season one

On this episode of The Mountain Spirit, join us for a conversation with Anita Seals, vice president of human services with Christian Appalachian Project (CAP). Discover what advice she carries to this day from CAP's founder, and how a childhood experience shaped her 40+ years of service.   Join us each week for more stories of faith, service, and compassion. 

SHOW NOTES

Twitter: @chrisappproj

Facebook: Facebook

Instagram: @chrisappproj

LinkedIn: Christian Appalachian Project

TikTok: @chrisappproj

In our Season 1 finale we look at several of the initiatives that Richard Nixon began at the end of 1971 that we are still benefitting from or are impacted by today. 

In 1971 Richard Nixon changed the monetary system for the United States ending the Breton Woods system and taking the United States off the Gold Standard. It was a dramatic economic move that is still debated. It certainly unleashed the amount of money flowing into the economy but it has led to ever increasing amounts of debt that is now at a crisis level in this country. 

In 1971, Richard Nixon also went to war to stop the abuse of drugs in America. The War on Drugs has largely been seen as a failure and often those who don't know the history of that war blame President Nixon because he gave it a name and made it a priority. But Nixon's "War on Drugs" was a dramatic success, he caused the burglary rate to plummet, and the drug addicted were getting the help they needed because Nixon focused on the demand side of the problem and helping those addicted with treatment programs, and in the case of heroin,  an experimental methadone program, that produced real positive results. It was later Presidents who changed everything focusing almost totally on the supply side of the problem. Richard Nixon did both, and it was a success, at least until Watergate forced him from the national scene. 

We also examine the Moorer - Radford Affair when Richard Nixon became the victim of a spying operation from the Military high brass. If you ever wanted insight as to why Richard Nixon felt that his administration was under siege and that he could not trust the bureaucracy around him, here is an example of why. That many of the Administration's best laid plans seemed often  to end up on the front pages of the national newspapers. This story will give you insight as to why and why it became such an obsession for the President, an obsession that played a large role in how the Presidency would be wrested away from Richard Nixon in 1974. 

Finally, we will look back on what President Nixon considered his greatest achievement as President. It was the thing he was most proud to have begun. In December of 1971, in what Richard Nixon called his "Christmas Present to the nation", he signed the National Cancer Act of 1971 into law. The results of the act may have fallen short of finding the cure for Cancer as Nixon had hoped by 1976, but it has truly changed the world in ways we can all be thankful for. In 1971, a Cancer diagnosis was almost certainly a death sentence. Today enormous strides have been made in genetic research and  treatments. Today cancer is often treatable, curable, or beatable. The survival rate is far better across the board than it was in 1971 and it is time that Richard Nixon gets the credit he deserves for this monumental achievement. 

The Richard Nixon Presidency had weathered some great and mighty storms by December 1971. The nation had up to this point suffered from moments of violent upheaval that stretched back to the 1960's, and we still had a war that was dragging on and on. But by this time in his Administration, Richard Nixon had laid the groundwork for one of the most dramatic, and historically successful periods in all of American History.  While most Americans may not have realized it yet, Richard Nixon was about to enter a season of absolute triumph for himself politically but also for a beleaguered, divided and tired land. 1972 would be the year Richard Nixon would lay the foundation for over a quarter century of peace for his country and set the nation up as the singular leader of the entire free world.

Richard

In this episode, we cover two of President Nixon's major accomplishments; giving 18 year old citizens the right to vote and initiating the opening to China. 

First, we listen as Richard Nixon signs the 26th Amendment into law in front of a White House full of young people. 

Then we listen in on a call between Henry Kissinger and President Nixon on a wide range of subjects involving South East Asia and the end game of the negotiations with China. We get to listen to a retrospective on the secret trip to China made by Henry Kissinger in July of 1971.  It was there that the invitation was finally extended by the Chinese for President Nixon to travel to China. It would be an announcement that would shake the world. 

We then listen to the national address by President Nixon announcing the breakthrough and plans for the trip. 

Finally, we look at the United States relationship with Asia's other great power, the Empire of Japan. Still reeling from the defeat of World War 2, Japan was finally beginning its emergence and in this final event of the episode we listen to the first official visit by a Japanese Monarch to the United States as Emperor Hirohito visits Anchorage, Alaska and is greeted by President Richard Nixon, himself a veteran of the Pacific theater of World War 2. 

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. 

On June 12, 1971, the daughter of President and Mrs. Nixon, Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox at a White House ceremony in the Rose Garden. It was a wedding celebrated by not only the Nixon and Cox families but by the entire nation. President Nixon said of the day "It was a day we were all just very happy" It was a truly magical event and one of five such weddings at the White House in the 20th Century. 

