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Richard Nixon Hated This ‘All in the Family’ Episode So Much He Ranted About It on Tape

A 1971 White House tape captured Nixon complaining about the sitcom’s gay storyline and arguing that it threatened society.

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Even though All in the Family has gone down in history as one of the greatest sitcoms ever made, it didn’t win everybody over when it first hit the airwaves back in 1971. Lucille Ball, for example, thought the series was “awful” and blamed it for making bigoted language popular again. “People do think that way, but why glorify it?” Ball said a couple of years after its debut. The legendary comedienne wasn’t alone in thinking that the show was glorifying things.

On February 9, 1971, CBS ran the groundbreaking All in the Family episode “Judging Books by........

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