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 The Epilogue. The Re-Rise (Part 1) The Pardon, The Illness, and the Grand Jury Testimony
This episode opens with the new President Gerald R. Ford addressing a joint session of Congress. He is there laying out his agenda for his new administration. The problems that he felt needed immediate addressing and where he intended to continue the policies of the man he had just replaced as President. Unfortunately for Ford every question he got in his first press conference had to do with Richard Nixon. He was spending a disproportionate amount of his time dealing with the problems of his predecessor.
So Gerald Ford decided to put an end to the issues once and for all. He granted a full an absolute pardon on to Richard Nixon thusly clearing the deck and allowing the country to move forward and leave Watergate behind. It would however, stir up a hornets nest among the rabid Nixon haters, and much of the country who had no idea of the alleged massive misconduct of the Watergate Special Prosecution force.
Here in this episode we will hear from Representative Elizabeth Holtzman who would get a chance to question President Ford during his historic testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee. You will hear President Ford in an interview with NBC "Later" host Bob Costas discuss the decision to grant the Nixon pardon.
You will also hear about his visit with President Nixon when he was near death in California during the month of October 1974.
Then we switch gears to the attempt by the
Special Prosecutor's to get Grand Jury testimony from the former President despite his weakened condition. In hopes, many thought, of entrapping the former President in a perjury wrap, which would not have been covered by the Presidential Pardon. However, they never laid a glove on the former leader of the free world.
In this episode we cover these days during the time Richard Nixon was at his lowest.
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