Western Standard - December 11, 2023


The Political and Strategic History of the World

Topics
Watergate affair and Nixon presidency
Mentioned
Richard Nixon Franklin Roosevelt Donald Trump Lincoln Nigel
Alberta Pension Plan engagement update Whistleblower Trudeau's $1 Billion Green Slush Fund

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

150.01

Word count

539

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Conrad Conrad is a Canadian academic, philosopher, and writer. He is the author of three volumes on the Nixon and Watergate, and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Globe and Mail. He has also been a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows, and is one of the most well-known academics in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You're well known, Conrad, for taking a different tack on things.
00:00:05.180 You, for example, have found kind words for a couple of American presidents
00:00:09.460 who people love to criticize.
00:00:11.960 I'm thinking of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.
00:00:15.260 And, of course, you have also taken the other tack
00:00:17.840 and taken on some of the intellectuals in Quebec who somehow or other,
00:00:24.320 oh, you put it very nicely, let me just refer to it,
00:00:26.540 that they struggle to reconcile the debt French Canada has,
00:00:33.300 owns for its survival to forces and institutions that it has renounced
00:00:39.380 and cannot accept as having been indispensable to their survival.
00:00:44.860 Why, you know, you have this different way of putting things,
00:00:50.720 and it leads me to ask, is there some overall direction
00:00:54.740 that in three volumes you're going to lead us
00:00:57.300 to a somewhat different understanding of all that's taken place?
00:01:02.500 Not, I think, of all that's taken place, Nigel.
00:01:04.920 But I do want to tell your viewers that I am not a reactionary.
00:01:09.640 I don't say, all right, here's the conventional wisdom,
00:01:11.940 and I oppose the conventional wisdom, period.
00:01:14.240 That is not the case. I don't.
00:01:15.640 I mean, if I think the conventional wisdom is defensible in factual terms,
00:01:21.700 I'm a good soldier in the upholding and maintenance of it.
00:01:27.940 But Mr. Nixon was pilloried.
00:01:31.100 He was an outstanding president.
00:01:32.600 Fifty years after Watergate, there is not one shred of probative evidence
00:01:37.420 that he himself broke any laws.
00:01:39.240 Some of his subordinates did, but there's no evidence that he did.
00:01:42.420 He was hounded from office as someone morally unfit to hold the office,
00:01:46.980 and yet his one full term was next to Mr. Lincoln's
00:01:51.700 and the first and third terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
00:01:54.860 I think the most successful term any president ever had.
00:01:58.940 When he came into office, there were half a million draftees 0.97
00:02:02.260 at the ends of the earth, 200 to 400 coming back in body bags every week,
00:02:07.520 no exit strategy, no discussions really going on with the other side.
00:02:11.360 There were no relations between the U.S. and China,
00:02:15.920 no substantive discussions with Russia about arms control or anything else.
00:02:20.560 And there were riots in the United States every week,
00:02:23.680 race riots and anti-war riots, and the country was a shambles.
00:02:28.520 And four years later, he departed Vietnam
00:02:32.440 while keeping a non-communist government in Saigon.
00:02:35.580 He'd opened relations with China, triangulated the great power relationship,
00:02:40.060 signed the greatest arms control agreement in the history of the world
00:02:43.800 in which the U.S. regained nuclear superiority
00:02:46.380 and had abolished the draft, reduced the crime rate,
00:02:52.720 ended school segregation,
00:02:55.560 and there were no riots.
00:02:58.280 There were no assassinations or no skyjackings of planes.
00:03:02.000 And he was reelected by what is still the greatest plurality
00:03:05.220 in American history, although the electorate is almost doubled in size.
00:03:09.120 Now, that is not a bad president.
00:03:11.340 He was a good president.
00:03:12.740 Now, unfortunately, aspects of his own personality
00:03:15.580 combine to make him mishandle the Watergate affair.
00:03:20.960 But history, in my opinion, will agree with me
00:03:24.460 that hounding that president from office for those reasons
00:03:28.320 was a terrible mistake.
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