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 232 General Alexander Haig , A Player on the World Stage , ( A Special Series part A )
This is the first episode in a four episode special series looking back at the life of General Alexander Haig. Haig served several Presidents, working most closely with Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan. He has been a major player throughout the time periods we have been covering throughout the entire storyline of our podcast. He has been such a large player throughout the run of our series and we thought here at what will be his last major appearance in our timeline that now was a time to look back at Al Haig, so that you could get a full picture of this man who played such a major role in four major historic moments in our nation's history: The Vietnam War, Watergate, the Nixon Pardon by Ford, and The Reagan State Department.
To say Alexander Haig was a major player in all of these events would be a major understatement. All three of these Presidents relied on Haig for advice an understanding of the World. Over the final months of the Vietnam War, Haig helped guide the President to the conclusion, as we shall see in this special series, and it is alleged he may have also later helped guide Richard Nixon out of the Presidency. Haig's role in the Nixon years, especially, is not without controversy, some of which I was unaware of when I started this podcast several years ago.
In this episode we will look back at several historic moments from the life of Alexander Haig. We start first at the moment that most likely ended his political life when he stepped up to the cameras and insisted he was incharge of the government after the assassination attempt on President Reagan. We will hear from the man himself, from an interview he gave while attempting to run for President in his own right in 1988. We will hear of his role in the pardon of Richard Nixon from Gerald Ford, and we will hear of his successes as Secretary of State including his role in trying to prevent the Falklands War.
But it is his role at the end of Vietnam, and at the end of the Nixon Administration itself that has engendered the most controversy, including accusations that at some point he may have been involved in a spy ring against the President from the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and also that he may have been a secret source for the Washington Post's journalistic team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, while also managing the Nixon White House as its Chief of Staff. We will examine it all here in this first of four episodes on General Alexander Haig.
