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We start season 5 with a bonus two part series far from the topic of politics, Government or Richard Nixon. Though President Nixon did start NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which began the National Weather Service and Hurricane Tracking. A service that has saved thousands of lives and improved weather tracking  and predicting immensely since the 1970's. So in a way this show and the storm it covers, and the lives saved at the time in 1989, were a direct result of the leadership and Presidency of Richard Nixon.  So now lets relive....

HURRICANE HUGO, 

It was a night like no other in my lifetime. I was 18 years old, a freshman in college, and sitting in my dorm at Spartanburg Methodist College with a guy down the hall from me from James Island S.C.  His home would be destroyed. I got lucky, my townhouse was totally unharmed in Myrtle Beach, my family in Hartsville S.C. was unharmed. But the ride home the next week was just surreal.  From the moment you got to Columbia S.C. all the way to the beach, destruction was everywhere you looked.  No one who lived through Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina has ever forgotten it. 

Today thousands of people have moved into the path Hugo followed. None of them have ever experienced anything close to the wrath of a Hurricane as powerful nor as enormous as Hugo.  This show is for all of you. Heed its warning because one day we will see it again. Here relive the tension as Hurricane Hugo approaches and then hear it roar as this  incredible night unfolds again. Hugo rushed in after midnight and packed a mighty punch in the dark of night. 

A night no one has ever forgotten, a night like no other in our lifetime. 

From the National Weather Service Website: 

" Around midnight on September 22, 1989,  Hurricane Hugo made landfall just north of Charleston, South Carolina at Sullivan's Island as a Category 4 storm with estimated maximum winds of 135-140 mph and a minimum central pressure of 934 millibars (27.58 inches of Hg). Hugo produced tremendous wind and storm surge damage along the coast and even produced hurricane force wind gusts several hundred miles inland into western North Carolina. In fact, Hugo produced the highest storm tide heights ever recorded along the U.S. East Coast, around 20 feet in Bulls Bay, SC near Cape Romain! At the time, Hugo was the strongest storm to strike the U.S. in the previous 20-year period and was the nation's costliest hurricane on record in terms of monetary losses (~$7 billion in damage). It is estimated that there were 49 deaths directly related to the storm, 26 of which occurred in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands."

(We would like to thank Santee Cooper Electric for the use of footage from their documentary "Bringing Back the Light" and all of the journalism outlets in our state for their coverage, WPDE, WIS, WCIS, The State Newspaper, The Sun News, and The Weather Channel, plus a North Carolina Radio station . )

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In our Season 4 finale we look at several of the initiatives that Richard Nixon began at the end of 1971 that we are still benefitting from or are impacted by today. 

In 1971 Richard Nixon changed the monetary system for the United States ending the Breton Woods system and taking the United States off the Gold Standard. It was a dramatic economic move that is still debated. It certainly unleashed the amount of money flowing into the economy but it has led to ever increasing amounts of debt that is now at a crisis level in this country. 

In 1971, Richard Nixon also went to war to stop the abuse of drugs in America. The War on Drugs has largely been seen as a failure and often those who don't know the history of that war blame President Nixon because he gave it a name and made it a priority. But Nixon's "War on Drugs" was a dramatic success, he caused the burglary rate to plummet, and the drug addicted were getting the help they needed because Nixon focused on the demand side of the problem and helping those addicted with treatment programs, and in the case of heroin,  an experimental methadone program, that produced real positive results. It was later Presidents who changed everything focusing almost totally on the supply side of the problem. Richard Nixon did both, and it was a success, at least until Watergate forced him from the national scene. 

We also examine the Moorer - Radford Affair when Richard Nixon became the victim of a spying operation from the Military high brass. If you ever wanted insight as to why Richard Nixon felt that his administration was under siege and that he could not trust the bureaucracy around him, here is an example of why. That many of the Administration's best laid plans seemed often  to end up on the front pages of the national newspapers. This story will give you insight as to why and why it became such an obsession for the President, an obsession that played a large role in how the Presidency would be wrested away from Richard Nixon in 1974. 

Finally, we will look back on what President Nixon considered his greatest achievement as President. It was the thing he was most proud to have begun. In December of 1971, in what Richard Nixon called his "Christmas Present to the nation", he signed the National Cancer Act of 1971 into law. The results of the act may have fallen short of finding the cure for Cancer as Nixon had hoped by 1976, but it has truly changed the world in ways we can all be thankful for. In 1971, a Cancer diagnosis was almost certainly a death sentence. Today enormous strides have been made in genetic research and  treatments. Today cancer is often treatable, curable, or beatable. The survival rate is far better across the board than it was in 1971 and it is time that Richard Nixon gets the credit he deserves for this monumental achievement. 

