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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:46
The Truth About Richard Nixon
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Hi everybody, this is Stephan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
This is the truth about the famous U.S.
politician known as Tricky Dick, a.k.a.
Richard Milhouse Nixon.
So who was he?
Well, he was a highly controversial U.S.
politician during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Even though he was re-elected after a landslide victory in 1972, he became the only U.S.
President to ever resign from office.
Why?
Well, of course, you've probably heard Watergate, which has created the unfortunate habit of adding gate to everything, like Gamergate.
This is a word that has become synonymous with the Nixon administration.
It actually referred to a hotel where some bugging was supposed to have occurred.
The President's abuse of power shocked America.
He was spying, he was harassing his political enemies, silencing critics, and fighting to keep his darkest secrets away from the public eye.
So, although he came into office wanting to provide what he called an honorable end to the war in Vietnam, Was he actually a peacemaker?
Well, recently declassified archives paint a very dark, very grim, and very traitorous picture of his actions to get into power, which we'll get to in a minute.
How are the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal related?
Oh, and if you think Watergate was a scandal, you don't know anything about Richard Nixon.
So let's dive straight in with some background.
His father, was Francis Nixon.
Seems to have come straight out of the template for a Grapes of Wrath character.
He came from a loud, boisterous, emotional, and Methodist background.
Frank's mother, Nixon's grandmother, died of tuberculosis when he was only eight years old, and his father remarried when the boy was eleven.
The family was very poor.
Frank was often bullied in school, but it was his abusive stepmother that made his life unbearable.
A relative later recalled, she was hard And beat Frank.
So, I mean, two points.
First of all, isn't it just amazing how recently people used to die of things like tuberculosis?
And secondly, this is a time when switching and hitting with implements was largely the norm in many places in America, and Nixon's father's stepmother stood out as somebody who was particularly brutal against Frank.
At the age of 14, Nixon's father quit school, ran away from home, and started working as a farmhand, but he soon grew restless, and he began traveling around the U.S.
as kind of a jack of all trades.
One biographer described his journey, quote, Frank did not prosper.
He did not starve.
He did not improve his station in life.
He knew a great deal about machines and tools, little about people.
He was argumentative, cantankerous, opinionated.
He shouted a great deal.
He was critical of his bosses, small wonder.
that every spring found him working at a new job.
May have been intelligence, seems to be some indications that he was, but without emotional intelligence, it's pretty hard to get ahead in this world.
Nixon later noted, throughout his life, my father tried to better himself through work.
Frank liked to quote one of his favorite Bible passages, in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.
Years later, he boasted that he'd never missed a day's work in his life.
Nixon's mother, her name was Hannah, and her maiden name became his middle name.
Unlike her future husband, Hannah Milhouse's ancestors were quiet, restrained, unemotional, and Quaker.
Her father Franklin was a farmer, and her mother worked as a school teacher.
When Hannah was twelve, the family moved to the Quaker town of Whittier, just east of Los Angeles.
Known for his honesty and hard work, Franklin quickly became a prominent member of the local community, while his wife made the home into a center for social and religious activities.
The Quakers were known for being pacifists.
Father never paddled us, Hannah recalled.
Mother switched my ankles once with an apple twig.
Stephen Ambrose, one of Nixon's biographers, commented, quote, Discipline in the family was done verbally rather than physically, and the words of criticism were spoken softly rather than shouted.
This didn't mean that it was any better.
We'll see in a few minutes that Nixon and his brothers dreaded his mother's soft layering of maternal guilt-ridden and moral horror-bound ash on the fires of his early personality.
Hannah had a dark and brooding look, and boys didn't find her appealing.
I guess this is prior to Twilight.
Hannah sometimes went out with a group, but she never had a single date, said one of her sisters.
She had no great beauty and no great talent that set her apart from the community, aside from her devotion to her religion, which even in Quaker wittier, went beyond the norm, noted the biographer Ambrose.
