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Understanding Nixon

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The majority of Americans remember our 37th President Richard Nixon for one thing and one thing only: the Watergate scandal. But there’s much more to the man than that. Like him or not, he was one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.

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Script:

Name this president. 

He created the Environmental Protection Agency and put real teeth into the Clean Air Act. Environmentalists called him the most environmentally conscious national figure since Teddy Roosevelt.

He was admired, sometimes revered, by civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King and Jackie Robinson. He desegregated southern schools and vigorously enforced civil rights laws, often against his own political interests.

His grasp of foreign affairs was acknowledged by both friend and foe to be unmatched. He opened US relations with Communist China for the first time in decades; signed the first nuclear disarmament agreement in history; and ended the Viet Nam War. When the peace accords were signed, it was clear that America was the victor in the conflict. 

Did you guess our 37th President, Richard Nixon?

If not, don’t feel bad. Most people only know one thing about him — that he resigned from office following the Watergate scandal. 

Looking back, his offense — covering up for overzealous subordinates who were caught trying to steal campaign secrets from the Democrats — almost seems quaint. But at the time, it roiled the nation. 

Had he accepted responsibility, apologized early on, he almost certainly would have survived. Sadly, he never considered the idea. When he felt cornered, his first reaction was to counterattack, not apologize. 

Nixon was first and always a fighter. Everything he ever achieved, he had to fight for. 

He was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California in a small house his father built from a mail order kit. Yorba Linda is now a bustling suburb of Los Angeles, but then it was basically a lemon grove with a road running through it. His grew up no advantages. If he wanted to escape, he read.

He read a lot. 

It’s part of the Nixon legend that he attended a local college, Whittier. What isn’t well known is that he was accepted to Harvard. He didn’t attend only because his parents couldn’t afford to send him there.  

After volunteering for service in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II, he returned home. A small-town law career, not politics, looked to be his future.  

Then, fate took a hand. The local Republican party was searching for a fresh face to oppose a popular Democrat congressman. Nixon passed the audition. Nobody expected him to win, but nobody expected him to campaign as hard and effectively as he did. 

He quickly became a fast-rising political star, achieving national attention when he almost single-handedly exposed a major State Department official, Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy. Hiss was everything Nixon was not — sleek, urbane, Ivy League educated. He was well-known and well-liked among the East Coast intellectual and media elite. No one in Hiss’s social set believed the charges against him — until Nixon forced them to. 

The liberal elites never forgave him for that or for beating the glamorous and very progressive Hollywood actress Helen Gahagan Douglass, in the 1950 California Senate race. 

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower tapped him to be his running mate. 

In just six years, Nixon rose from a small-town lawyer to vice-president of the United States. He was only 39. 

Ike sent his vice-president on important diplomatic missions all over the globe. It was on these missions that Nixon developed his mastery of international affairs. 

After a heartbreaking loss to John F. Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960, one of the closest and most disputed elections of modern era, Nixon returned to California. There he lost another election, an ill-advised run for governor in 1962.

He should have been done as a politician. 

He wasn’t. 

In one of the most unlikely comebacks in American political history, Nixon won the Republican nomination for president in 1968 and then defeated incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey in the general election. 

For the complete script as well as FACTS & SOURCES, visit https://www.prageru.com/video/understanding-nixon

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45 Comments

  12. Nixon to Americans is what WW2 is to the modern Japanese. Nixon is some Republican president who got axed by Watergate. WW2 is when the Japanese got nuked twice. Nothing else about either is known by their respective people.

  15. Compared to modern day Democrats illegally spying on their political rivals, Nixon's Watergate scandal was nothing more than a fart in the wind. Sad thing was he didn't even have to do any of those things to win a second term as president he would've still won. If he would've not been involved in Watergate, maybe the American pull out of Vietnam would've been different for the better by 1975.

