By Randal Wallace
Randal Wallace Presents : "George H. W. Bush" a five season look back at his extraordinary life, career, and his single term as President of the United States. A term that saw the high point of Ame
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In this episode we introduce you to the one person who needs no introduction, Bill Clinton, the then Governor of Arkansas. He would burst onto the national stage in 1991 and quickly emerge as the Democratic Frontrunner. He raised the most money, setup the strongest organization , and used his extraordinary people skills to win the public over.
In this episode we let you see those skills in full bloom. We watch two different Clinton Foundation videos that tell the story of the start of his historic 1992 campaign, and we will sit down with him, and legendary reporter Hugh Sidey, as they discuss his life and career before the Presidency.
Then we head down to Little Rock, Arkansas, on October 3, 1991, to hear the Governor announce he is a candidate for President of the United States. It is a big moment , for this Governor from this small Southern State, who will in little over a year, find himself the First in his Class of Baby Boomers to make it to the White House.
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Pat Buchanan, the tough talking, former speechwriter and aid to Richard Nixon, and former Communications Director for Ronald Reagan, steps up and challenges the President and leader of his own party in New Hampshire. His campaign will sound very familiar to you if you have followed the last three Republican Presidential Campaigns.
For much of the "America First" and "Make America Great Again" platforms and campaign rhetoric began with the campaign in 1992 of Pat Buchanan. In this episode we will take you back to the beginning of his improbable campaign in 1992 when he nearly toppled a President before the President could get his campaign off the ground.
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In this episode we look at the daunting economic tasks George H. W. Bush has in front of him over the next year. The economy, Unemployment, Healthcare, and the ever present issues on the World Stage, are all piling up and Bush is busy putting his plans together to tackle them. We will see him in this episode start putting those plans out into the public.
At the sametime, he will face the 1992 Presidential Campaign and in this episode we will hear from the long list of Contenders all vying for his job. Senators Tom Harkin, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerry, and Governors Jerry Brown, Doug Wilder, and the front runner, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, all step onto the national stage in an attempt to unseat President Bush. They will receive some help too.
From a Republican, who will challenge Bush from his right, in his own party, the way Senator McCarthy did President Lyndon Johnson, nearly a quarter of a century before. Pat Buchanan's candidacy would have much the same effect, turning the Republican race into a real race for the nomination and wounding the President for the upcoming fall campaign.
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In our first episode of our fourteenth season, we open with arguably one of the high points of the George H. W. Bush years. When he opened the 1992 State of the Union address he could legitimately say"The State of our Union is strong", for in the past year, he had vanquished a dictator in the Middle East, and he had managed the collapse of the Communist World without it leading to another World War.
As Robert Gates had said often, the collapse of a major World Empire rarely if ever happens in history without a major War. Bush and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, had managed to oversea the end of the Cold War without it leading to a hot one.
However, in the meantime, the United States economy had gone into recession and that would be the next big item on President Bush's already historic agenda. The question would become could he get it all turned around in time for the election that was on the horizon in 1992.
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In this brief bonus episode we take just a few minutes to remember the career of the great ABC News reporter Tom Jarrell who passed away in October 2024. Jarrell covered some of the biggest stories of the last half of the 20th century. He most notably was in Memphis covering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr when King was assassinated in 1968.
We have some of his remarkable career to play for you in our brief tribute to one of the best television reporters of our time.
Tom Jarrell was 89 years old.
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In 1992, as the Cold War had come to an end, George H. W. Bush was up for re-election. It should have been a cake walk. Bush had accomplished more in three years than many Presidents accomplish in 8 years. He had presided over the end of the Cold War, victory in the Gulf War, and in Panama, he had bailed out the Savings and Loans, passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, and presided over the management of Communisms collapse around the globe.
To this day, I still have never understood how George Bush lost that election. The reason can be summed up in two words, Bill Clinton. The Arkansas Governor is without question the best campaigner who ever drew a breath and he got helped out by a conservative firebrand on the right challenging and wounding the President , named Pat Buchanan and a Texas Billionaire named H. Ross Perot draining away Republican votes in the general election too.
If you listen closely, what you will hear in the echoes of this 1992 campaign, are the talking points and blueprints of a movement that has taken a hold of the United States today in the form of Donald Trump, Make America Great Again, and America First politics of 2024. The big difference between now and then is the charismatic talents of the Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton. He is the first of the Vietnam era generation to win on the national stage and this election marks the moment that the World War 2 Generation begins to leave stage left.