The next day in a small article on the front page of the New York Times was a little story about a leak of confidential papers from a secret Pentagon study on the history of the Vietnam War. That little story was about an enormous leak of monumental proportions for our nation and its foreign policy. The thief, Daniel Ellsberg, had as good a secret clearance as anyone in Washington, he was married to an influential toy maker's daughter, and no one had any idea what else he had stolen. 

While the papers themselves did not mention the Nixon Administration in any of the documents it did have appendices full of documents that the communist enemies around the world had intercepted coded versions of and now that the real ones were readily available they could match up and break our secret codes. That was a fact that could get people killed and was a fact the press either willfully ignored or flat out did not care about. In either case, they also did not report that information to the public.  

Here was Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with a strategic plan that included negotiating with the Soviet Union, the Communist Chinese, and we were at war and trying to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, and we were dealing with communist regimes in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland, plus dictatorships in Pakistan and other areas of the world in order to get their strategy in place and their plans to come to fruition. The release of the Pentagon Papers made  it appear to all of these secretive, totalitarian regimes that we could not keep our secrets from the New York Times or, even worse, The Washington Post. 

Nixon was red hot mad and had damn good reason to be. All the staff that worked at the White House called this the moment in which the Nixon Administration felt it had to take matters in hand to deal with leaks, subversives, and riotous protesters  to keep our country from coming apart in a wave of violent upheaval similar to 1968.

 It was extraordinary times and it would lead to events that would bring the Nixon Administration crashing down and leave our nation with a true question mark.

Is it right to remove one of our truly greatest leaders, in extraordinary times, because he may have broken the law in order to save the nation?

For a half century that question has still lingered and its consequence has set the nation on a calamitous course of extremism, cynicism, the criminalization of politics and the rise of widespread conspiracy theories that now 50 years later threaten the very foundation and core of the great American experiment in self governance. 

One of the low moments of the Vietnam War is covered in this episode. It was the moment in the plans to Vietnamize the Vietnam War that we conducted an operation with only South Vietnamese troops on the ground and we provided air support. In the end, our side got walloped. 

This happened in an operation in which our side went over the border into neighboring Laos to finally stop the Communist forces from moving supplies an ammunition down that portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Despite the heavy losses, overall things were going better for our forces and more and more reductions of our own troops involvement in the war was happening. 

In this episode, we look at the Laotian campaign, its aftermath, and then we listen in as President Richard Nixon delivers one of his best and most powerful speeches to the nation on the situation we faced in Vietnam. 

In this episode we talk about the contents of the historic tapes of the Nixon Administration. We address the negative parts that are so familiar to the public. Nixon's remarks about Women, Gays, Jews, African Americans, his rages, and his intemperate remarks, all caught on a voice activated tape recorder that caught his every word every time he entered a room. 

We will also discuss the quality of some of the tapes, or the lack there of, as we learn that many of these tapes are either inaudible and to various other degrees hard to understand. But we also go through those moments when we see a giant at work, a man steadily working for the good of the country, and most importantly, working to get us out of a war he inherited from the two previous administrations, and to free us from that war in a way that we maintain our place in the world and actually enhance it.  This is the high point of the march of Communism in the world during the Cold War. It fell to two Presidents,  Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon,  to stop it and hold our ground. 

The taping system is a window on the Administration of Richard Nixon in an unparalleled way. We will watch him masterfully maneuver the most complex set of problems ever faced by a United States President. In this special edition, we listen in,  to the worst,  and some of the best moments, and we hear from historians, and some of the people on the tapes, as they discuss the legacy of those tapes, and the legacy of a President who arguably saved our Union from disaster both abroad and here at home too. 

In this episode, we finally be at the moment that the taping system was installed. It was a fateful decision, and it would eventually lead to the fall of the Nixon Administration. The tapes have been used to attack the President and portray him as an awful person. For the most part, only the worst of the worst of these tapes have been promoted to the public. President Nixon allowed the taping system to be set up in such a way that it taped his every utterance on a voice activated system for every moment when he walked into a room. Due to that fact, it recorded everything, the good , the bad, and the ugly. It caught Nixon at his very best and at his very worst. For the obvious reason, that it would destroy his image and hurt his historical standing with vast numbers of the public, liberal historians and liberal documentarians have grabbed every negative tape they can find and made sure the public has heard it.

Few, if any, of the general public have heard the good moments, the masterful moments, or the painstaking ways in which President Nixon worked so hard to get us out of a disaster he inherited in Vietnam, to open China, to create detente with the Soviets, to save the environment, and to work to eradicate drugs from our culture and to find a cure for cancer. 