The Richard Nixon Presidency had weathered some great and mighty storms by December 1971. The nation had up to this point suffered from moments of violent upheaval that stretched back to the 1960's, and we still had a war that was dragging on and on. But by this time in his Administration, Richard Nixon had laid the groundwork for one of the most dramatic, and historically successful periods in all of American History.  While most Americans may not have realized it yet, Richard Nixon was about to enter a season of absolute triumph for himself politically but also for a beleaguered, divided and tired land. 1972 would be the year Richard Nixon would lay the foundation for over a quarter century of peace for his country and set the nation up as the singular leader of the entire free world.

Richard Nixon would over the next year truly join Abraham Lincoln as one of the two men in American History that could truly lay claim to the mantle, The Man Who Saved the Union. 

And that will be the next story we will tell..... 

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On January 6, 2021 a riot broke out in Washington D.C. at the United States Capitol. It was an angering sight to see and brought the functioning of the Capitol to a total standstill. The national media and the Democratic Party have tried very hard to put the blame on one man, Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. But I think I speak for millions of Americans when I say bluntly, there is plenty of blame to go around. While Donald Trump certainly has done little to alleviate the divisions in this country, the sad fact is our nation has had nearly two and a half decades of incompetent, divisive, extreme, unworthy leadership from both parties , and, frankly,  I could just go on and on using these types of descriptions of our national leadership. The incompetence  extends to the national media and its leadership too. They are a collective national embarrassment unfit to walk the same halls as Bob Dole or Dan Inouye, or sit in the same chairs as Peter Jennings or Walter Cronkite. Until January 6th, our nation had functioned with relative immunity from just how bad they have mishandled the positions they have been entrusted with, but finally the chickens have come home to roost. 

If I sound disgusted understand I am actually being generous on how I really feel about the current state of our national discourse. 

When we wrote our book "Always Vote Your Conscience, Don't Take it personally and Don't fight the Same old battles over and over again" or when we started this podcast, we were frustrated, today we are just plain mad and sick of it. Our Podcast premiered on January 2, 2021 and it was originally a nine episode podcast documentary focusing on lessons of leadership we could learn from the World War 2 generation of leaders, both those of the generation that led us through the war, and those who fought it and returned to serve in Congress and the Presidency afterwards. The events that occurred at the Capitol erupted just 4 days after we went on the air and because of how strongly we felt we put together a new ending of the series to include a frank assessment of our current leadership and a review of the events of January 6. 

This was our first production of this type and we basically took the material from the finale, centered on the resignation of Senate Leader Bob Dole and his powerful speech on the Senate Floor in 1996, and divided the show in half,  adding material looking at two decades of colossal failure and extreme politics, combined  with an overview of the day the Capitol was ransacked. This added two full shows to our series finale.

 To commemorate the first anniversary of this horrible, embarrassing, an angering moment in the history of our country, we have revamped the material from the close of our first series. We have added a new opening, removed all the Bob Dole material, and added some new narration and removed some too.  The show is still our longest, at 2 hours and ten minutes, but it is , in our opinion, a powerful indictment of just how bad our national leadership has been for a quarter century. We are  now at a  moment of truth when we, the great silent majority of Americans, the non shouters, the non protesters', must step up and take our country back. 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

We need to elect leaders capable of leading, of finding compromise, and finding real solutions for making Government work again, instead of leading BullS#$& revolutions and extremist public policy. 

It is time to leave what we have had behind because, as I have said before,  what we have had is frankly a collective national embarrassment. 

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In this episode, we cover two of President Nixon's major accomplishments; giving 18 year old citizens the right to vote and initiating the opening to China. 

First, we listen as Richard Nixon signs the 26th Amendment into law in front of a White House full of young people. 

Then we listen in on a call between Henry Kissinger and President Nixon on a wide range of subjects involving South East Asia and the end game of the negotiations with China. We get to listen to a retrospective on the secret trip to China made by Henry Kissinger in July of 1971.  It was there that the invitation was finally extended by the Chinese for President Nixon to travel to China. It would be an announcement that would shake the world. 

