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 1974 ,To the Indictments (Part 1) Conventional Wisdom
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Our story opens with a look at the conventional wisdom most of America, and the World, holds on Watergate. It is the story of the heroic Special Prosecutors who investigated the heinous crimes of Watergate. The story of a Washington Press Corp determined not to let the sly , crooked , Richard Nixon get away with running his, as Dan Rather called it, "crime syndicate" from the White House.
It is the story of the heroic Democrats in Congress who continued to push for more and more information in order to protect the country from a President determined to undermine our constitutional democracy and trample over the American Criminal Justice System. It was nothing less than saving our democracy itself and stopping fascism from reigning over our mighty and free land.
I don't know about you, but I ain't never bought that line of happy Horse manure!!
But I also never had anything but a feeling that "something was not right in Denmark". I had studied the career of Richard Nixon most of my life. What I had found was if you really looked at it almost none of the accusations, other than those of Watergate, ever stood up.
He had in fact exposed a real communist spy in Alger Hiss. He had defeated Susan Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate in a nasty race where most of the nastiness had been provoked by her not him. He had had a special fund to help with legitimate expenses related to his political career but he had been able to account for every dime spent from the fund, something the 1952 Democratic Nominee for President, Alai Stevenson, who also had a similar fund could not do for himself. The 1960 election for President had been arguably stolen from Richard Nixon and Nixon had had his taxes audited by the IRS and his airplane and phone lines bugged by the FBI during the subsequent Kennedy and Johnson years.
It just seemed that every time you really looked at it, except for Watergate, Richard Nixon was actually not at all what he was constantly being presented to the public as having been. So you just always had this feeling that maybe Richard Nixon's claim that he would one day be vindicated, yet again, would prove true. But like most Americans, while sympathetic, I guess I kind of doubted that it could actually be possible.
Until I read three riveting books by a lawyer, former Nixon staffer, and a man whose own credibility is unquestioned. That man's name was Geoff Shepard and starting with this episode we are going to do a deep dive into documents he has unearthed over the past nearly two decades. I think what you will see us lay out is an absolutely shocking and overwhelming story of alleged Prosecutorial Misconduct.
And it will change everything you thought you knew about Richard Nixon.
*** If you would like to see the documents they are available at ShepardonWatergate.com
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