WELL THAT IS ABOUT TO CHANGE

Starting with this episode of our documentary series on President Richard Nixon, you will get to hear some of the thousands of hours of tape of Richard Nixon painstakingly working to change the world for the better. In this episode alone you will hear him working with, cajoling, bargaining, and complimenting congressmen for their help with legislation designed to make our lives 50 years later better. Throughout the next episodes we will listen as he opens China, starts initiatives at home and abroad, all with a strategic goal in mind to put the United States in the strongest position in the world economically, militarily and morally. From there he will set up the architecture and the foundation for a generation of peace, that my generation Americans was able to live. He set up the structure of a safer world that still constrains the most extreme elements to this day, elements who would plunge our world into darkness and chaos. 

Here you will hear Richard Nixon getting the job done, one show, and one historic event, at a time and he will do it, over and over again. 

Starlight, the Secret Service Codename for First Lady Pat Nixon, was absolutely perfect as a way to describe Mrs. Nixon. She lit up every room that she entered. She was a First Lady who quietly went about accomplishing things in ways often unseen and under appreciated. Yet, despite her reluctance to be in the spotlight the American people still responded to her spirit and to her many contributions to our nation. She was voted one of the most admired women in the World for 22 straight years. That is a record few can match. 

In this episode, we put the First lady front and center and share several retrospectives on her life and contributions put together by the Nixon Foundation and an interview with President Richard Nixon himself on how much he appreciated this extraordinary partner. She rose from humble beginnings, orphaned as a teenager, she helped raise her younger siblings and went on to get her undergraduate, and then Master's degree before starting a career as a public school teacher, all in an era when few women were encouraged to do so. It really is a remarkable story, long before she even met Richard Nixon. But together, these two people from very humble beginnings would transform the World. 

Then we look at the initiative the President began when he took office, very much under the guidance of Mrs. Nixon, to bring women into government service. It is the initiative that brought several women to the forefront including Sandra Day O'Conner who would later go on to be the first woman on the United States Supreme Court under the Reagan Administration.  Listen as Barbara Franklin, the lady Richard Nixon tasked with leading the initiative, discusses the free hand and absolute support President Nixon gave her to do her job. It was yet another example of why Richard Nixon deserves to be considered one of our 5 greatest civil rights Presidents

People don't seem to realize that Richard Nixon was actually one of our five great Civil Rights Presidents.  Brown vs the Board of Education was decided in 1954 but it was left up to Richard Nixon to make the decision to desegregate the public school systems a reality. He did it and he did it with no violence. He did it by sitting down with state and community leaders, treating them like he respected them, and having them have a hand in making it happen. It is a truly remarkable story and it was guided to reality by George Shultz, one of only two men to hold four different Cabinet positions under Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. 

Again,  as the year wore on, Richard Nixon would comeback to try and find a solution to the war that was dividing our country. He would return with a new set of initiatives to try and bring the recalcitrant North Vietnamese back to the table to try and find peace. 

Then as 1970 drew to a close, Richard Nixon would have the most unusual of summit meetings. Now the White House is no stranger to Presidents, Prime Ministers, General Secretaries, and various other foreign heads of State, it has even played host to Kings and Queens in its proud over 200 year history.  But on December 20, 1970, the White House got some royal treatment like no other in its history. That was the day a very special King rolled up , unannounced, with a handwritten letter , an an antique revolver in hand as a gift for the President. And, as with all things Elvis, they let the King of Rock and Roll in the building. 

Lord A Mighty, 
feel my temperature rising, 
Higher , higher
It's burning through to my soul

Girl, girl , girl , girl
You gonna set me on fire
My brain is flaming
I don't know which way to go....

Apollo 13, one of the most remembered moments in the history of NASA. By April of 1970 going to the moon had become almost "ho hum". The television networks did not even bother to show the inflight special broadcast from the spaceflight.  Then when the Astronauts were preparing their ship for the long voyage to the moon, BAM!! An explosion, followed by the calm immortal words of mission Captain Jim Lovell back to the Mission Control Center...

"Houston, We have a problem." 

If you have seen the movie you know it was high drama as the spacecraft ended up crippled and good old American ingenuity had to kick in in order to bring the three Astronauts home. This is that story, as recorded live in real time.  Over and over again, our three astronauts Jim Lovell,  Fred Haise and Jim Swigert and all of their expert associates on the ground at Mission Control have to overcome life threatening obstacle after obstacle until they finally land in the Pacific back home here on Earth. 

