The Richard Nixon Experience

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We join a 1972 campaign in wide open progress as George McGovern tries to make his case to the American people at a time when the economy is doing well and a peace looks like it could be with in grasp of President Nixon. It was a tough row to hoe.

Listen in as President Nixon continues to work toward a negotiated peace in Vietnam, with many frustrations along the way.  Plus you will hear Vice President Spiro Agnew on the campaign trail with a style uniquely his own.

Here we listen to ads, the speeches, and  the news reports  from along the 1972 campaign trail. We also get to hear the President as he works with Henry Kissinger trying to find a way to get the war over with. 

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While Richard Nixon served as President at the height of the Cold War. He was also President when terrorism exploded on to the World stage as a tool of the extreme Islamic World. 

In this special edition we look back at one of the most horrifying events of the early 1970's, by tuning into the voices of the people who covered it for ABC Sports. It features interviews with a Hall of Fame Quarterback turned sports commentator, Frank Gifford, and his counterpart T.V. Host Jim McKay, a man best known for hosting a Saturday afternoon show which covered obscure sporting events like the National Lumberjack Championship in Hayward, Wisconsin or the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. 

But with little to no notice, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge, moved Jim McKay in from his role at ABC's Wide World of Sports duties to cover a hostage situation at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany.  McKay would bring the humanity of the moment to the small screen as he covered the tragic circumstances of an Israeli Olympic team being held hostage by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September.

It would be a tragic and grim moment for all involved and it would be the precursor for the challenges the free world still faces today, long after the fall of communism,  by religious fanaticism hell bent on staying in the late 11th century. 

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The 1972 conventions are over and the candidates hit the campaign trail. It is a year where major events seem to be happening every time you turn your head around.  President Nixon has a commanding 26 point lead in most national polls and he is in hot pursuit of not only a victory at the polls in November but also a successful end to the war in Vietnam, a peace with honor.
 
It is in the last half of 1972 that a high stakes game of International intrigue is being played to finally get the United States out of its longest and most divisive foreign conflict  but it is also a time period where a third rate burglary would begin slow festering a political cancer on the body politic that will change everything for the nation and sew the seeds of inner division that has never healed to this day.

In this episode we will listen in as President Nixon works for peace in Vietnam while on the phones with both his National Security Advisor  Henry Kissinger and his top aid General Alexander Haig. You will hear the President voice his frustration at the treatment of his wife at the hands of a press corp that rarely could find anything good to say about him or his administration. Plus you will hear his opponent both on the campaign trail an in an oral history nearly 40 years later.  This episode begins a long march toward the end of Vietnam, a peace in Southeast Asia, a 49 State re-election and a slow burning scandal that would eventually bring down the President.

This episode marks the beginning of our use of a treasure of tapes that show Richard Nixon at his finest. Listen closely because it will change everything you thought you knew about this extraordinary man.  

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The final night opens with actor Jimmy Stewart and First Lady Pat Nixon. Then Congressman Gerald Ford introduces Vice President Spiro T. Agnew who will in turn bring out Richard Nixon for the main event.

Then Richard Nixon will deliver his acceptance speech for a second term as President. At that moment, Richard Nixon sat on top of the world. He was closing in on a victory of not only the Presidency , but of ending the War in Vietnam with honor, restructuring the Federal Government, calming down a decade of upheaval, and setting up  a structure of order that would bring peace to millions around the World. 

All was going perfectly, what could possibly go wrong?

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If the McGovern campaign had been a textbook example of what could go wrong would, the Nixon campaign ran like a well oiled machine. 

If you listen to the journalist covering the convention they sound like they are covering the great turtle race.  They are audibly struggling to keep things interesting. But if you love the pomp and circumstances of a national convention, which I do, you will still love all the fun of the roll call vote, the nominating speeches and the convention demonstrations.

It is the celebration of America.

Then after the foregone conclusion happens , the magic of television will take you to Maritime park in Miami for a concert featuring entertainer Sammy Davis Jr, as they go after the youth vote, which President Nixon had opened the doors for just the year before. 

After Nixon was nominated he came down to the stage and delivered an inspiring speech watched around the world on television and on the big screens at the convention hall.

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In this episode we open with the real power player in the Democratic Party of 1972, Senator Ted Kennedy. He would step up to nominate George McGovern. 

Then George McGovern will step up to the podium in the wee hours of the morning to make his case to the nation as to why they should trade in Richard Nixon for him. It would be the high mark for a campaign that would end up with a shock just days after the convention gaveled to a close. 

