this was general zachary taylor. now we have a poster from the 1848 campaign with taylor and the immortal mill phil more. the immortal millard fillmore. the whigs under taylor managed to win, to defeat the democratic party candidate. the democrats hurt very badly by internal divisions, especially within new york state, really serious battle within new york state. had new york gone a different direction, the democratic nominee might have been elected instead of zachary taylor, the whig nominee. serious internal divisions within the democratic party in new york. i think i may have talked about this before. a lot of factionalism among the democrats in new york. factionalism. hunker group and the barn burner group. we won't get into that, but suffice to say the whigs again end up with a successful candidate with electing the president in the form of zachary taylor, but ironically again, someone who's not really a committed whig. someone who is less than a diehard whig, you know, in the clay or webster mold. taylor had of

we have three small state presidents, bill clinton, zachary taylor and franklin pierce. that's it. virginia is the biggest state and for 32 of the first 36 years it's virginian and massachusetts is the second or third biggest state depending on how you count anded adamses. they dominate. it's not big state, small state. it's house versus senate. it's slavery, stupid, as james carville would say. that's what it's most about. before you have political parties to know if you're from massachusetts who is good from virginia and vice versa but once we have political parties merge, you can vote, even retrospective whether you like the incumbent, whether he's done anything good and you know enough to vote on that rhett respectively. this is almost the death of us. why did they get this one number down? they didn't have any track record among the states. none of the slave states had census formula so they didn't know. they just plucked a number out of a hat, plucked a number used for tax purposes and had representation in the house and the electoral college where it didn't fit. turned out t

polk would have been sort of irked at his successor, zachary taylor. tension between the two. taylor was a leading military commander along with winfield scott. both taylor and scott were whigs. polk seemed to be muttering he was making heroes out of two whigs that had run for president. polk didn't run for re-election. he didn't run against taylor but was a kind of uncomfortable carriage ride to taylor's inauguration. taylor said something to the effect to polk that maybe it is good that california and oregon are territories. he doubted they would become state, because they are so far away. that irked polk and called taylor a well-meaning old man. he thought that taylor lacked vision for the continental united states. sure enough, california would become a state thanks to the gold rush in 1850 a year after he died. >> was there speculation as to why he chose not to run? >> when he was nominated in 1844, it was a strange situation that he wasn't even running. the main democratic candidate leading up to the convention was mark van buren who had lost running for election from 18

crittenden had taken him at his word and had really become rather intimately involved in the zachary taylor boom that was -- it was the result of taylor's success in the mexican war. >> and taylor and clay in the same party. >> yes, they were both whigs. >> this is the '48 election. >> and taylor is a whig primarily not because he believes what the whigs do, most apolitical, he's a whig because he hates james polk who wasn't running. polk had tried to ruin taylor's career, reputation, because he saw him as a political rival. and polk becomes a whig by default as a reflex -- >> you mean taylor. >> taylor becomes a whig as a reflex. >> he's buried in louisville? and clay is in lexington. >> it's a strange thing. at the time he was living in louisiana. >> yeah. >> he was a louisiana citizen. when he came back in he wanted to be president as a vindication, taylor did. clay didn't quite understand. in fact, in november of '47 taylor virtually foreswore and said if clay wants this, i'll step aside. that wasn't true. as time wore on, that became less true. and crittenden found himself pretty -- be

for the first time since zachary taylor, both houses of the congress were against the united states. and as i said, the media loatheed richard nixon. a lot of them did. and others did not like richard nixon. here was the final problem. you go down the east coast, go to the boston globe, providence journal, hartford current, new york times, baltimore sun, philadelphia inquirer, washington post, anti nixon all of them. three networks. two-thirds of the american people depended on the network news of those three networks as their primary source of news and information about the president of the united states. all were hostile to richard nixon. thus, the impairive of nixon to communicate over, through and around this filter, which many of us saw as distorted in order to communicate his ideas and keep the country united behind him. he did it by two things. one, the prime time address, primarily, and secondly, the national press conferences he would have in prime time, which were adversary proceedings. and it was in that environment that he wrote his inaugural address, which my friend here