The Richard Nixon Experience

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Not since the Civil War had America been this divided. The decisions to both go to war in Vietnam and to pass several Civil Rights Bills that changed how America interacted socially led to an explosive Presidential Election year.  Never had their been a campaign with more extreme lows as this one had. 

First came a major offensive by the enemy in Vietnam during the Vietnamese New Year known as Tet. The offensive was actually a military failure but you would never convince anyone of that in the United States. It led to an upstart Senator from the State of Minnesota named Eugene McCarthy to challenge his own party's President in the New Hampshire Primary. He nearly won capturing over 40% of the vote. 

That brought in the younger brother of the slain former President, the former Attorney General turned New York Senator, Robert F. Kennedy into the race for President.  Over on the Republican's side, several Governors, George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller and even the new California Governor Ronald Reagan saddled up to run against Lyndon Johnson, but on that side of the aisle there was one clear front runner, Vice President Richard Nixon. 

Just six years before, in 1962, Nixon had lost a bid for the California Governorship and appeared totally washed up in politics. He had appeared to be a loser. But after the Republican's nominated an extremist candidate for President in 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater, many Republicans had abandoned the party and voted for President Lyndon Johnson in an unprecedented landslide election. Richard Nixon had not. He stayed loyal and worked harder for Goldwater than Goldwater did.  He then went out and campaigned all over the country for Republicans in the 1966 mid terms. 

Now Nixon was back, rested and ready, with a platform he had developed over many years in the wilderness and he, like all the democrats in the race, set dead aim on Lyndon Johnson, but LBJ had a surprise for them and when he bowed out it turned the entire election upside down. 

Sadly, just a few days later the Civil Rights Leader  who had led a movement of nonviolence and helped change the country for the better, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It set the country on fire, and was just the first of many tragedies that 1968 would see happen. Relive this period of tumult in this first episode examining the critical year of Upheaval that was 1968. 

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The rest of Season 1 of   "The Richard Nixon Experience " takes us through the most controversial period in our history other than the Civil War. 

In this season we will cover one of the most controversial an arguably most consequential elections in the entire history of our nation.  We will see the country inherited by Richard Nixon after The Administrations of John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Here is a preview of what promises to be a long, hot, summer....

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This episode starts as Richard Nixon, at age 39, is taking the oath of the Vice President of the United States. 

On this episode we take you through his remarkable Vice Presidency, where he has to step in through two major illnesses of the President, a heart attack and then stroke. Then he is attacked by a violent, rock throwing mob as he travels by motorcade through the streets of Caracas , Venezuela, then has to hold his own at a trade show in Moscow when he is cornered for an impromptu debate with Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev. 

Then we move into the most examined Presidential campaign in history as Vice President Richard Nixon faces off against an old friend from Congress, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It would be one of the closest races in history and Nixon would lose. Then to get back in the political hunt Richard Nixon goes home to California and attempts to run for Governor in 1962, only to lose a second time. It looked like his career had flamed out as meteorically as it had taken off to start with. 

Then a series of events would open more and more doors for a return to the national stage and a run for President in 1968. 

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The opening episode of Season 1 of  "The Richard Nixon Experience"   is a particular thing of excitement for me. Richard Nixon is one of my political heroes and most responsible for my interest in public service. I have been a fan since I discovered a scrapbook saved by my Mother from a class she was student teaching in 1960. A full decade before I was born. 

 I have long felt that no full length , in-depth, look at the life of Richard Nixon has ever been done that did not attempt to paint the life, career, an administration of Richard Nixon in a negative light. That has, thankfully,  in recent years begun to change, with great books written by Conrad Black, Jonathan Atken, Evan Thomas, J.A. Farrell, and most recently several books by Historian Luke Nichter, especially  his book "Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Post War Atlantic World" 

This Podcast Documentary, that begins with this episode, will I hope contribute to showing the remarkable life of Richard Nixon with the appreciation he deserves. This Podcast series will span four seasons worth of shows. This first season will cover his career through the end of the Vietnam War in January of 1973. We will then comeback in Season five to look at Watergate and the other events of his final year and 8 months in office, and then an epilogue of events that shows what happened after he left, to both the country, and to him.  

