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 11) The House Judiciary Committee Review
This episode is an in-depth look at the House Judiciary committee itself as they went through the work of deciding whether or not they should impeach a President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanors for the first time in 106 years.
In this show you will hear the memories of each of the members and staffers of the committee we selected. They will go in-depth to recall the procedures they followed, their own feelings upon hearing the tapes, their own judgements, the work ethic of the staff and members and their thoughts about Watergate all these many years later.
Of particular interests will be the oral history segments of Bernard Nussbaum and his assessment of both John Dean, the star witness and the former Counsel to the President , and of John Mitchell the former Attorney General and head of the Re-Election campaign for President Nixon. He says at one point that he found John Dean "the perfect Nazi corporal" who would mirror the opinion and thoughts of the person who had power over him at any given point. It is a startling revelation as to what this member of the staff thought of the main witness against the sitting President. Nussbaum also says that this issue of mirrorring the powerful person in the room made him watch what he said "out of fear of putting words in his mouth" and " while some prosecutors will do that , that is not what I do".
It will make your jaw drop.
We also will hear from President Richard Nixon, in an interview conducted by his former aid Frank Gannon from 1983, in which the President will lay out his version of several of the lesser remembered accusations of the Watergate years: his taxes, the improvements to his homes, the accusations of enriching himself etc.. If you listen with an open mind it will certainly cause you to question a lot of the claims made by his accusers.
Then we let Geoff Shepard lay out the articles of impeachment that are to be drafted by the House Committee after they had reviewed the overwhelming evidence they had in their hands. Evidence, in our opinion, tainted by the decision of John Doar, the lead House Staffer, to only be a collation of evidence provided by the Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force and the Watergate Senate Committee.
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