The Richard Nixon Experience

Send a text THE TRUTH HAS FINALLY COME HOME!! Season 4 Richard Nixon and Watergate, 1974 Through the Fire will take you from the start of the New Year in 1974 through the March 1, 1974 indictments against the defendants in the Watergate Case. One of the 19 people named as an unindicted Co-Conspirator was President Richard Nixon.  He had been the target of the Watergate Special Prosecutors Task For...

Send a text In our 1973 Enemies at the Gate  season finale, we look at the explosive circumstances around the 2 missing calls and an 18 1/2 minute gap on one conversation in the tapes requested by the prosecutor's office. It sets the prosecutors off and the Judge does it all with the maximum of theatrics to insure the spotlight shines brightly on him, John J. Sirica.  It will all set the stag...

Send a text As the year winds down several things are happening at once. Representative Gerald R. Ford begins the process of being confirmed for Vice President. The entire procedure is a first under the new 25th amendment to the Constitution.  Ironically, it would be used again in 1974 to confirm Nelson Rockefeller. The process was about the only easy thing confronting Nixon at the moment as he ha...

Send a text In this episode we bring this historic month to an end. The Israeli's agree to a ceasefire with Egypt and Syria at the behest of our government and negotiated by Henry Kissinger.  The ending of the war where it was, would eventually help lead to the Camp David Accords between  two of the three countries involved that would come to fruition years later by President Jimmy Carter.  E...

Send a text SHOWDOWN!! There was no question that after a junior officer of the Federal Government faced down the President of the United States on National Television that that junior officer was not going to have his job long and Archibald Cox didn't.  Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. Richardson refused, as did his next in line William Ruckelshaus before...

Send a text Spiro Agnew resigns on October 10, 1973, the Arab Forces go on another offensive on October 11, 1973 all the while the Special Prosecutor's continue to push forward trying to get their hands on the Presidential recordings. Tom Brokaw of NBC News is right to describe the situation as "Richard Nixon was a President under siege." He seemed to be facing historic level crisis...

Send a text In our second episode centered on Vice President Spiro Agnew we cover his fall from power. Here we listen as President Richard Nixon describes the events that took Agnew down from his perspective from his interviews with reporter David Frost.  We hear from a BBC Documentary the events as they unfolded that led to Agnew's resignation and the maneuvering he did to try and preserve h...

Send a text Spiro Theodore Agnew was the 39th Vice President of the United States of America. Today the average person knows almost nothing about him. His only real vague claim to fame is that he was forced to resign the Vice Presidency in a long forgotten, unrelated to Watergate, scandal in 1973.   Only recently was he attacked by MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow in her book " Bag Man, the Wild Crim...

Send a text  Richard Nixon loved baseball and football and was actually fairly insightful in both sports. There are countless pictures of Richard Nixon over his long and storied years in the public eye at sporting events.  He also made a number of appearances on radio and television shows for the Major League Baseball Teams he loved to watch. We have a few for you here.  In his retirement, he did...

Send a text Did you know that one man in World  History bares the distinction of not only saving one nation but actually saving two!!  That man, was Richard Nixon.  Like his 19th century predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon would save our Union from self destruction. Then Richard Nixon would step up, in October of 1973, with the coalition of Arab Nations poised to wipe out the nation of Isr...

Send a text Another of the unfair accusations often heralded against President Richard Nixon and his assistant Dr. Henry Kissinger is that they overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in Chile  and allowed him to be murdered on September 11, 1973.  Literally, every bit of that accusation is a total falsehood.  The facts are that Salvador Allende , the world's only elected Marxist-sociali...

Send a text BOMBSHELL!!! Assistant to the President for Special Files, Alexander Porter Butterfield would be questioned by lawyers for the Ervin Committee and while being asked questions he was directly asked if there were recording devices in the White House.  His answer to that question changed everything about the Watergate Scandal. It laid the groundwork for the downfall of the Nixon Administr...

