The Political and Strategic History of the World
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
150.01392
Summary
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
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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
00:00:11.960
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
00:00:57.300
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,
00:01:15.640
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.
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Fifty years after Watergate, there is not one shred of probative evidence
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Some of his subordinates did, but there's no evidence that he did.
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He was hounded from office as someone morally unfit to hold the office,
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and yet his one full term was next to Mr. Lincoln's
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and the first and third terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
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I think the most successful term any president ever had.
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When he came into office, there were half a million draftees
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at the ends of the earth, 200 to 400 coming back in body bags every week,
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no exit strategy, no discussions really going on with the other side.
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There were no relations between the U.S. and China,
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no substantive discussions with Russia about arms control or anything else.
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And there were riots in the United States every week,
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race riots and anti-war riots, and the country was a shambles.
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while keeping a non-communist government in Saigon.
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He'd opened relations with China, triangulated the great power relationship,
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signed the greatest arms control agreement in the history of the world
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and had abolished the draft, reduced the crime rate,
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There were no assassinations or no skyjackings of planes.
00:03:02.000
And he was reelected by what is still the greatest plurality
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in American history, although the electorate is almost doubled in size.
00:03:12.740
Now, unfortunately, aspects of his own personality
00:03:15.580
combine to make him mishandle the Watergate affair.
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that hounding that president from office for those reasons
00:03:29.920
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