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 16) The Coup in Chile
Another of the unfair accusations often heralded against President Richard Nixon and his assistant Dr. Henry Kissinger is that they overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in Chile and allowed him to be murdered on September 11, 1973. Literally, every bit of that accusation is a total falsehood.
The facts are that Salvador Allende , the world's only elected Marxist-socialist leader, was a devout communist. His government confiscated industry, land, and shut down freedom of the press over its brief three year run. His Communist policies led to massive inflation and total unrest so bad in the nation of Chile that its own Parliament passed a resolution asking the military to seize power and topple the Allende regime. Which it did on September 11, 1973.
The Chilean leader was given countless opportunities to flee his country before holding himself up inside the Presidential Palace. As the Army was starting its final assault on the Palace Salvador Allende took to the airwaves in a final defiant address to his nation and then shot himself, rather than be captured as the coup entered its final stage. None of this was a good way for the regime to fall, but none of it was Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger's fault either.
President Nixon did pull American investment out of the country. Nixon did work against the Allende Government. But Richard Nixon did not OK the military coup that toppled Allende and he certainly had nothing to do with the death of Allende. Which after a nearly three decade mystery was finally proven to have been self inflicted.
Here again, is the amazing double standard of the liberal left in the United States, when a coup was given approval personally in South Vietnam by John F. Kennedy , it led to the violent overthrow of our ally President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and his death , by assassins as he waited in the backseat of his car to flee the country. Not a word has been spoken about it in the mainstream media all the while President Nixon has been trashed as trampling human rights and disregarding a democratically elected regime for three decades.
Occasionally whataboutism does matter!!
