Richard Nixon: I Am Not a Crook (1969 – 1974) — Transcript

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1. 0:00Professor Dave again, let’s  talk about Richard Nixon.
2. 0:09Richard Milhous Nixon may have been the most  temperamentally unsuited man ever elected to
3. 0:15the presidency. Uneasy in social situations and  resentful of slights both real and imagined, his
4. 0:22paranoid nature and vindictive personality would  ultimately be his downfall. He remains the only
5. 0:28president ever to resign from office, so let’s  examine the events that mark his personal history.
6. 0:34Nixon, a World War II Navy veteran, had been  selected and groomed by wealthy conservative
7. 0:39Southern California backers for their state’s  12th congressional district election in 1946,
8. 0:45hoping to defeat five-time incumbent Democrat  Jerry Voorhis. Nixon succeeded, using what would
9. 0:52become a defining campaign tactic, insinuating  that his liberal opponent was “soft on Communism.”
10. 0:59He quickly burst onto the national scene, serving  on the House on Un-American Activities Committee,
11. 1:05investigating New Deal official Alger  Hiss. A journalist named Whittaker Chambers
12. 1:11had claimed that he and Hiss had both been  Soviet spies in the 30s. During the trial it was
13. 1:17revealed that Chambers had classified documents  proving Hiss had indeed been a Russian spy.
14. 1:23Hiss could not be tried for espionage because  the statute of limitations had expired,
15. 1:28but because he lied about not knowing Chambers, he  was found guilty of perjury. Later, Ronald Reagan
16. 1:35would credit Chambers’ memoir as the reason for  his leaving the Democratic Party to join the GOP.
17. 1:42The Hiss conviction was a great victory for  Nixon, and it contributed to the “Red Scare”
18. 1:47Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 50s. Nixon  rode this hysteria to national prominence, and was
19. 1:54elected Senator from California after smearing his  opponent, former movie star Helen Gahagan Douglas,
20. 2:00for being soft on Communism. When Dwight  Eisenhower ran for president on the GOP
21. 2:05ticket in 1952, Nixon was presented as a young,  viable running mate from an electoral-rich state.
22. 2:12During the campaign, Nixon played the role of  political attack dog, which he’d perfected in
23. 2:17his previous campaigns, while Eisenhower  stayed serenely above partisan politics.
24. 2:22The Eisenhower/Nixon ticket  sailed to an easy victory,
25. 2:26and after only six years in politics, Dick  Nixon was a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
26. 2:33After eight years as vice president, Nixon faced  no serious challenge for the GOP presidential
27. 2:38nomination, and fought Democratic opponent  John F. Kennedy in the 1960 general election.
28. 2:44Nixon campaigned on his superior experience  over Kennedy, but his performance in the
29. 2:49televised debates, especially the first one,  projected an image of weakness and lethargy.
30. 2:55Recovering from an illness, Nixon was sweaty, his  eyes constantly darting around. This and his five
31. 3:01o’clock shadow all exemplified the “Tricky  Dick” persona, as he was often referred,
32. 3:06famously summed up in the slogan -  “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
33. 3:11Kennedy, so calm and poised, exuding a youthful  vigor and wisely having accepted an application
34. 3:17of makeup before taking the stage, came off as  far more presidential. Kennedy eked out a narrow
35. 3:24victory, winning by just one hundred and twenty  thousand votes. Nixon then decided to run for
36. 3:30Governor of California in 1962, which he lost  by a surprising three hundred thousand votes.
37. 3:36Embittered, he blamed his loss on the press  and told them it was his last press conference,
38. 3:42stating: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around  anymore.” He moved to New York and worked for a
39. 3:47prestigious law firm. After the crushing defeat  Goldwater suffered to LBJ in the 1964 election,
40. 3:54Nixon traveled around the country helping the  GOP recover many lost seats in the midterms
41. 4:00and build new alliances within the party. As  the Vietnam War, counterculture, and urban riots
42. 4:07exploded, Nixon decided to run for President again  in 1968, presenting himself as the “New Nixon,”
43. 4:14an elder statesman whose wisdom and experience  could heal the social upheavals tearing the
44. 4:19country apart. His campaign focused on “Law  and Order,” to combat the riots and protests.
45. 4:27During the 1968 presidential campaign,  Nixon violated the Logan Act,
46. 4:32a law from 1799 prohibiting private citizens  from engaging in diplomatic treaties.
47. 4:38It was later revealed that Henry Kissinger, then  Johnson’s adviser on the Vietnam peace talks,
48. 4:43secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was  coming, and negotiations had nearly concluded. A
49. 4:49cease-fire was imminent and Democratic opponent  Hubert Humphrey, who had been steadily gaining
50. 4:54ground, seemed assured of winning. But at the  last minute, the South Vietnamese pulled out.
51. 5:01LBJ received an FBI report saying that Anna  Chennault, a Nixon ally, had told the South
52. 5:08Vietnamese ambassador that the Vietnamese  should cease negotiating because they could
53. 5:12get a better deal from Nixon. LBJ called him into  the White House and Nixon denied any interference.
54. 5:19Johnson was livid; he knew Nixon was lying  because he’d heard the FBI wiretaps. He even
55. 5:25called the Republican Senate Minority  Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain.
