President, died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, of arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease and diffuse arteriosclerosis. Up until ( Read more... )

In the 1972 election, Richard Nixon would eventually achieve a landslide victory over Democrat George McGovern. But as the election approached, Nixon's re-election was far from certain. Nixon had been elected in 1968 on a platform to end American involvement in Vietnam, but four years later, the war raged on. Nixon's strategy of gradually handing ( Read more... )

Three weeks before the Democrats met for what would be their disastrous convention in Chicago in 1968, the Republicans held their convention in Miami Beach, Florida from August 5th to the 8th at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It was a much more restrained affair. News reports were about what happened at the convention and not in the streets.


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Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother, Dorothy Ayer Gardner, separated from Ford's father, leslie Lynch King Sr., just sixteen days after Ford's birth, fleeing from an abusive marriage. Dorothy Gardner and King Sr. divorced in December 1913 and Ford's mother gained full custody of her son. On February 1, 1916, Dorothy Gardner ( Read more... )

On December 26, 2006 (just 16 years ago today) Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., the 38th President of the United States, and the only person to hold the office without ever having been elected President or Vice-President, died at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, of arteriosclerotic cerebrovascular disease and diffuse arteriosclerosis. Up until ( Read more... )

When President Richard Milhous Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon celebrated their first Christmas in the White House in 1969, they began a tradition of gifting Presidential portraits to their staff members. That year they gave reproductions of Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George Washington. The Hallmark company was contracted to produce 3,500 ( Read more... )

It is virtually impossible to write a succinct article about Richard Nixon and Watergate. It has been the subject of numerous books, most of which have been large books. (One recent one come to mind, John Dean's 2014 work The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (reviewed here in this community). Acknowledging that difficulty at the ( Read more... )

(This was originally posted on April 24, 2018 as part of our series on the pivotal year of 1968. Though more about the protest than the President, it nevertheless chronicles a interesting time in American political history and tells a fascinating story from those turbulent times.)On May 17, 1968, nine Roman Catholic activists, who became known as ( Read more... )