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 5) The Battle Lines are Drawn
In this episode we examine the events that led to the Supreme Court Case of The United States of America vs Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America.
We examine the wrangling over just how many tapes the Special Prosecutor would ask for and his attempt to blackmail the President into backing off of his claim of Executive Privilege. We will take both a scholarly look at the actual doctrine of Executive Privilege with Dr Noah Zerbe , and listen to those who were involved on both sides of the issue in 1974, we will look at what the settled law had been up to the point the case went to the Supreme Court, and a look at the timeline in which the leadership of the House Judiciary staff, mainly John Doar, had been secretly working with Hank Ruth to design a pathway for the Special Prosecutor's case to be made by his staff to the House Committee.
In fact, the word "secret" is one you will see a lot over these final days of the legal case mounting against the President of the United States. Secret meetings, secret files, secret namings of people as conspirators, secret files being taken with Special Prosecutors and then sealed for years after the case was closed, files secretly sealed, it is secret, secret, secret, and when this much stuff is kept secret there must be a secret nobody wants the public to ever actually see and hear.
Well it is all not a secret any longer, as we will hear in this episode.
We will also hear from a Special Prosecutor we have not heard from until now, Phil Lacavara. We have read several of his memos but this is the first time we will hear from him as he addresses the case of the United States vs Richard Nixon in "An Evening with Phil Lacavara" at Rutgers University. These segments will set the stage for the oral arguments in front of the United States Supreme Court we are about to replay for you in their entirety.
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