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 and WATERGATE The Epilogue, The Re-Rise (Part 3) The Oxford Union Q and A
This was an extraordinary moment. It marks the beginning of Richard Nixon's long, and remarkable journey to the status of beloved elder statesman. Richard Nixon walked into the room a hated, disgraced, much maligned, but still historic figure, and he walked out having won the respect of everyone who witnessed his performance.
As he stood an answered questions on every subject imaginable he had to endure the verbal abuse of a huge throng of protesters chanting "No more Nixon" so loudly it is audible in the background of this video. Yet, Richard Nixon was unflappable, thoughtfully answering question after question about world affairs, American domestic affairs, the relationship between the United States and Europe and even questions about Watergate itself.
He answered them all.
It is an extraordinary performance. In which Richard Nixon offered a rare moment of acknowledgement that he had not handled Watergate as it should have been handled, saying "They were right I screwed it up and I paid the price."
That simple statement, in a lot of ways to a lot of people around the world, closed one era in the history of the life of Richard Nixon and opened what would eventually be seen as arguably the greatest and happiest era in the life and career of Richard Nixon.
