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 16) The Legacy of Watergate
In this episode we examine the Legacy of Watergate. It was the one question everyone was asked by historian Timothy Naftali and the answers were fascinating. This is a study of what each person thought the lesson of Watergate is for history. The one that caught the most interest from me was that of Bernard Nussbaum, who was the second in command on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee. He calls the Special Prosecutor's Office " a dangerous, dangerous office."
He runs through all the ways this office can be abused and how President Nixon and his friend President Bill Clinton should never have allowed the office to have been created in either of their cases.
While Nussbaum pays token defenses of the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office it is clear that he holds the institution in fairly low regard and in every point he makes we are in agreement. His warning is one every President and leader needs to heed. There is no reason the office should ever exist again, in my opinion.
Former Senator Trent Lott also makes a valid point too about what happens when a person gets in trouble and how the price they pay can be very different depending on which political party they are a member of when it happens.
Here is the Legacy of Watergate, including my opinion, which is its unfairness to President Nixon and the battles over the war in Vietnam planted the seeds of the disfunction in politics we see today
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