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
The Character of Leon Jaworski, Watergate , and the Fort Lawton Riot
For all of the folks who have said to me that our long documentary on Watergate and the massive evidence of alleged prosecutorial misconduct just did not seem plausible. This special edition is for you. It is a story I had not heard before until our podcast's friend , Geoff Shepard, sent the story to me and then I proceeded to research it.
It is the story of one of greatest injustices ever perpetuated on a group of our soldiers, accusing three African American fighting men of murder, and causing 47 more, all African Americans, to face trial and court martial for a riot in November of 1944. It would be another 64 years before this injustice was ever set straight. An early investigation had been conducted of the events in question before the Army Prosecutor had been sent to work on the case and that investigation had cleared every single African American soldier involved of any wrong doing.
But the Prosecutor decided to prosecute all of them anyway, even though he knew of the report that said they were all innocent men. He actively hid the report refusing to turn it over to a rushed Defense Team knowing they only had 10 days to prepare their case. It was a travesty of American Justice.
That prosecutor was named Leon Jaworski and the case has many earie similarities to the long national nightmare of Watergate, we just chronicled in our last three season series. This is a sad, sad , story. A story that brings new insight to the massive amount of new evidence that has emerged that shows that Richard Nixon, and many of his top aids, may not have been as guilty as we have all been led to believe for the past half century.
To learn more about the 1944 Fort Lawton riot see these links :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lawton_riot
KCTS 9 Connects: Miscarriage of Justice
https://youtu.be/Nxil2dibqiU
