Richard Nixon: Rise from Poverty

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To understand Watergate, to understand the fall of Nixon, you need to look first at the rise. How the turbulence of his sky rocketing career left bruises and bitternesses that lingered. Don's guest today is Professor Nicole Hemmer whose latest book is "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s". She takes Don on a journey into the psychology and politics of the most fascinating President of them all.

Produced by Freddy Chick. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the 27th of April 1994 in Yorba Linda, California, deep in Orange County.
0:06.8	President Bill Clinton speaks at the memorial services of his predecessor, late President Richard M. Nixon.
0:13.0	He addresses an invited gathering of dignitaries, honored guests, and media,
0:17.8	outside the modest home where Richard Nixon and his brothers were raised.
0:21.8	A small, white, wooden kidhouse, ordered by mail from a catalog, built by his father, who
0:27.7	assembled it piece by piece on their lemon farm.
0:30.9	One can imagine the scene.
0:32.7	Richard Nixon, as a young boy, his face gazing out of the tiny window of the attic loft bedroom he shared with
0:39.0	his brothers, now a short distance from where his casket rests today, draped with an American flag.
0:46.4	Clinton, the house, the casket, all shaded by a mighty oak tree that reminds those present of the
0:53.3	enormous journey of that boy in the window.
0:56.0	What would happen to Richard Nixon those many years as the leaves on this tree budded and fell and
1:01.6	budded again? The many seasons as he came of age, then served in war, campaigned for Congress,
1:08.3	traveled the world, and then rose to the highest office in the land,
1:11.9	only to fall in disgrace. What do we make of the man that boy became now that he's gone?
1:18.4	Who was, after all, the real Richard Nixon?
1:21.5	Music Hello, all, I'm Don Wildman, and you're listening to American History Hit.
1:50.8	Welcome back to our president series, as we today reach number 37, Richard Milhouse Nixon of California,
1:58.0	who was elected to the office twice, serving from 1969 to 1974,
2:04.1	when he infamously resigned, handing the White House over to his vice president, Gerald Ford.
2:09.6	These were the late 60s, early 70s, heady times in America, NASA landing on the moon, hippies
2:16.1	tuning in and dropping out in Hate Ashbury, Vietnam and Woodstock and Charles Manson, draft cards being burned along with women's brassiers as soldiers marched on Kent State University firing real bullets.
	...

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