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 14) Two Roads, The Special Prosecutors and the Ervin Committee
In this episode we look at the start of the Ervin Committee Hearings as the Congress begins bringing the various players of Watergate out in front of the American people on national television. We listen to the members of the press as they look back at a different era when the news of the day could grab an enormous audience because there were only three networks. Then we learn all about the make up of the committee and how it would structure the hearings. Basically, as a legislative show trial in which the accused had no rights and in which what they said would be used against them later.
Then we move on to the early stages of the hearing itself and listen in to various moments from the testimony of the burglars themselves, the officers that made the arrest, and finally to those in charge of the campaign. Jeb Magruder, Hugh Sloan, Maurice Stans and finally the former Attorney General himself John Mitchell. He will face a barrage of questions from several Senators and he holds his ground fairly well.
Then we turn to the big moment of the Ervin Hearings, the testimony of former White House Counsel John Dean. This is where you will see the extreme partisanship that had begun to grip the investigative process. John Dean is protected by the Democratic staffers by being allowed to keep his testimony and written statement private until literally he walked out in front of the cameras forcing the Republicans to study all of the written material as they listened to the testimony as it was televised. They literally had no time to plan out or even think about questions to ask.
It does not get any better over at Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox's office as he begins to staff up for his investigation. He is hiring nothing but the most partisan and most determined lawyers he can find, all alumni of the Kennedy - Johnson Justice Department and Administration. The very failed Administrations Richard Nixon had swept from power.
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