Send a text In this episode we look at the start of the Ervin Committee Hearings as the Congress begins bringing the various players of Watergate out in front of the American people on national television.  We listen to the members of the press as they look back at a different era when the news of the day could grab an enormous audience because there were only three networks. Then we learn all abo...

Send a text n June of 1973, The leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev arrived in the United States and for ten days even the Watergate investigation stopped as Richard Nixon finished an agreement that called for the prevention of Nuclear War. It read:  “The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, hereinafter referred to as the Parties… Guided by the objectives o...

Send a text Even as Watergate begins to dominate the news coverage of the Administration there are still other very important things going on for President Nixon to attend to for the country.  Ironically, even though his second term is considered a failure he still was able to accomplish a lot of things that would be listed among the greatest accomplishments of some of our lesser Presidents.  In t...

Send a text "The White House counsel is a senior staff appointee of the president of the United States whose role is to advise the president on all legal issues concerning the president and their administration. The Office of Counsel to the President and Vice President was created in 1943, and is responsible for advising on all legal aspects of policy questions; legal issues arising in connec...

Send a text If our last episode was one of the saddest we will ever cover on our podcast, this was one of the happiest. On May 24, 1973, underneath an enormous tent on the grounds of the White House, the largest state dinner and event ever held occured in honor of the Vietnam Prisoners of War.  It was a star-studded event.  Bob Hope hosted with guests the New Christy Minstrels, Phyllis Diller, Joe...

Send a text In this episode we get to listen in on what was probably the most agonizing and personally painful decisions that President Nixon had to make, save decisions involving the war in Vietnam. It was during these days that Nixon had to finally step up and force the resignations of two of his closest aids and confidantes, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.  Two men who had be...

Send a text In this short, special edition broadcast, we give you a taste of some of the exculpatory materials we are going to be delving into over the next two seasons as we look back at Watergate.  These two snippets were tapes that we discovered as we were researching this project in 2022. They did, however , come to light after we had gotten to far along in the process to incorporate them into...

Send a text In this episode we hear the President on the phone with the Deputy Attorney General, Henry Petersen. Petersen is a man whose name we have heard a lot as the early events unfold. He would come under fire for simply doing his job and informing the President of the United States of events occuring in the scandal as they unfolded. This is one of the calls he made to let President Nixon kno...

Send a text After the pandamonium of the James McCord letter dies down inside the courtroom it becomes very clear that Watergate is now an entirely new ballgame.  In this episode we see events move swiftly as the White House Counsel , John Dean, starts making his overtures to the prosecutors trying to cut a deal that will get him immunity. You can also see how off guard the other players are with...

Send a text This is arguably the most important episode of the series and these events we will be revisiting through out the scandal of Watergate.  Up to this week, Richard Nixon had never been dealt with completely by anyone who was intimately involved in the Watergate debacle now on the verge of consuming his Presidency.  That includes his Counsel to the President, John Dean. It is in the events...

Send a text Now we move back to February 1973. Judge Sirica, always trying to insure his place in the sun, asks the Congress to investigate. The Senate happily complies, originally under the guidance of an enthusiastic Senator, named Ted Kennedy.  There would be a fight about how the investigation would be handled, and what they would be looking into, and a partisan nearly straight party 77 - 0 vo...

Send a text In this episode we step back to the events in question. The actual burglary on June 17, 1972. You will get to hear oral histories from G. Gordon Liddy, John Dean and several other players in the events of that night and days afterword.  We will also use footage from a nearly 30 year old BBC documentary that has interviews with all the major players as they discuss the events in a seque...

Send a text In this episode we start introducing you to the major characters of the Watergate scandal at its roots.  We start with the guy who masterminded it all, though mastermind may not be the correct description.  G. Gordon Liddy was a former FBI agent, a lawyer, and it seems fantasy espionage agent.  He somehow seems to have bungled his way upwards from a job in the Treasury Department to th...