I cannot say thank you enough to several sources of information that have made this podcast documentary possible.  They are:  the national archives for several oral histories, the television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, & CNN)  for historic coverage and , most especially, the Richard Nixon Foundation and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace, that have created many of the short features I used, and events where people talked about their time with, or their studies of,  President and Mrs. Nixon. 

I would also like to say a special thank you to Historian Luke Nichter for his work with chronicling and making accessible the Nixon tapes through the site NixonTapes.org. We use them extensively, especially as we drew closer to the end of the Vietnam War. This I hope will be an opportunity to hear President Nixon guide us through the end game, out of Vietnam. Most people have never heard these tapes and I hope you will tune in to those episodes most especially. 

This show begins at the end, on the night that former President Richard Nixon  passed away. We will look as the the world stopped to take a pause and reflect on his amazing life. Much to the chattering class and media elites amazement, Richard Nixon's passing led to an outpouring of grief from the heartland of America, the common people, the folks Richard Nixon had always represented and in whose interests he served. We then will take you through a two part tour of his amazing career from running for Congress, to the Senate, the Vice Presidency , his 1960 and 1962 losses, and then back to the 1968 election he won in our last documentary. ( see the shows  we just completed in Season 3 on Lyndon Johnson and 1968)  

Then we will move on to Richard Nixon's Presidency and what many have called "The Age of Nixon" 

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At the end of 1968 the United States was a country at war abroad and in chaos at home.  The  American people  were asking the same question that movie star Lauren Bacall expressed to the country on "The Dick Cavett Show", "What has become of our country, is our country worth saving? "

In January 1969, a new President, but a leader many had written off as a failure years before returned to the national stage to prove to the nation that it was not only a country worth saving but it was still the Greatest Country on Earth. 

But it is a story that came with a high price and for the past 47 years a horribly unfair and one sided story has been promoted across the land.

But now,

Finally, the remarkable Presidency of Richard Nixon will be told, here on  The Richard Nixon Experience...... 

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Breaking News!! The Vindication of Richard Nixon appears at long last to be upon us. One of the leading academic institutions in America has decided to look in-depth at the documents discovered by Geoff Shepard ( and that we used on our podcast for Seasons 6 -8) as we approach the 50th anniversary of the Watergate Scandal and the fall of President Richard Nixon. 

In this episode , we have been given permission to replay a new discussion panel featuring former White House Appointments Secretary for President Richard Nixon, Dwight Chapin, former Nixon legal Defense Team Member Geoff Shepard, and one of the leading historians in the World today, Luke Nichter of Chapman University, as they discuss the Hoover History Working Group and its new 12 hours of in-depth seminars delving into the documents discovered by Geoff Shepard in the National Archives. This is the first time a major academic Institution has decided to study these documents this intensely  that make the case that their was massive Prosecutorial Misconduct, and misconduct of Judge John Sirica, that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon and the conviction of several of his top aids in 1974. 

We also review some of the examples of exculpatory materials we feature in our series that covers 5 seasons and the entire Nixon Presidency.  If you tune in to our shows it will be evident that there was a lot more to the story of Richard Nixon than has been told so far by historians and the national news media. A lot of it is of a great man with a long list of accomplishment.  So this news about the work of the Hoover working history groups in-depth look at the new Watergate documents is welcome news in deed.

For those of us who have admired this greatest of Presidents this is an exciting and almost tear producing moment. That this  man who saved our union will finally be able to take his place among the greatest Americans the nation has ever produced without any caveats concerning the scandal that ended his administration.  We invite you to delve deep into our back catalogue as well, starting at episode 50 through episode 175, plus several bonus episodes running from Season 4 through Season 8, and learn the true story of a great American leader. We hope you will because the better educated we all are, the less likely it will ever happen again....and it could happen again, in fact, it may be happening now. 

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The Bad News, we have cancelled "The Randal Wallace Show" , which is a big disappointment for me personally. I had hoped to feature some interesting interviews on our new show however it proved to be difficult to get the guests we had hoped to have on the show. We  also had not seen the numbers we had hoped to lead off with in order to remain on the air.  

We still plan to have interviews from time to time and will post some of those in special segments on our History Documentary podcast "Randal Wallace Presents" and if the subjects work on this new podcast that will be continuing in this spot. We also plan to leave the four special editions we produced prior to the decision to cancel the show here for you to enjoy if you wish. We are proud of those shows and our ability, on a limited to no budget, to cover two historic live events from the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. to an international incident on the steps of my own front door in Myrtle Beach S.C. 

