The Richard Nixon Experience
It has been 50 years since the Administration of Richard Nixon. In that time, the left has waged a war on history to define Richard Nixon as a failure as President. For much of the half century Richard Nixon's name was synonymous with corruption and Government overreach. Podcasts, Documentaries, Cable Network specials have all controlled a narrative that cast Richard Nixon as the 20th centuries great American Villain.
But all of that has changed. First in 2013, Geoff Shepard, Richard Nixon's youngest Watergate Defense team member, petitioned the National Archives for access to sealed Watergate materials. What he found was a treasure of exculpatory material that has sent shock waves throughout the world of serious historians and legal scholars. Was there more to the story of Watergate? The documentation he exposed certainly seems to say so and that is not the only area where scholars are finding that there was way more to Richard Nixon's tenure than had ever been appreciated.
Richard Nixon worked to protect civil rights, advance women in government, protect the environment, set new higher standards for workforce safety, share revenues with local government, restructure the inner workings of the Federal Government, with plans to make it work more efficiently and more effectively and he even worked to provide a better healthcare and welfare system some 40 years ahead of his time. He opened up women's sports, lowered the voting age, ushered in an era of Judicial restraint, desegregated the Southern School system, poured millions into entrepreneurial programs for minorities, passed tough laws on organized crime, ended the draft and passed billions of dollars into cancer research that has led to most of the advances against the wide variety of deadly diseases we see today.
And that list does not even get into the Foreign Policy achievements we associate with his incredible five and a half years as President.
We thought it was time to tell that story and over the next year and half we will tell that story on this podcast. The story of the experience of a nation, at war in Vietnam, and often under siege, and at war with itself, here at home. An experience that created a great gash in the body politic that we are still healing from today. It is the story of the man who saved our Union from the growing disaster an upheaval experienced in this era.
The story of the experience of a nation as it wrestled with titanic changes in culture, the experience of a nation ripped from its foundations, and the experience of the historic leader that set that nation back on course to its rightful place as the beacon of light for freedom and prosperity to a troubled world . The experience of the late 1960's and early 1970's, the experience of the most divisive era in American history, other than the Civil War, the experience of the United States of America and the leader who fixed it all.
Welcome to "The Richard Nixon Experience" Podcast
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The Richard Nixon Experience
RICHARD NIXON 1973 WATERGATE (Part 11) THE SINISTER FORCE EMERGES (John Dean and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force)
"The White House counsel is a senior staff appointee of the president of the United States whose role is to advise the president on all legal issues concerning the president and their administration.
The Office of Counsel to the President and Vice President was created in 1943, and is responsible for advising on all legal aspects of policy questions; legal issues arising in connection with the President's decision to sign or veto legislation, ethical questions, financial disclosures; and conflicts of interest during employment and post employment. The Counsel's office also helps define the line between official and political activities, oversees executive appointments and judicial selection, handles presidential pardons, reviews legislation and presidential statements, and handles lawsuits against the president in his role as president, as well as serving as the White House contact for the Department of Justice."
(This is the definition provided by the website Wikipedia)
If ever anyone in the history of employment ever failed anymore totally at the job description provided in the hand book than John W. Dean, I would like to know who it was. His entire job description can be summed up in shorthand like this
"Sit there and when you hear something that sounds illegal, say Mr. President, you can't do that"
That is all you have to do, I mean really how hard can it be?
John Dean not only did not do that, he actively made himself the "desk officer of the cover up" , and when he goes up to Camp David to write the report the President has asked him to write, he suddenly realizes all roads filter into one that leads from the Committee to Re-elect the President to the White House Staff itself, like the middle of an hourglass, through one "poison line".....HIM.
So what does he do, he shops a deal, at first to the career prosecutors who want nothing to do with it, and then to the Ervin Committee. That committee totally controlled by the Democratic Party, leap at the chance to embrace "The Chief Desk Officer of the Cover up"
All of this occurs while another force emerges and enters the battlefield. This force more sinister than anything Richard Nixon has had to face since the North Vietnamese gave up in Paris.
A force determined that they would destroy Richard Nixon using any tool, distortion, lie, or sleight of hand they could engineer; they were the partisan lawyers who made up the staff of the Watergate Special Prosecutors Task Force and it is their sinister rise that begins in this episode.
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