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 Watergate 1973 (Part 20) ALL AT ONCE - AT WAR, (Part D) At Home and Abroad
Spiro Agnew resigns on October 10, 1973, the Arab Forces go on another offensive on October 11, 1973 all the while the Special Prosecutor's continue to push forward trying to get their hands on the Presidential recordings. Tom Brokaw of NBC News is right to describe the situation as "Richard Nixon was a President under siege." He seemed to be facing historic level crisis everywhere he looked.
Nixon went right to work to insure the Israeli government would have everything they needed to defend themselves and he was given some hope by his Attorney General that finally a deal could be struck not to hand over the tapes. He was determined not to give in to the mounting pressure of allowing the prosecutor's free run over the Nixon White House. That hope would turn out to be false.
Attorney General Elliot Richardson would waffle around on a proposal for third party verification of the tapes, in a compromise originally proposed by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox himself. But when it was originally proposed Richard Nixon had turned the idea down and pursued his options in court. The court would rule against him 5 -2 but add that they wanted the party's to find a deal themselves. So Richardson took the initiative to re propose the compromise that had been earlier rejected. It is a little murky as to what exactly happened or if it was all a misunderstanding but an idea was proposed that a prominent, well respected Senator, John Stennis, a Democrat from Mississippi would listen to the tapes and verify what he heard on them.
Stennis was a man of unquestioned character, (though he was a southerner and a segregationist) , he was also elderly, hard of hearing, and a huge supporter of the Republican President. The Prosecutors wanted no part of this deal and I actually can understand the reasoning on this point. However, it was Archibald Cox's idea, and though he now had a court decision saying he should get the tapes he had asked for, it could reasonably be argued that in good faith he should have honored his original proposal. But either way he chose to hold a press conference and face down the President of the United States while the President was dealing with an enormous crisis in Israel and for that a showdown became inevitable.
This episode takes you right up to that moment just before the most famous of showdowns happened and it includes Archibald Cox's press conference.
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