The Richard Nixon Experience

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In our Season 1 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

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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. 

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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. 

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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 and 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 other good , fine, and nongovernmental people. 

Are their 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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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 talk about the contents of the historic tapes of the Nixon Administration. We address the negative parts that are so familiar to the public. Nixon's remarks about Women, Gays, Jews, African Americans, his rages, and his intemperate remarks, all caught on a voice activated tape recorder that caught his every word every time he entered a room. 

We will also discuss the quality of some of the tapes, or the lack there of, as we learn that many of these tapes are either inaudible and to various other degrees hard to understand. But we also go through those moments when we see a giant at work, a man steadily working for the good of the country, and most importantly, working to get us out of a war he inherited from the two previous administrations, and to free us from that war in a way that we maintain our place in the world and actually enhance it.  This is the high point of the march of Communism in the world during the Cold War. It fell to two Presidents,  Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon,  to stop it and hold our ground. 

The taping system is a window on the Administration of Richard Nixon in an unparalleled way. We will watch him masterfully maneuver the most complex set of problems ever faced by a United States President. In this special edition, we listen in,  to the worst,  and some of the best moments, and we hear from historians, and some of the people on the tapes, as they discuss the legacy of those tapes, and the legacy of a President who arguably saved our Union from disaster both abroad and here at home too. 

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In this episode, we finally be 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 Americans was able to live. He set up the structure of a safer world that still constrains the most extreme elements to this day, elements 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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Starlight, the Secret Service Codename for First Lady Pat Nixon, was absolutely perfect as a way to describe Mrs. Nixon. She lit up every room that she entered. She was a First Lady who quietly went about accomplishing things in ways often unseen and under appreciated. Yet, despite her reluctance to be in the spotlight the American people still responded to her spirit and to her many contributions to our nation. She was voted one of the most admired women in the World for 22 straight years. That is a record few can match. 

In this episode, we put the First lady front and center and share several retrospectives on her life and contributions put together by the Nixon Foundation and an interview with President Richard Nixon himself on how much he appreciated this extraordinary partner. She rose from humble beginnings, orphaned as a teenager, she helped raise her younger siblings and went on to get her undergraduate, and then Master's degree before starting a career as a public school teacher, all in an era when few women were encouraged to do so. It really is a remarkable story, long before she even met Richard Nixon. But together, these two people from very humble beginnings would transform the World. 

Then we look at the initiative the President began when he took office, very much under the guidance of Mrs. Nixon, to bring women into government service. It is the initiative that brought several women to the forefront including Sandra Day O'Conner who would later go on to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court under the Reagan Administration.  Listen as Barbara Franklin, the lady Richard Nixon tasked with leading the initiative, discusses the free hand and absolute support President Nixon gave her to do her job. It was yet another example of why Richard Nixon deserves to be considered one of our 5 greatest civil rights Presidents

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People don't seem to realize that Richard Nixon was actually one of our five great Civil Rights Presidents.  Brown vs the Board of Education was decided in 1954 but it was left up to Richard Nixon to make the decision to desegregate the public school systems a reality. He did it and he did it with no violence. He did it by sitting down with state and community leaders, treating them like he respected them, and having them have a hand in making it happen. It is a truly remarkable story and it was guided to reality by George Shultz, one of only two men to hold four different Cabinet positions under Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. 

Again,  as the year wore on, Richard Nixon would comeback to try and find a solution to the war that was dividing our country. He would return with a new set of initiatives to try and bring the recalcitrant North Vietnamese back to the table to try and find peace. 

Then as 1970 drew to a close, Richard Nixon would have the most unusual of summit meetings. Now the White House is no stranger to Presidents, Prime Ministers, General Secretaries, and various other foreign heads of State, it has even played host to Kings and Queens in its proud over 200 year history.  But on December 20, 1970, the White House got some royal treatment like no other in its history. That was the day a very special King rolled up , unannounced, with a handwritten letter , an an antique revolver in hand as a gift for the President. And, as with all things Elvis, they let the King of Rock and Roll in the building. 

Lord A Mighty, 
feel my temperature rising, 
Higher , higher
It's burning through to my soul

Girl, girl , girl , girl
You gonna set me on fire
My brain is flaming
I don't know which way to go....

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Apollo 13, one of the most remembered moments in the history of NASA. By April of 1970 going to the moon had become almost "ho hum". The television networks did not even bother to show the inflight special broadcast from the spaceflight.  Then when the Astronauts were preparing their ship for the long voyage to the moon, BAM!! An explosion, followed by the calm immortal words of mission Captain Jim Lovell back to the Mission Control Center...

"Houston, We have a problem." 

If you have seen the movie you know it was high drama as the spacecraft ended up crippled and good old American ingenuity had to kick in in order to bring the three Astronauts home. This is that story, as recorded live in real time.  Over and over again, our three astronauts Jim Lovell,  Fred Haise and Jim Swigert and all of their expert associates on the ground at Mission Control have to overcome life threatening obstacle after obstacle until they finally land in the Pacific back home here on Earth. 

For over the next hour listen in at NASA's finest hour as the World comes together once again to pray that our men make it home, on a wing, a prayer, and a roll of Duc tape.