For over the next hour listen in at NASA's finest hour as the World comes together once again to pray that our men make it home, on a wing, a prayer, and a roll of Duc tape. 

In this special edition we will examine the recently declassified letter written by former President Richard Nixon to President Bill Clinton just after his two week trip to Russia and Europe. In the letter Richard Nixon gives the young President a thorough examination of what he thinks is happening in Russia, Ukraine and in Europe. In it he stresses the importance in helping Russia preserve its new found freedoms and helping it get on its feet economically and he discusses the dire consequences that could happen if we fail. 

It reads as though a psychic wrote it. It is a powerful letter and it was appreciated at the time by President Clinton and it is even more appreciated today. It really puts on display the brilliance of our former President and a man who ranks among our greatest American leaders in the history of the Republic. Here is a fine example, bold, strategic, insightful and full of visionary advice, as to why that latter statement is true. 

After President Nixon announced he would cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and take military action in Cambodia, college campuses across the nation exploded. Riots and demonstrations shut down several colleges and led to a nightmare scenario at Kent State in Ohio. 

It was there that four young people would lose their lives when National Guardsman, themselves very young, fired on protesters at a demonstration against the actions in Cambodia and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. The country looked to be coming apart at the seems. At first President Nixon was defiant and in frustration called several  of the demonstrators "Bums", which only added to the already enflamed situation. 

As all of the tension built the tension began to show on Richard Nixon. He was struggling at how to get control of this war before it ended up being his war. As his advisor Patrick Moynihan said, years later, "If we stayed Lyndon Johnson's war would become Richard Nixon's war and by the time the year was through half the people seemed to think he started it."  Richard Nixon began to struggle to find sleep and his advisors began to report erratic behavior.

It was then that Richard Nixon decided to reach out to the young college age demonstrators that had descended on Washington D.C.  Late in the middle of the night, or better described early morning hours, of May 09, 1970, Richard Nixon went nearly alone except for his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a visit that has been heavily maligned by Nixon haters for years. It was called weird, crazy, and mocked, but in reality it was a genuine attempt to hear from his constituents, to understand their feelings and to convey to them that he really cared for their futures. 

It was a truly remarkable moment. 

We would like to ask a favor of all of you , our listeners, from all of us here at the Richard Nixon Experience 

This episode opens at the dawn of the environmental movement in America. It may come as a surprise to you that Richard Nixon is considered second only to Theodore Roosevelt as the greenest of all our Presidents. Several historians consider Nixon's environmental record his second biggest achievement.

Nixon's secret to success was pretty simple.

He found good people and then let them run the ball down the field. As they have often noted he had little interest in the issue, and was not an expert in it, so he found those who were experts in it and then he supported their efforts. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the list goes on and on. Richard Nixon  really set a high bar for commonsense approaches to environmental issues. Something we could all learn from today. 

Richard Nixon also had an enormously rare opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court Justices including picking the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Here you will hear him discuss this enormous opportunity to shape the laws of our land he was given and the two other appointments he made that ended in failure too.  It was a fascinating look at a rare opportunity for any President. 

Finally, Richard Nixon makes some very difficult decisions about how to deal with North Vietnamese supply chains running through neighboring neutral Cambodia.  Nixon finally decides to go after the Ho Chi Minh Trail and cut those supply routes in what was arguably the most controversial decision of the Vietnam War. He would cross the border and order military operations in Cambodia. It would be one of the most effective decisions of the war but lead to upheaval here at home. 

On November 3, 1969, President Richard Nixon asked to address the nation to talk about Vietnam. 

He then laid out his strategy for bringing the War to an end. He also asked for the great silent majority of Americans to support his efforts. They did in record numbers. 

To piggyback on our episode on the Silent Majority speech which has a featurette with former Nixon aid Dwight Chapin, I thought I would include the Silent Majority speech alone for those of you who have never heard the speech. 

On January 20, 1969, Richard Millhouse Nixon was Inaugurated the 37th President of the United States. He faced a country and a World in upheaval. It was as historian Jim Prado points out "A more complicated set of circumstances than had faced any of his predecessors, at least in the modern era." That is in my opinion an understatement. Our country was divided and under siege here at home, at war abroad, and involved in a dangerous dance with the other super power, the Soviet Union, all over the Globe. 

Richard Nixon would also face inequality at home, an environment in peril, an economy sputtering, a government that had tried to do to much in to many different directions, and an electorate that was tired of it all. Richard Nixon had to look out at the crowd that January day and wonder if he could actually get our nation out of the hole he inherited, could he save this Union?