56. 5:29“This is treason!” Dirksen limply replied,  “I know.” And so, even before he was elected
57. 5:36President, Richard Nixon was already guilty  of high crimes against the United States.
58. 5:41After the election, Nixon made Kissinger his  National Security Adviser, and in the next four
59. 5:46years more than twenty thousand US troops died  in Vietnam, over a hundred thousand were wounded,
60. 5:52and more than a million Vietnamese were killed.  In the final indignity, Kissinger was given the
61. 5:59Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the  very settlement he helped sabotage in 1968.
62. 6:07Although Nixon never had a secret plan to  end the war, he did have plans to expand
63. 6:11the war into Cambodia to root out the  North Vietnamese Army’s hiding places.
64. 6:15An aggressive bombing campaign against Cambodia  began in 1969. Ground troops were later deployed.
65. 6:22When Nixon announced his expansion of the war into  Cambodia, there was outrage from coast to coast.
66. 6:28Universities shut down in protest, condemnation  for the illegal invasion was nationwide,
67. 6:34and in Kent State in Ohio, four protesting  students were shot dead by National Guardsmen.
68. 6:41About forty thousand Cambodians would  die as a result of US intervention.
69. 6:46Ironically, Nixon’s domestic policies  have since been hailed as the last
70. 6:51liberal domestic agenda in a Republican  Administration. 1970 saw the first Earth Day,
71. 6:57a product of the environmental movement, so Nixon  created the Environmental Protection Agency,
72. 7:02endorsed the equal rights amendment for women,  proposed a national Guaranteed Annual Income,
73. 7:09and had always been progressive on Civil Rights,  despite pandering to Southern segregationists.
74. 7:14In truth, Nixon had little  interest in domestic policy,
75. 7:18instead seeing himself as a grand foreign policy  strategist, playing a global chess game with the
76. 7:24Russians, who were as Machiavellian as he was.  His greatest strategic maneuver occurred in 1971
77. 7:31when Kissinger secretly flew into China to open  negotiations with the isolated Communist nation.
78. 7:37When Nixon announced the visit, it was hailed  as a masterstroke of diplomacy, something only a
79. 7:43firm anti-Communist like Nixon could pull off. The  irony was, of course, if any Democrat had done it,
80. 7:50Richard Nixon would have been among the  first calling for their impeachment.
81. 7:54Nixon visited China in the summer of 1972 and  he returned in triumph. His re-election was
82. 8:00the biggest landslide in history; he carried  every state but Massachusetts. And, he had
83. 8:06solidified the GOP’s hold on the South, which  had been solidly Democratic for over 150 years.
84. 8:14But like Johnson, the seeds of Nixon’s fall had  been sown during his greatest triumph. Even though
85. 8:201972 Democratic opponent George McGovern never  posed a serious threat to Nixon’s re-election,
86. 8:26Nixon utilized a team called “the Plumbers” to  break into the Democratic National Committee
87. 8:31headquarters at the Watergate office complex  in Washington DC, to see if they had anything
88. 8:37incriminating on Nixon. On June 17th, 1972 five of  the Plumbers were arrested burglarizing the DNC,
89. 8:45including men with links to the CIA and FBI. Their  phone books contained White House phone numbers,
90. 8:51turning the burglary into the greatest political  scandal in American history, exposing abuses by
91. 8:57the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the former Attorney  General, and the White House itself. Ultimately,
92. 9:04Nixon’s party turned on him and he was forced  to resign in disgrace. Nixon’s original Vice
93. 9:10President Spiro Agnew had previously been forced  to resign when he was found guilty of taking
94. 9:15bribes while Governor of Maryland, and congressman  Gerald Ford was selected to replace him in 1973,
95. 9:21thus putting Ford directly in line to take over  the remainder of Nixon’s second term in 1974.
96. 9:29In the end, the man elected on a “Law and  Order” platform with the insistent claim,
97. 9:35“I am not a crook,” was the greatest  lawbreaker ever to sit in the Oval Office.
98. 9:39As his successor, Ford pardoned him in order  to spare the country from more of its “long
99. 9:45national nightmare,” and Nixon spent the rest  of his life trying to rehabilitate his image
100. 9:50by writing books on foreign policy. But in his  paranoia, he had even bugged the Oval Office, and
101. 9:56when those tapes were made public, they condemned  him for all time, revealing Nixon to be a petty
102. 10:01thug who pursued vendettas like a Mafia don.  Still, Nixon had transformed American politics,
103. 10:08as the South would become a GOP stronghold for  decades to come. Nixon was the first Republican
104. 10:16who convinced the middle class to vote against  their own interests by appealing to their fears.
105. 10:22The once moderate Eastern Establishment  GOP evolved into a more right-of-center
106. 10:27Republican Party, the ideological child of Ronald  Reagan, combined with the political slash and burn
107. 10:33tactics of Nixon. After a dozen years of trauma  beginning with Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam,
108. 10:40Watergate, and finally the fall of Saigon in  1975, the United States was exhausted and would
109. 10:46never quite recover the unbridled optimism  that had been lost. And the office of the
110. 10:52Presidency would be forever diminished by the  crimes and moral failings of Richard M. Nixon.