Trailer - Welcome to Nixon at War

Nixon at War

PRX

History

4.8 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2021

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most accounts of the collapse of Richard Nixon’s presidency begin with Watergate —- the now iconic tale of a bungled break-in and the misbegotten cover-up that followed. But what led to Watergate? How —- and more puzzlingly, why —- did one of the shrewdest, most gifted political figures of his time become embroiled in so manifestly lunatic an enterprise in the first place? Intrigued by that question, writer/journalist Kurt Andersen takes a deep dive into the vast archives at the Nixon Library and emerges with an answer he wasn’t expecting: While Watergate doubtless accelerated Nixon’s spectacular fall, it was the Vietnam War that led inexorably to the break-in, and from there to the sinking of his presidency.

For Andersen, who came of age in the Vietnam era, that answer in turn begs another, larger question: How did Richard Nixon, with all his foreign policy savvy, allow himself to get trapped in the same quagmire he had watched engulf his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson? These questions are the central concerns of Nixon at War. Over the course of seven episodes, Andersen peels back the onion and emerges with a new and deeper understanding of both the man and the war, and of the complex linkage between them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I just start right at the top and fire some people.
0:04.3	The best politician of all is Nixon.
0:07.0	But boy, when you get in tight and close and he's under attack.
0:10.5	President Nixon heard today, the voice of the campus in a massive appeal.
0:14.6	He was known as the Madman theory.
0:16.3	Make those North Vietnamese think that he was just crazy.
0:18.9	Here was a fellow who seven years before was the biggest loser in American politics.
0:22.6	Astonishing.
0:24.6	He was a textbook or how to damage our democracy.
0:28.6	I have Dr. Kissinger calling you.
0:29.6	He thinks it was a paranoid.
0:31.6	Everybody was told a different story.
0:32.6	The president, you are saving this country.
0:34.6	I thought this is really what he means, and he's the president.
0:38.4	It was a very intense time.
0:43.3	I'm Kurt Anderson.
0:44.7	I thought I knew the story of Richard Nixon's downfall pretty well.
0:48.4	The Watergate break-in, the cover-up, exposed, busted, resignation, the end.
0:52.9	But it turns out the true story, the bigger, deeper, underlying backstory, the untold stories
0:59.0	and the monumentally tragic consequences of Nixon's paranoia and lying and ruthlessness all
1:06.0	have their roots in the Vietnam War. Nixon at War is our seven-episode documentary series about the long, ugly endgame of America's War in Southeast Asia.
1:18.6	You'll hear recordings from The People in the Room.
	...

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