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Edited on Thu Feb-05-04 09:43 AM by G_j
www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9901
Nixon's Children
Stephen Pizzo is a financial journalist who lives in Sebastapol, California.
Here's a trivia question of no small consequence. When, about what event and by whom was the following statement made?
>But out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment; and the—the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong.
You could be excused if you said it was George W. Bush complaining about the recent revelations by WMD inspector David Kay, but you would be wrong. Actually, former President Richard M. Nixon uttered those fateful words during a meeting in the Oval Office with aide H.R. Halderman. The date was June 14, 1971 and Nixon was obsessing over the publication a day earlier of the Pentagon Papers in The Washington Post.
I came across this remarkable quote quite by accident while doing research the other day. At first it simply struck me as ironic that three decades later another sitting president's pronouncements about the reasons and objectives for war had been publicly revealed to be false. ...more...
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