We then listen to the national address by President Nixon announcing the breakthrough and plans for the trip. 

Finally, we look at the United States relationship with Asia's other great power, the Empire of Japan. Still reeling from the defeat of World War 2, Japan was finally beginning its emergence and in this final event of the episode we listen to the first official visit by a Japanese Monarch to the United States as Emperor Hirohito visits Anchorage, Alaska and is greeted by President Richard Nixon, himself a veteran of the Pacific theater of World War 2. 

Questions or comments at  , [email protected] ,  https://twitter.com/randal_wallace   , and http://www.randalwallace.com/
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It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. 

On June 12, 1971, the daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon, Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. It was a wedding celebrated by not only the Nixon and Cox families but by the entire nation. President Nixon said of the day "It was a day we were all just very happy" It was a truly magical event and one of five such weddings at the White House in the 20th Century. 

The next day in a small article on the front page of the New York Times was a little story about a leak of confidential papers from a secret Pentagon study on the history of the Vietnam War. That little story was about an enormous leak of monumental proportions for our nation and its foreign policy. The thief, Daniel Ellsberg, had as good a secret clearance as anyone in Washington, he was married to an influential toy maker's daughter, and no one had any idea what else he had stolen. 

While the papers themselves did not mention the Nixon Administration in any of the documents it did have appendices full of documents that the communist enemies around the world had intercepted coded versions of and now that the real ones were readily available they could match up and break our secret codes. That was a fact that could get people killed and was a fact the press either willfully ignored or flat out did not care about. In either case, they also did not report that information to the public.  

Here was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with a strategic plan that included negotiating with the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, and we were at war and trying to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, and we were dealing with communist regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, plus dictatorships in Pakistan and other areas of the world in order to get their strategy in place and their plans to come to fruition. The release of the Pentagon Papers made  it appear to all of these secretive, totalitarian regimes that we could not keep our secrets from the New York Times or, even worse, The Washington Post. 

Nixon was red hot mad and had damn good reason to be. All the staff that worked at the White House called this the moment in which the Nixon Administration felt it had to take matters in hand to deal with leaks, subversives, and riotous protesters  to keep our country from coming apart in a wave of violent upheaval similar to 1968.

 It was extraordinary times and it would lead to events that would bring the Nixon Administration crashing down and leave our nation with a true question mark.

Is it right to remove one of our truly greatest leaders, in extraordinary times, because he may have broken the law in order to save the nation?

For a half century that question has still lingered and its consequence has set the nation on a calamitous course of extremism, cynicism, the criminalization of politics and the rise of widespread conspiracy theories that now 50 years later threaten the very foundation and core of the great American experiment in self governance. 

Questions or comments at  , [email protected] ,  https://twitter.com/randal_wallace   , and http://www.randalwallace.com/
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HAPPY NEW YEAR 2022!!!

In this episode we look back at 2021, a year of success here at "Bridging the Political Gap" and a year of sad farewells as we said good by to so many inspirational figures in our life from former Senator Bob Dole, to former Secretary of State George Shultz ,  to Former Senator John Warner, to the Mayor I served with through most of my time as a Myrtle Beach City Councilman, John Rhodes, and an Horry County pioneer who served as the first woman from Horry County to sit in the South Carolina Legislature and for whom I worked in her Horry County South Carolina Auditor's office in the late 1990's. Lois Eargle had been a constant presence in my life and an inspiration. 

We suffered three very personal losses this year as well. My colleague  in Real Estate, Charles Hinson, whom I worked along side with for two decades and sadly had no footage I could share for a broadcast. 

My Mother Gloria Bulmer also passed away in March. There is literally nothing I ever achieved that was not a direct result of her influence in my life. She was business woman, a teacher, and my biggest fan and most ferocious defender. It is hard even today to imagine her not being here for advice and support. 

It was also the year that I sadly lost my loyal companion, my Dog Cooper, whose presence in our show continues to this day every time our closing theme ends. 

We also look forward in this episode to all the exciting shows planned for 2022 on the life and career of Richard Nixon with what is turning out to be the largest available resource of the secret Nixon tapes available outside Nixontapes.org or the National Archives itself. This coming year you will get to ease drop on history and listen as a great President does great things as he leads the nation and the world into an era of peace. 

Plus, in the next few weeks for those of you from South Carolina we have couple of special editions on the infamous Hurricane of 1989, known to the world as Hurricane Hugo. 

