Professor Nicole Hemmer
speaker
296 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Professor Nicole Hemmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Black people, about Jewish people, about women. And that all comes out on the tapes. And that is part of the story of his downfall, is that people see this kind of bigotry and meanness that Nixon has, that he's able to largely disguise in public. But that is very evident on those hidden tapes.
Undermining it in so many different ways, because, yes, on the one hand, you have this Nixon who is, you know, promoting affirmative action for in his Philadelphia plan and who is crisscrossing the world and talking to people of all different kinds of backgrounds and religions and belief systems and pulling them together in international politics.
But who harbors a great deal of bigotry in his own personal life. And that also, you know, while he's building this enormous national majority in the 72 election, is also behind the scenes breaking law in order to make sure that he wins that election. So this is the break-in to the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. but is also going after his political enemies.
You mentioned the Pentagon Papers, which were released in 1971, and the Nixon administration fought tooth and nail to try to keep those from being published in the New York Times and the Washington Post, where they were ultimately revealed.
But part of the crime spree in 1972 is going after Daniel Ellsberg, who's the person who released the papers, breaking into his psychiatrist's office in order to try to get dirt on him. That sort of...
Revenge-Mindedness trips him up again and again and leads him to break the law at a time when presidents have so much power that there was probably things he could do legitimately to discredit someone like Ellsberg, but that's not the path he chose.
It's a great question, because on the one hand, we often talk today about how great it would be to have a president who is deeply knowledgeable about the world and treats the world as it is. And I think that that is something that is laudable and that we want. We want presidents who are sincerely interested in peace and who are engaged and understand both how power and people work.
And in a lot of ways, Richard Nixon had those qualities. At the same time, the way that he went about getting peace in some of these places, including Vietnam, involved war crimes and lawbreaking, as in the case of the bombing of Cambodia.
Yeah. The body count of the Nixon administration is not something that can be set aside. The chaos and the destruction that his administration caused in pursuit of those loftier goals. The loftiness of the goals does not excuse the criminality on the world stage and then the criminality at home.
I think one of the lasting legacies of the Nixon administration is that he did have a lot of supporters, people who felt that he was unfairly prosecuted and persecuted through Watergate and who then spent the next several decades trying to create a world in which the next Republican president wouldn't be held responsible if he committed crimes in pursuit of his goals.
And that's the world we live in now. And so, you know, I think that you can tally things up on a ledger. About the good and the bad of the Nixon administration. But I think we have to take into account the destructiveness of that legacy, which, you know, Nixon probably couldn't have foreseen that he would have loosened the constraints on presidents going forward.
That wasn't, I think, what he saw as the lesson of his presidency. But nonetheless, we are living in the world that Richard Nixon created. And looking around right now, it doesn't feel like a very good world to live in.
Thank you so much for having me, Don.
Absolut. Und er war so eine große Figur in der US-Politik für so lange, von den frühen 1950er-Jahren bis in die Mitte der 1970er-Jahre. Es war wirklich, du weißt, Richard Nixon's Quarter Century.
And that arc, right, from that tiny little place in Yorba Linda to the final ignominy of his resignation from office. He grew up in poverty. He was raised by his two parents. His mom was a stay-at-home mom. He was raised as a Quaker and was deeply steeped in religion when he was growing up. But he was somebody who was scrapping from the very beginning.
Who believed that he was destined for bigger things and who couldn't necessarily immediately see a path out. And so he was intent on making a path out of Yorba Linda onto a bigger stage.
Very much so. And that's the thing that he's always struggling against. When he enters that East Coast world, when he starts to become part of that East Coast elite, he thinks about Whittier and where he came from and how much he has to prove himself. And that sort of metastasizes into something more than just a drive.
It definitely gains some edges of paranoia and vengeance by the time he becomes president. But Whittier is always with him.
Which is a very Nixonian thing to do, right? If I can't be accepted, I'm going to make my own way. And you'll see that throughout his career. But even as he's making his own way, because the thing is, you look at his career and he's inordinately successful.
Er hat es absolut gemacht. Und deshalb ist es so wichtig, nicht nur alle Erfolge, die er durch die Zeit hatte, zu behalten, sondern auch die Schmerzen und das Verzweifeln, die er mit ihm verbracht hat, als er aufwuchs.
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