BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

Send us Fan Mail To the stars through difficulties, the  motto of the state of Kansas and a theme for the life of Bob Dole.  In this final episode in our week long tribute to Senator Bob Dole we look back on two historic days  in which the Senator laid in state in the rotunda of the Capitol of the United States of America.  Here you will hear the President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, sp...

Send us Fan Mail In part 5 of our tribute to Bob Dole we look back at the war injury that left him disabled. We hear from him and from his close friend and fellow Senator, Dan Inouye, about his hard scrabble fight back to health.  Dole spent 39 months in Army hospitals regaining his health after his act of heroism trying to save his radio man, Corporal Simms.  We then hear Bob Dole talk about his...

Send us Fan Mail Bob Dole lost the 1996 Presidential Election.  On that night he came to the podium and said something I know for him had to be a little scary.  "For the first time in my life when I get up tomorrow I won't have anything to do" - Bob Dole Boy did that turn out not to be true. In three days he would be invited to come be a guest on the CBS show "Late Show with Da...

Send us Fan Mail On June 11, 1996, Senate Majority Leader and the 1996 Republican Nominee for President got to do something few if any politicians ever get to do. He left office on his own terms. Bob Dole resigned so he could focus all his energy and effort on winning the 1996 election.  He was behind in the polls but on Capitol Hill he was given a heroes send off. It was truly a day for the histo...

Send us Fan Mail It was the campaign of my lifetime. A chance to work for not one but three of my heroes in one year, Bob and Elizabeth Dole and Strom Thurmond.  1996 was a great year.  Some people have been critical of the campaign Bob Dole ran in 1996, but I doubt anyone could have done any better. The economy was booming and Bill Clinton was the master of campaigning. But Bob  Dole gave him a r...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Bob Dole Week!!! Everyday this week we will look back at the life and career of one of the 20th century's greatest Americans.  In this episode we look back at his entire life with his Presidential Concession speech, and  two videos of his life from his 1988 Presidential campaign and from the Bi-Partisan Policy Center. Then we will step back in time to the moment he...

Send us Fan Mail 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 m...

Send us Fan Mail 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, treati...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail On November 14, 2021,  on a Sunday, Horry County, South Carolina, lost a towering giant in the history of the region. Lois Eargle was a trailblazer, never politically correct, and never afraid to speak her mind. She was an unabashedly proud public servant for the people of Horry County and most of all a servant of her Lord, Jesus Christ.  She opened doors for young people,  an esp...

Send us Fan Mail After President Nixon announced he would cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and take military action in Cambodia, college campuses across the nation exploded. Riots and demonstrations shut down several colleges and led to a nightmare scenario at Kent State in Ohio.  It was there that four young people would lose their lives when National Guardsman, themselves very young, fired on protester...

Send us Fan Mail This episode opens at the dawn of the environmental movement in America. It may come as a surprise to you that Richard Nixon is considered second only to Theodore Roosevelt as the greenest of all our Presidents. Several historians consider Nixon's environmental record his second biggest achievement. Nixon's secret to success was pretty simple. He found good people and th...

Send us Fan Mail On November 3, 1969, President Richard Nixon asked to address the nation to talk about Vietnam.  He then laid out his strategy for bringing the War to an end. He also asked for the great silent majority of Americans to support his efforts. They did in record numbers.  To piggyback on our episode on the Silent Majority speech which has a featurette with former Nixon aid Dwight Chap...

Send us Fan Mail This episode opens as the Apollo 11 Astronauts have returned from their mission to the moon. It was a moment in which the United States had finally found something to rally around as one united country. But that sense of national unity won't last, not because of events in the heavens, but due to a war here on Earth.  In this look at the final 6 months of Richard Nixon's...

Send us Fan Mail While researching the material for our podcast documentary we are currently presenting now on President Richard Nixon, I had one of those random thoughts cross my mind. Had we had any other Quakers serve as President?  That led me into looking at a story that is featured on this show by CBS Sunday Morning titled "The Real Herbert Hoover", and I was fascinated by all I di...

Send us Fan Mail On January 20, 1969, Richard Millhouse Nixon was Inaugurated the 37th President of the United States. He faced a country and a World in upheaval. It was as historian Jim Prado points out "A more complicated set of circumstances than had faced any of his predecessors, at least in the modern era." That is in my opinion an understatement. Our country was divided and under s...

Send us Fan Mail 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 o...

Send us Fan Mail The opening episode of Season 1  of "Bridging the Political Gap" 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 fe...

Send us Fan Mail Eerie similarities mark our world today with the one Richard Nixon faced a half century ago.  As we begin our Landmark Podcast Documentary Series on Richard Nixon we look at the world Richard Nixon faced as he stepped into office and how he had changed that world by the time he began his second term. By January 29th, 1973, Richard Nixon stood with Abraham Lincoln as one of the two...

Send us Fan Mail In our 50th, and final episode of our third season, we watch the winding down of the Lyndon Johnson Administration. It is truly an end to an era, as few men have ever dominated the public stage as Lyndon Johnson did our country for over two decades, even before he wound up in the White House.  Joe Califano, an aid to President Johnson, is correct when he says the United States tod...

Send us Fan Mail This episode opens in the final two days of the 1968 campaign as the election polls  have tightened to an even race. Vice President Hubert Humphrey has made up enormous ground and with the announced bombing halt of North Vietnam it looks like all the momentum is with him. Here you see both Humphrey and former Vice President Richard Nixon out on the stump working overtime trying to...

Send us Fan Mail Why has our podcast "Bridging the Political Gap" dedicated two seasons, this one and the next one,  to the Presidencies of  Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon? It is a good and valid question.  After all, they presided over the most divisive time in our history other than the American Civil War.  The answer is simple, they may have been flawed men, but they were great men,...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second episode examining the phone calls so often cited as proof of the Chennault Affair and Lyndon Johnson's acknowledgement of Richard Nixon's "treason".  When you listen to them all it will often leave you wondering if there is any there, there. Or is it the hope of a man, prone to paranoia, looking for an excuse as to why something he hoped so t...

Send us Fan Mail This is not as complicated as it looks, but we start with these two episodes to have a subset of a subset of our series on 1968. These are a collection of phone calls, in their entirety of President Lyndon Johnson talking to the three Presidential candidates, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, Republican Leader Everett Dirksen, Democratic Senator Richard Russell, a...

Send us Fan Mail During the investigation of Former President Donald Trump over whether he had been colluding with the Russian Government in attempts to sway the 2016 Presidential election, television host Rachel Maddow and her host network MSNBC decided they would be cute and put on a television special designed to use the example of Richard Nixon committing treason to somehow allude to President...