Most importantly, this is a special episode that gives us here at "Bridging the Political Gap" a chance to say thanks to all of you who have tuned in during our first year on the air. We appreciate you more than we can ever say, 33 countries, 360 cities, all 50 states,  every continent, and over 2000 downloads. It has been more than I ever could have imagined and it speaks volumes about our world's yearning for real leadership to emerge. 

Thanks again for tuning in. 

Sincerely,

Your Host, 

Randal Wallace

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This episode begins just after President Nixon delivers his powerful speech going through the campaign in Laos and the advancements our side is making in extricating ourselves from the Vietnam War. It was a powerful moment for President Nixon. 

Recently, another documentary titled "Nixon at War" , attempted to smear President Nixon for his conduct of the operation,  that he lied in his speech, and they besmirched his character using only tidbits of the calls he made and received after the speech. The reality was , in our opinion, far different than what the documentary "Nixon at War" portrayed and therefore, in true "Bridging the Political Gap" fashion we thought we would just let the tape roll so that you could hear President Nixon for yourself.  So you could hear the enormous positive reaction he received not just from his staff, which the other show accused of overly complimenting the President and playing to his insecurities, but also from the public, from people like Reverend Billy Graham and Actor Freeman Gosden ,  good , fine, and nongovernmental people. 

Are there moments when Henry Kissinger, for example, may blow the smoke a little thick, sure there is, are there moments when President Nixon may fish for a compliment or two, sure there is, but there are no moments in which the President does not come across as a man sincerely doing everything he can to get our nation out of this war, a war he did not create nor mismanage, and to get us out of that war with honor and in a way that maintained our place as the leader of the free world.

 Richard Nixon was determined to stop the high water mark of communism and its aggression right there in Vietnam, and in the end, he did. 

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Our Host Randal Wallace appeared on the Radio show "Up With America with Tom Heron" in November of 2021 and the segment is here. This interview stresses the importance of history in learning how to deal with today's divisions in our land. We hope you enjoy the interview. 

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One of the low moments of the Vietnam War is covered in this episode. It was the moment in the plans to Vietnamize the Vietnam War that we conducted an operation with only South Vietnamese troops on the ground and we provided air support. In the end, our side got walloped. 

This happened in an operation in which our side went over the border into neighboring Laos to finally stop the Communist forces from moving supplies an ammunition down that portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Despite the heavy losses, overall things were going better for our forces and more and more reductions of our own troops involvement in the war was happening. 

In this episode, we look at the Laotian campaign, its aftermath, and then we listen in as President Richard Nixon delivers one of his best and most powerful speeches to the nation on the situation we faced in Vietnam. 

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In this episode, we are finally  at the moment that the taping system was installed. It was a fateful decision, and it would eventually lead to the fall of the Nixon Administration. The tapes have been used to attack the President and portray him as an awful person. For the most part, only the worst of the worst of these tapes have been promoted to the public. 

President Nixon allowed the taping system to be set up in such a way that it taped his every utterance on a voice activated system for every moment when he walked into a room. Due to that fact, it recorded everything, the good , the bad, and the ugly. It caught Nixon at his very best and at his very worst. For the obvious reason, that it would destroy his image and hurt his historical standing with vast numbers of the public, liberal historians and liberal documentarians have grabbed every negative tape they can find and made sure the public has heard it.

Few, if any, of the general public have heard the good moments, the masterful moments, or the painstaking ways in which President Nixon worked so hard to get us out of a disaster he inherited in Vietnam, to open China, to create detente with the Soviets, to save the environment, and to work to eradicate drugs from our culture and to find a cure for cancer. 

WELL THAT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE

Starting with this episode of our documentary series on President Richard Nixon, you will get to hear some of the thousands of hours of tape of Richard Nixon painstakingly working to change the world for the better. In this episode alone you will hear him working with, cajoling, bargaining, and complimenting congressmen for their help with legislation designed to make our lives, 50 years later, better. 

Throughout the next episodes we will listen as he opens China, starts initiatives at home and abroad, all with a strategic goal in mind to put the United States in the strongest position in the world economically, militarily and morally. From there he will set up the architecture and the foundation for a generation of peace, that my generation of Americans was able to live. He set up the structure of a safer world that still constrains the most extreme elements in our world  to this day,  forces  who would plunge our world into darkness and chaos. 

Here you will hear Richard Nixon getting the job done, one show, and one historic event, at a time, and he will do it, over and over again. 

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