Final Thoughts on Richard Nixon by our Host Randal Wallace

The Richard Nixon Experience

Send us a text

This episode is one of final thoughts on Richard Nixon.
They range from subjects like the shameful treatment he received from the national news media and how they have actively worked to keep the public in the dark on the facts of Watergate. This was a problem both when it occurred and even today as an enormous amount of easily verifiable documentation has come to light that has exposed misconduct across the board by just about every entity involved in the Watergate story.
We will look at the current status of the prosecutorial misconduct complaint that was received last year at the United States Justice Department and continue to encourage you to weigh in on the case so it is not swept under the rug.
We also examine, as best we could, the one lingering question that we felt we never fully resolved from our 144 episode examination of this historic period of American History. Why did a man as revered as John Doar, Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, decide not to investigate on his own the material provided to him by the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office? It appears to be an elusive question if you believe as I do that people do not suddenly become dishonest. There is no history of John Doar being anything other than an honorable man. So we asked six experts on Watergate, who either lived through it, or studied it extensively as historians:
Bob Bostock, writer of much of the exhibits located at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library,
Dwight Chapin, President Richard Nixon's right hand man and appointments Secretary during most of his Presidency,
Geoff Shepard, the author of three outstanding books on Watergate and widely recognized as the World's leading expert on it,
and three historians
Michael Kroncwiez , of NYU and author of "They Said No to Nixon"
Kevin Kruse, of Princeton University currently working on a biography of John Doar,
Tim Naftali, the former Director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and a CNN Contributor.
All six of them were gracious enough to either answer me directly or pointed me to material that would be of assistance.
Then we move on to open ended mysteries, like the involvement of the intelligence agencies in the overall story of Watergate, and the exculpatory nature of the actual tapes that are now far more readily available to the public in places like Nixontapes.org run by historian Luke Nichter or his two outstanding books on the subject matter. ( The Nixon Tapes 1971 - 1972 and The Nixon Tapes 1973 http://lukenichter.com )
Finally we will look back on this greatest of World Leaders who so fundamentally changed the world we live in today. As we recount his many achievements including the most important one. An effort, that has probably touched the lives of everyone on Earth in one way or the other. For it was Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, that poured billions of dollars into Cancer Research that has changed the diagnosis of this deadly set of diseases from a death sentence into a chance for life.
It is here at the end of this epic five season podcast documentary, that we make our final case that Richard Nixon belongs among the pantheon of our greatest leaders alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.