Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”

This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal as well as political event, and proved to be one of the most astounding examples of “government transparency” in modern times — indeed, it helped demystify and desanctify the Office of the Presidency, a very republican (if not pro-Republican Party) development.

On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.

A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.

Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.

On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.