So here  is the good news. We will be changing the concept on this site to coincided with the 50th Anniversary of the Presidency of Richard Nixon. We are entering the anniversary of what was his second term, the Watergate term. We thought that over the next year and a half we would rebroadcast our landmark, extensive,  highly acclaimed, podcast Documentary on Richard Nixon, here in this spot  for those of you who would be interested or may have missed it during its earlier run on "Bridging the Political Gap". 

This time the entire documentary series will run under our new show  name "The Richard Nixon Experience".  So please tune in as we look back on the incredible years of Richard Nixon's Presidency from the 1968 campaign forward to his passing in 1994. You will relive the experience of the Vietnam War and then the accomplishments, Upheaval, and high drama that made up the experience of America as it wrestled with the forces that rocked the nation to its core from the 1960's through the early 1970's, the experience of a war, civil rights, social upheaval, all coming together at one time and overwhelming the very institutions Americans had trusted for nearly two hundred years.

 It was an experience like no other, it was  "The Richard Nixon Experience. " 

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On Saturday February 4, 2023, after several days of monitoring a Chinese Spy Balloon as it meandered across the nation at 60,000 feet. The United States Military sent F-16's up in the air to shoot it down as it went out over the Ocean just off the coast of South Carolina. 

For those of us who live in Myrtle Beach it was a Saturday like no other in memory. I was busy editing my two podcasts when the news flash came over that the Spy Balloon was over head and the U.S. Military was circling it. When suddenly my entire house shook and we all headed outside to to watch the balloon fall from the sky. Suddenly, Myrtle Beach S.C. was the center of the World's attention in a dispute that featured the two most powerful nations on Earth, The United States and China. 

This is a story we thought we would try and share,  if you, like most people, had only sort of paid attention to the news until the balloon was shot down.  Here in Myrtle Beach where I live it was just six miles and 60,000 feet from my front door. We set this episode up much as we do shows on our sister podcast. This episode features news reports from several of the major news outlets, and we want to say thank you right now for the extraordinary coverage of FOX , CBS, ABC,  CNN, Sky , Bloomberg and several other news outlets. Plus we were thrilled to have the radio transmissions from the Air Force that were released a day or so after too. This podcast is proud to let you relive the fateful few days that the Chinese Spy Balloon wandered the skies above us and the day we shot it down...

With a Missile over Myrtle Beach..... 

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In part three of "The Randal Wallace Show" we bring you the conclusion of the fight for the Speakership of United States House of Representatives. In this episode, we see the negotiations begin to finally  bring the debate to a close. Representative Kevin McCarthy gives in to several of the requests of the conservative wing of the Party. But just when you think a deal has been done Representative Matt Goetz throws' a monkey-wrench into the works.

That leads to one of the most dramatic things seen in politics on the House floor in years as one representative has to be physically restrained all while a former President steps in to push the resisters into a final deal. It is high drama on the floor of the House.

Then we bring you the final speeches and draw this extraordinary civic lesson to a close,

(We wish to give full credit for the network news reports used through out to the media outlets we used audio from, CBS News, WBTW - News 13 in Myrtle Beach/Florence S.C., CNN, the PBS NewsHour, and ABC News. )

Theme song is  Produced by Danya Vodovoz, Royalty free song link   https://youtu.be/NRxduUMZcdw

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In part two of our introductory podcast series for "The Randal Wallace Show" we let the leading news outlets of the day cover the fight for the Speakership of the 118th Congress. You will get to sit through all the twists and turns of the middle days of the open rebellion of conservative firebrand congressmen who tried to block Representative Kevin McCarthy from becoming the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

You will hear the speeches from the floor and listen in on the coverage of the maneuverings behind the scenes of the Republican House Leadership as it struggles to survive, and take control of the Chamber.  It would be one of the great civic lessons that our country has had in a long, long, time.

And we will let you listen in on it all in days two and three......

(We wish to give full credit for the network news reports used through out to the media outlets we used audio from, CBS News, WBTW - News 13 in Myrtle Beach/Florence S.C., CNN, the PBS NewsHour, and ABC News. )

Theme song is  Produced by Danya Vodovoz, Royalty free song link   https://youtu.be/NRxduUMZcdw