A special thank you to CNN's "Campaign 1992" for many of the edited highlights
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In our Season finale of the historic year that was 1991, we look at the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union itself.
It began in a bloody revolution that saw the execution of not only Czar Nicholas the second but also his entire family including his young daughters. In the 69 years it officially existed and in the five years before that after the Russian Revolution, it saw its revolution spread to many other countries and its own power spread across 11 time zones, and all across Eurasia. It became a world , nuclear Super Power in parity with the United States militarily. However, it never had any kind of real economic strength and it had all the weaknesses of a command economy.
That was what eventually brought it down. It had seen Lenin, a bloodthirsty dictator in Joseph Stalin, a wily, constantly experimenting in economics and Agriculture and cabinet shuffling leader in Nikita Khrushchev, the cunning, pragmatic, and cautions 20 year rule of Leonid Brezhnev, and then a succession of two old, relatively ill, and brief Presidents in Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko before a young, vibrant, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
Gorbachev would serve 6 years and try and reform, and save his country. It would be the reforms he let loose that would bring his country its first taste of political and economic freedom. Once it was tasted that freedom, it could not be turned back and Gorbachev, ever the committed Communist, continued to try and manage it all without totally overhauling the system.
In that he failed. On Christmas Day, 1991, he resigned the Presidency of the Soviet Union and the once proud hammer and sickle flag of the USSR was taken down from over the Kremlin and the flag of the Russian Federation was flown in its place. The Soviet Union, began in blood shed, and revolution, vanished quietly in the night with a phone call to the President of the country it had been at Cold War with for nearly half a century.
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In over a thousand years of Russian history only one man can lay claim as having been elected directly from the people. His name was Boris Yeltsin.
He is the man who pushed the Soviet Union over the cliff and then became the leader of the fledgling Russian Federation. He stood on a tank in defiance of a coup that was trying to seize control of the nation from the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, and while that coup failed to topple Gorbachev, it in effect, stripped all the power away from the USSR President and all the real bonds of the republics that held it together.
By the end of 1991, the various republics of the old Soviet Union had declared themselves independent and Yeltsin got together with their leaders of those republics to form a new Federation, leaving Gorbachev and the Soviet Congress with no real country to rule. The Politburo would meet one last time to debate the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
This all occurred as one man rose to power in the Russia and it would be him who would lead Russia up until the start of the 21st century . In this episode we look back at him, Boris Yeltsin, and how he rose to the position of President and how he did as the new nations leader.
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In our second part of our look at both the fall of the Soviet Union and of its final leader Mikhail Gorbachev, we look back at his life and his career. we listen to the man himself and hear his thoughts after the dissolution of the Soviet Union had occurred.
We will also examine one of the ultimate of ironies for this historic figure of the 20th century. By the time of his death at age 91, Mikhail Gorbachev, had become a loved and admired figure around the world, and yet he was shunned in his own country. The new leader of Russia said of the demise of the Soviet Union "It was the worst catastrophe of the 20th Century"
Vladimir Putin, while sending condolences to the Gorbachev family and visiting the wake of the last Soviet Union, sent his regrets that he was to busy to attend the funeral of the last President of the Soviet Union and a giant in the history of the world, Mikhail Gorbachev.
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As we begin our four part look back at the fall of the Soviet Union, we begin by looking back at the man who presided over it, Mikhail Gorbachev.
He was reformer, a charismatic leader, and a committed Communist. It is that latter part of the description that is the key to understanding his own downfall. He stayed married to the Communist philosophy to long and due to it was maneuvered out of his job, by another leader, Boris Yeltsin, whose rise was only made possible by the reforms that Gorbachev himself had unleashed.
In this episode we examine both the life, rise and career of Mikhail Gorbachev but also the situation the Soviet Union faced after the committed Communists tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August of 1991. The Gang of 8 were trying to take back control of the country before the Soviet Union fell apart. Instead, they may very well have pushed it over the cliff. It created a change in the power dynamic that even after Gorbachev was restored to the title of President of the USSR, he found himself sharing power with Boris Yeltsin, and all the real power had shifted away from him.
Here is the beginning of that story.
Questions or comments at , [email protected] , https://twitter.com/randal_wallace , and http://www.randalwallace.com/
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The podcast currently has 482 episodes available.