In this look at his first six months in office you will see him planting the seeds for many of the accomplishments to come. In Civil Rights, the Environment, the Federal Court System, and overseas in Europe, in China, in dealing with the Soviets and most importantly in dealing with the 550,000 American troops then stationed in Vietnam. Here the journey to a generation of peace begins.

Finally, in July of 1969, an event happens that will, for just a moment, bring the country, and the World, together and it features a moment when Richard Nixon is actually able to pick up a phone and reach for the Moon. 

The second episode of a two part look back at the Vietnam War on the 50th Anniversary of its end. In this episode you will hear from private soldiers,  to the tapes of the two Commander and Chiefs, as we hear the struggles of the two Presidents who had to preside over the war, and the troops who fought the war. and several of the Prisoners of War. 

The audio for these two episodes came from the ceremonies sponsored by the Military Appreciation Committee of the City of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, as the Memorial Day events centered this year on the Travelling Vietnam War Memorial, the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Prisoners of War reunion  sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation, and held in Yorba Linda, California, the audio tape recordings of both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the audio from the original POW Dinner at the White House in May of 1973. 

It certainly will show you that Freedom is not free. 

The first episode of a two part look back at the Vietnam War on the 50th anniversary of its end. In this episode you will hear from military front line privates, to the tapes of the two Commander and Chiefs, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon,  as we listen in on the struggles of the two Presidents who had to preside over the war ,  the troops who fought the war, and several of the Prisoners of War too. 

The audio for these two episodes came from the ceremonies sponsored by the Military Appreciation Committee of the City of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, as the Memorial Day events centered this year on the Travelling Vietnam War Memorial, the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Prisoners of War reunion  sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation and held in Yorba Linda, California, the audio tape recordings of both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the audio from the original POW Dinner at the White House in May of 1973. 

It certainly will show you that freedom is not free. 

During the investigation of Former President Donald Trump over whether he had been colluding with the Russian Government in attempts to sway the 2016 Presidential election, television host Rachel Maddow and her host network MSNBC decided they would be cute and put on a television special designed to use the example of Richard Nixon committing treason to somehow allude to President Trump as guilty of the same. 

It was a true gift to the memory of President Richard Nixon. It had so many clear and glaring errors, assumptions of facts, and in the case of Joe Califano out right misrepresentations (I could use a stronger word but won't) , that we decided that it made the obvious contrast with our research of the facts.  So enjoy as we take the network special  through a thorough examination of what I will term as historical fiction vs Historical fact.

Then we will also look at one aspect of the Chennault Affair that seems to be often over looked. That much of the basis for this accusation comes from former President Lyndon Johnson's tape recordings. Much of what we know we learned because Johnson had illegally taped Anna Chennault, the South Vietnamese Ambassador and the President of South Vietnam's phone lines in Saigon. That based on that material Lyndon Johnson commented on what he believed was a vast conspiracy to undermine him, his administration's efforts for long hoped for peace in Vietnam, and to secure the Presidency for his successor and his party.  However, there is one big problem with believing any of it. Lyndon Johnson had a long history of delusions, paranoid fantasies, and chronic manic depressive behavior, so much so that his own staff commented on it for years after the administration ended, and we will get to hear some of them talk openly about it, and their concerns about the mental stability of an otherwise great man. 

As part of our series on the 1968 election , we are going to take 4 episodes and create a sub series to examine thoroughly the accusation of treason that has been promulgated for years against then Vice President Richard Nixon. It is a subject that has divided the public and historians for decades. Richard Nixon always denied it. Anna Chennault never talked about it until every one else was dead and gone. 

The Nixon haters, which made up a huge number of the liberal press and left wing elite, naturally embraced the story. But more serious academic historians have always asked a very serious question that has always called into question the validity of the story. Why would a nation like South Vietnam, who had access to televisions and newspapers, need anyone to tell them that Richard Nixon, a career anti communist, would be a better deal than Hubert Humphrey, a man who had already announced he intended to pull out of the war and leave South Vietnam to fight the Communist aggressors alone. It sort of defies common sense. But when it comes to Richard Nixon most people are willing to believe anything anyone says about him. 

Here we will listen to both popular historians, and serious historians, as they discuss the issue and the facts and we will also hear from some of the players themselves who were actually there, campaigning at the side of Richard Nixon throughout 1968. The folks we will hear from include Patrick Buchanan and Henry Kissinger and a quote from Tom Houston, plus historians, Neil Ferguson, Ken Burns, Luke Nichtor, Michael Beschloss, Ken Hughes, John Prados  and James A. Farrell from various documentary an interview footage .  In the end, it is a much weaker case than a number of these folks will portray it.