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 14) The Emotional Final Week
In this episode, the Smoking Gun Tape has pulled the rug out from under President Nixon and now he is being urged to resign by even his most loyal defenders. However, his family unanimously urged him to fight on. It is in this final emotional week that President Nixon goes back and forth about what to do. The President himself seems to have already come to the decision to resign, while at the same time hoping to find a glimmer of hope from somewhere.
Three leaders from congress, John Rhodes, the Republican House Minority Leader, Hugh Scott, the Senate Minority Leader and Senator Barry Goldwater , the 1964 Republican Presidential Nominee, all come down to the White House for a fateful meeting to tell him that his support in Congress had totally evaporated. It was then that Richard Nixon moved forward with his decision to resign the Presidency.
He would enlist his main speech writer Ray Price to help him put together the words for an address to the nation and his Chief of Staff Alexander Haig would reach out to the Vice President and the Congress people who had fought so hard and valiantly on President Nixon's behalf, men like Representatives Charlie Wiggins of California and Charlie Sandman of New Jersey. In order to prepare them for the momentous decision now just hours away.
Then the President would meet with the Congressional Leadership and have a moment with his old friend from Oklahoma, a man who had come to the House in the same class as Nixon, and who had risen to the position of Democratic Speaker of the House, but Carl Albert had not been able to tame his out of control caucus and in one of the most telling moments of the entire Watergate Scandal says what sounds like a sad admission of guilt, that he knew what had happened was totally unfair.
Speaker Carl Albert says as he was leaving the meeting, with the President's last remaining ally in leadership , Senator James Eastland D- Mississippi , by his side " Dick, I hope you don't blame me for this....."
This is that story and will lead you right up to the moments just before Richard Nixon would address the nation.
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