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
The Epilogue 1974 - 1994 The Re-Rise of Richard Nixon Preview
This episode is a preview of our final series on Richard Nixon. Here we begin with Gerald Ford becoming President of the United States and former President Richard Nixon heading off into exile and most likely into oblivion. It appeared he was to be sidelined and treated as a failure.
With Richard Nixon gone South Vietnam was cast aside and collapsed into a Communist hell. The Watergate Defendants were convicted and Nixon himself was saved from prison by a pardon. It appeared the Special Prosecutor's and the Nixon haters had won, proving their point that Nixon was little more than a criminal and horrible failure as President.
As we have shown, time has not been kind to that storyline of the Watergate Scandal. But long before that fact became as clear as it is today, the grateful American people of the era were ready to forgive Richard Nixon for his perceived crimes, his efforts on our nation's behalf became more and more appreciated, and he was welcomed back to the national scene in the final 17 years of his life. His image even received an ovation at the 1992 Republican National Convention.
By the time of Richard Nixon's death in April of 1994, he bore the distinction of being seen by the American people as a beloved elder statesman whose opinions about the world were sought out everywhere. This is that story as we share with you those moments that changed people's opinion of President Richard Nixon, from a blockbuster interview, to the welcome of a small town in Kentucky, to the Oxford Student Union, to being welcome wherever in the world he chose to go. It was yet another remarkable rise from the ashes for a President who deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest to ever hold the office.
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