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 21) All At Once (Part E) The Saturday Night Massacre
SHOWDOWN!!
There was no question that after a junior officer of the Federal Government faced down the President of the United States on National Television that that junior officer was not going to have his job long and Archibald Cox didn't. Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, as did his next in line William Ruckelshaus before finally the true hero of the night stepped up and did the deed. Robert Bork, the Solicitor General, fired Cox and then held the Justice Department together for two and a half months all while being under attack for having done the right thing, Richard Nixon was , contrary to popular belief, justified in that decision.
We were dangerously close to a war with the Soviet Union as both sides sat on the sidelines helping the two sides of a conflict in the Middle East. In fact, this was the closest the two nations had come since the Cuban Missile Crisis a decade before. There was no way that Richard Nixon was going to let Archibald Cox, nor his Special Prosecution Force, get away with such insubordination at such a moment. I would dare say that the history you have read about would have looked totally different had it involved any other President other than Richard Nixon. That is how egregious this act by Cox was no matter how avuncular he appeared that night on television.
The chain of events this situation set off changed everything for President Nixon and it was largely in my opinion unfair. Archibald Cox should never have been appointed in the first place. He was a known Nixon hater, puppet of the Kennedy family, and he loaded up his staff with rabid partisans that either came from the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations or were prosecutors who had spent years chasing gangsters and treated the Nixon staffers as though they were members of a crime family.
From this point on Richard Nixon was at war with a prosecution staff willing to do , say, and perform any sleight of hand necessary to get the only target they were actually focused on, the facts be damned. And the at target was Richard Nixon and they cared not who all's lives they had to ruin to do it.
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