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
(FAIR USE NOTICE : This presentation contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The use of this footage is for educational and historical commentary. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material.)
The Richard Nixon Experience
RICHARD NIXON Watergate 1973 (Part 18) ALL AT ONCE, (Part B) Getting to Know Spiro T. Agnew
Spiro Theodore Agnew was the 39th Vice President of the United States of America. Today the average person knows almost nothing about him. His only real vague claim to fame is that he was forced to resign the Vice Presidency in a long forgotten, unrelated to Watergate, scandal in 1973.
Only recently was he attacked by MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow in her book " Bag Man, the Wild Crimes, audacious cover up and Spectacular downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House"
Well anyone who is familiar with our podcast knows we don't think much of Miss Maddow, nor her far left opinions and predilection for exaggeration and sharing of nonfactual material.
Not that we believe that Vice President Agnew was anywhere near as innocent as we believe President Nixon was of the smears against him. Because we don't. However, there is some level of unfairness in the way his case was portrayed from the very start, and we believe it is fair to say that he fell victim to the age old bug of having risen to far to fast at his given profession.
In just 11 years, Spiro Agnew rose from being an attorney for a Union and serving on the Zoning Board of Appeals, to being elected Baltimore County Executive, and after taking advantage of a feud with in the Democratic Party, finding himself elected Governor of the State of Maryland. Richard Nixon in need of a running mate that did not drag down his poll numbers, turned to the unknown Agnew to be his running mate in 1968 for Vice President of the United States. An amazing rise for anyone to have come so far so fast.
The State of Maryland had a very unusual way of doing business that apparently everyone was aware of and no one really talked about. It involved people looking to do work with various local governments subsidizing the decision making office holders income. Now today that would be considered illegal, and it is rather shocking to me that it was not considered illegal then, but the truth is it wasn't. That basic fact is a part of the story rarely if ever discussed and it is about the only defense available for not only a Vice President forced to give up his office but for the rather large list of other public figures this scandal involved in the state of Maryland.
Over the next two episodes we are going to introduce you to the man, Spiro T. Agnew, who had risen so quickly from obscurity, the intricacies of the scandal that brought him down, and the story of his fall. A fall that was only made possible not because he had continued to take as Governor and Vice President what appears to be kickbacks involving projects he oversaw as a County Executive, but because he, like the gangster Al Capone, had not reported any of it on his Federal Income Tax.
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