The news that would change the upward stride of the campaign was that Vice Presidential Candidate Thomas Eagleton had had electro shock treatment for depression just few short years before. Then the McGovern campaign had to move Eagleton off the ticket and make room for Ted Kennedy's brother in law, Sargent Shriver, to try and carry them to the finish line. 

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This episode starts off the conventions of 1972 with the Democrats. While 1972 was not 1968, it was still a textbook example of what not to do. Poor George McGovern was in a campaign best described as if it could go wrong it did. 

He had come from out of nowhere to be the front runner for the nomination going into the convention but he still had not won it. He would wrestle with his opponents until 2:30 am the night of his nomination. In the meantime, he had to make a Vice Presidential nomination and he chose a well liked Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. That would be the ticket to face Nixon and Agnew in 1972. 

It would have a rather shocking end before it ever really got started. But in this episode we will see the various issues of the convention, and hear from Thomas Eagleton as he accepts the nomination. 

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President Richard Nixon's Address to the nation and to a joint session of Congress on June 1, 1972, would mark the arguable high point of his amazing political career. Fresh off two successful summits, first in Peking, China and then in Moscow, in the Soviet Union. President Nixon was poised to change the chess board of the world in 1972.  It was an incredible moment when all seemed with in his grasp, that he would be bringing peace to the world and marking his place as one of America's greatest Presidents. 

You will hear this amazing address to the nation, listen in on his calls with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and see him setting the stage to try and bring the one major obstacle to his plans, the Vietnam War,  to an end. 

We also step back a couple of weeks to yet another assassination attempt on yet another national political figure, Alabama Governor George Wallace. Here you will hear President Nixon call to see about his political rival and talk to his worried wife. Nixon will also order Secret Service protection for Senator Edward Kennedy as a precaution for the safety of the last of the political family that he has been at political odds with for so long. 

In the middle of all of this, is a story about a foiled burglary attempt at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, at the time it seemed like just a small story and the show moves on with little comment. 

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SUMMIT IN MOSCOW. 

On May 22, 1972 Richard Nixon was the first American President to set foot inside the Kremlin as he and Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev would hold the first Summit meeting. It would lead to various treaties and the start of a thaw in Cold War relations between the two world Super Powers. It was there in Moscow that the two nations signed the SALT 1 agreement, the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty. 

In this show we look back at this momentous moment and here from several of the folks at a conference at the Nixon Library about how the summit came together and how it changed our diplomatic positioning through out the world.  We listen in on a documentary about the summit just after it concluded and finally we listen in on something no one in America during the height of the Cold War would ever believed could happen. 

We listen as President Richard Nixon, one of the most anti-communist leaders in the entire world, addresses the people of the Soviet Union on primetime television. 

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After President Richard Nixon returned from China he would have to catch up on all he missed as the Democratic Party began its campaign to challenge him in earnest.  It would be a race that would feature one of the great come from nowhere candidates in all of American history, South Dakota Senator George McGovern.  He would be up against Senator Edmund Muskie, the presumed frontrunner, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey the 1968 nominee, an Alabama Governor George Wallace who had run for President as an independent in 1968. 

McGovern had two things going for him, he was strong against the war in Vietnam and he had a young , bright, aggressive campaign manager named Gary Hart who decided to bet the farm on the Iowa Caucuses and it worked. McGovern shocked the world finishing second. Muskie would end up with a few problems of his own after a letter accusing him of allowing racism popped up in Florida and a New Hampshire Newspaper made ethics an issue about the candidates wife. Muskie had a meltdown in which he may or may not have cried at a snowy press conference  in New Hampshire but either way it would dampen his Presidential hopes.

Then the President had to make a strong move in Vietnam after the North Vietnamese went on an Easter offensive. Nixon addressed the nation, bombed Hanoi, and mined the harbors there. Nixon was now free of worry about an invading Chinese and with the game now so dramatically changed he thought a strong move against Hanoi would do him no harm as he also prepared for his summit in Moscow. It was hardball politics on the world stage.   

Finally, the show ends with a game changing domestic event here at home. A giant of the nations history would pass away suddenly at the age of 72. Whether you liked J. Edgar Hoover or not there was no denying his enormous place in the history of the nation and in the influence of domestic politics here at home, and his passing would create an enormous power vacuum that would have huge ramifications on future events in the life of Richard Nixon and the nation. We end as we listen to President Nixon deliver a eulogy for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.