Many people who knew my mother in Whittier referred to her, even during her lifetime, as a Quaker saint.
Nixon recalled, Following a Valentine's Day party at the Whittier church, Frank, who had moved to town, was invited to the Milhouse home, and after a walk with Hannah, he knew he wanted to be with her.
I immediately stopped going with the five other girls I was dating, and I saw Hannah every night, claimed Frank.
I guess no stranger to boasting.
Hannah kept seeing him despite the strong disapproval of everyone in her family.
Everyone she valued urged her to end the relationship.
So Frank, unlike the Millhouse family, was loud, emotional, openly expressed his affections, and I guess his angers as well.
And above all, he wasn't a Quaker.
Both Hannah and Frank were deeply religious, but people in Whittier saw the young man and woman as complete opposites.
Nixon had a theory about what attracted his mother to his father.
I think she saw in my father first that he was a very handsome fellow, vigorous and handsome.
He had a lot of magnetism, and I think that emanated.
That affected her to an extent.
And I think another thing that affected her was the fact that she felt that he really needed her.
I mean, my mother had such a heart, you know, and I think she realized that this boy hadn't had a mother, hated his stepmother, and he had never really had much of a chance in life.
Damaged pretty boy, quasi-alpha male, steals reclusive woman's heart.
Not the first time, nor the last time that that story has been played out in human affairs.
Frank and Hannah were married in June 1908.
Four months after they met, and of course over the strenuous objections of Hannah's family.
Frank, of course, had left home at 14, had no family.
Richard Nixon, the second of five brothers, was born on January 9th, 1913 in the town of Yorba Linda, 15 miles from Wehia.
Nixon was a quiet, serious child, intelligent and very bookish, later inspiring the name of a Simpsons character.
The emotional distance that he kept from other people would later earn him the nickname Gloomy Gus.
However, underneath this rigid exterior lay a different side of the young boy.
When he was seven years old, Nixon struck a six-year-old boy on the head with a toy hatchet, permanently scarring him simply because he wanted a jar of tadpoles the boy had collected.
At the beginning, the Nixons were struggling on the verge of poverty, but the family's financial situation improved significantly after Frank opened a successful gas station and grocery store.
When Nixon was twelve, his seven-year-old brother Arthur died after a short illness.
Young Richard cried for weeks.
A second tragedy struck the family when Harold, Richard's older brother, fell ill and died from tuberculosis.
Nixon was twenty years old at the time, his mother noted.
From that time on, it seemed that Richard was trying to be three sons in one, striving even harder than before to make up to his father and me for our loss.
Unconsciously, too, I think that Richard may have felt a kind of guilt that Harold and Arthur were dead, and that he was alive.
Psychoanalysts describe Rich's father as restless, frustrated and an angry man, a mean-spirited person who psychologically abused his five sons and sometimes beat them.
Nixon recalled, She vividly recalled when she used to visit us in Yorba Linda when I was a baby that my father would be out on a tractor in our lemon grove and I would be crying and I would cry so loud that he'd come in off the tractor raging at my mother and saying, Hannah, if you can't keep that boy quiet, I'll have to get off this tractor and do it for you.
He later said it was my father's temper that impressed me most as a small child.
He had tempestuous arguments with my brothers, Harold and Don, and their shouting could be heard all through the neighborhood.
He was a strict and stern disciplinarian, and I tried to follow my mother's example of not crossing him when he was in a bad mood.
Perhaps my own aversion to personal confrontations dates back to these early recollections.
When you listen to people talk about their childhoods, particularly if the childhoods have been abusive, of course, it's important to listen to what's there.
Listen for the contradictions that are not conscious to the person.
So for instance, here, Nixon says that his father had a bad temper, he tried to stay away from him and he was in a bad mood, but he also said a strict and stern disciplinarian.
These two are kind of opposites, right?
If you are strict and stern disciplinarian, then you're self-disciplined first and you impose that discipline on others, which means you don't vent your anger on babies and little If you do venture anger on babies and little children, then that's not being a disciplinarian.