  16. I feel like this is an excellent example of showing Prager U is fake conservatism. As Rothbard said he basically doubled down on LBJ's economic approach, expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia, and as recognized by conservative constitutional scholars Kevin Gutzman and Brion McClanahan was one of the most unconstitutional Presidents we ever had

  19. I really don't think defending Richard Nixon is a hill worth dying on.
    Also, we most certainly did not win the Vietnam War. Perhaps we could have, and it was not an unjust war, but we 100% lost.

  24. We have a similar situation in 🇬🇧 with the amazing John Major in our country – he did so many great things but many have a tarnished view of him mostly made by lies and he had a terrible deafest in 1997 most not even of his cause. Major was amazing PM bad Nixon a great president.

  25. Yes, he did all those things. Yet you leave out the fact that he took the U.S. off the Gold Standard, which resulted in massive inflation leading to price fixation. His support of Israel caused the Oil crisis of the early 70's. You also leave out the fact that he went to bed with the Saudi's. Selling weapons to the Saudi's in exchange for using U.S. dollars only in the sale of oil, Ie. the Petro-Dollar. And by doing so, Nixon created deficit spending and big Government. If he never recognized China, they would still be a Second-World country and not the disruptive pain they are now. Sorry, I disagree that Nixion was great. He did more damage to the U.S. than any other President in history. Many of the problems of today can be traced back directly to Nixon and his actions as President.

  28. It's never good to see things on a surface level. We should always look deeper, and I agree that when people talk about Nixon, Watergate is the only thing that comes up. That being said, this is a pretty biased video. They talk about him as a benevolent savior that made one mistake. Nixon did a lot of shitty things. I mean for one thing he started bombing Cambodia without congressional approval.

  29. The Left is a morally bankrupt anti-American cult, lacking any intellectual honesty. Sadly, our left leaning schools in the USA have successfully suppressed how great President Nixon really was. Meanwhile, Biden and Obama have done such horrible things to damage our country. We all must push back and educate the young to the greatness of American Ideals and the perils of the Socialism con.

  33. Are we just… not going to talk about the war on drugs and how it was a massive failure and basically a way to oppress minorities? Also, Nixon was famously suspicious of people in general, was very bad a taking advice, and constantly made bad, rash decisions. I fail to see why Nixon was an exceptionally good president.

  37. Their aspects of this video that are highly deceptive. For example, the speaker claims that Nixon was wildly popular. That is false. The only reason Nixon won in a landslide in 1972 was because he ran against George McGovern, who was perceived as being an ultra left-wing radical. It wasn't that Americans were in love with Nixon, they hated McGovern. And on a personal level, well the speaker claims that he saved Israel, most Jews viewed him as an anti-semite, because of comments that he made that are on tape about Jewish people.

  38. Wait. You guys have another video about Vietnam online where you say the end of that war was due to the democrats. And that it was nothing good because you guys(americans) promised the vietnamese support to fight the communist north. Democrats fighting to leave was a broken promise in the end.

  39. Isn't the same president who lifted the Gold standard in 1971? And the reason we have so high inflation today and money don't have anymore value because of this, we instead print money endlessly.

  40. President Nixon helped to save Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.  Prime Minister Golda Meier called Nixon in the middle of the night and asked him for arms.  The next day a giant cargo military plane delivered arms to Israel, and Israel ended up winning the war.  Afterwards, Golda Meier said she almost committed suicide because she was so desperate that no other country would help her.  Watch the outstanding DVD set Against All Odds: Israel Survives to hear the series creator tell that story.  Nixon said later that his Quaker mother told him as a boy, as she read Scripture to him, that someday God would call him to do a mighty work and he should do it.  And so he did!

  42. Funny thing is Nixon is actually sort of well liked by leftists these days, not liberals mind you but leftists. Slavoj Zizek was asked who he thought the greatest president was and one of his answers was Nixon. I do wish some republicans today were like him…hell I wish some Dems were! Try getting Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to vote for environmental protection lol