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 in Episode 178 GERALD FORD The Accidental President (Part 3) Working with Richard Nixon (Tape series 11)
It is one thing to work with a President from the other party and be the loyal opposition that is often getting in the news for being opposed to the President. It is another to be your President's leader on the House floor pushing through his agenda, especially when you are in the minority. That is the position that Gerald Ford will be in for much of the Presidency of Richard Nixon. He was the President's lead lieutenant in the House of Representatives.
Richard Nixon assumed the Presidency as the first President since Zachary Taylor, with both houses of Congress in the opposition hands. Somehow , Nixon got a lot of things done, and his domestic record of accomplishments is actually very strong, despite the handicap of being a minority party President and a President often seen as an enemy to the Democratic Party.
Some of that long list of accomplishments can be attributed to the legislative skill of his Minority Leader, Gerald Ford. In this episode we will listen in as the two men work on many things in the first Administration. It was there that Richard Nixon laid the groundwork for his place as one of our five Greatest American Leaders in the history of our country.
It is here that we will get a small dose of the role Gerald Ford played in all that success.
