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, 1974 THE FALL (Part 2) The Players of the House Judiciary Committee Members and Staff: Who they were and how they got there
In this episode we are going to introduce you to a new set of players in the saga of the fall of Richard Nixon. These are the members of the House Judiciary Committee and its staff. We chose five of them.
Representatives Elizabeth Holtzman D-New York and Trent Lott R-Mississippi, two people at the very start of their long and illustrious careers. We also chose three members of the staff, Hillary Rodham Clinton and William Weld, who were young staffers and the number two man on the staff Bernard Nussbaum.
It is Bernard Nussbaum whose oral history is of the most interest throughout the rest of our series. He is blunt in his assessment of the office of Special Prosecutor even as he attempts to defend the job that they all did in 1974. He calls it a dangerous office. He also points out often that Doar overruled him in his view that a thorough investigation needed to be conducted by their office rather than just relying on the information and evidence gathered by the Senate Watergate Committee and the Watergate Special Prosecutor's office.
However, in this episode, we will just introduce them all to you and how they got in the places they were when the scandal landed on their doorstep in March of 1974.
I will tell you that of all the various entities involved in the horrible travesty of justice known as Watergate (Here I am editorializing again) my opinion of these people, with the exception of William Weld, changed the most dramatically for the better of any of the research I conducted.
This is their story with a few funny side stories too. Like how sliming salmon prepared Hillary Rodham Clinton for her long career in politics.
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