That's just being an abusive jerk.
So I think that's very important to note.
This split, this opposite ways of describing someone or ways of describing someone that directly contradict his or her behavior is very common in the victims of child abuse.
Nixon said, I used to tell my brothers not to argue with him.
I learned earlier that the only way to deal with him was to abide by the rules he laid down.
Otherwise, I would probably have felt the touch of a ruler or the strap as my brothers did.
Nixon said, I suppose they say, you fail to use the rod, you spoil the child.
But my father was not one who could use that physical punishment as much as others did.
I can't recall it too much.
One of the things that happens with victims of child abuse is memory challenges, memory loss in the hippocampus and other areas of the brain.
Trauma inhibits the aggregation and recollection of memories, particularly from early childhood.
On my show, when people call in and talk about childhood, a lot of times they say, but I don't really remember anything until I was about eight or nine and so on.
It's not proof of, but it is often areas to further explore.
And this, just by the by, this spare the rod, spoil the child, which is used by a lot of religious people to justify hitting their children, is completely incorrect in the interpretation as it's commonly put forward.
The rod is the shepherd's staff, which is used to guide and lead the sheep.
It is not something which is used to beat the sheep.
And so if you do not guide your children, if you do not provide sensible limits and guidance and set a good example to your children, They will probably go off the rails.
That is what it means, but what most people who have not done any particular research in it, because perhaps it's justifying the abuse they received as children, say, if you don't hit your children, they'll turn out rotten.
And this is completely false with regards to the Christian text.
So while Nixon avoided his father, he found refuge in his mother.
In a 1983 interview, he was asked, was your mother a disciplinarian as well?
He said, in a very quiet way, yes, but she would do it with a look.
If you did something that was wrong, you knew it, and she'd just look at you, very quietly, very softly, and she would say something.
From that point on, almost as if he had forgotten the question, he started talking about his mother's homemade pies.
Fifteen years earlier, he stated, quote, My mother used to say later on that she never gave us a spanking.
I'm not so sure.
She might have.
But I do know that we dreaded far more than my father's hand, her tongue.
It was never sharp, but she would just sit you down and she would talk very quietly.
And then when you got through, you had been through an emotional experience.
In our family, we would always prefer the spanking, Nixon recalled.
When his five-year-old brother Arthur was caught smoking a cigarette, he said, tell her to give me a spanking.
Don't let her talk to me!
I just can't stand it to have her talk to me!
So clearly the mother was a master of guilt-inducing, self-horrifying, pit-yourself-against-your-own-very-soul kind of verbal abuse and breaking down of personalities.
And to prefer a beating rather than being talked to by your mother is indication of the kind of verbal skills and abilities that Nixon's mother had, which we'll see later was a great advantage to him in his political career.
Nixon stated in his memoirs, My mother loved me completely and selflessly.
However, in another book he wrote, In her whole life I never heard my mother say to me or to anyone else, I love you.
She did not need to.
Her eyes expressed a love and warmth no words could possibly convey.
No one projected warmth and affection more than my mother did, he claimed.
But she never indulged in the present-day custom which I find nauseating of hugging or kissing her children or others for whom she had great affection.
So she seems to not have touched her children.
Nixon's physical awkwardness and hostility to being touched probably was the result of not being touched much, if at all.
As a baby, a maternal touch, skin-on-skin contact is essential for the development of empathy, which is probably one of the reasons why he ended up giving another child a permanent scar with a toy axe.
He wasn't a little boy that you wanted to pick up and hug, claimed one of Nixon's second cousins.
It didn't strike me that he wanted to be hugged.
He had a fastidiousness about it.
So, of course, this is blaming the child.
The child did not grow up with physical affection.
The skin and the body and the nerves as a source of pleasure is foundational to a good relationship.
with oneself as an adult and a sense of trust in the world.
If you are left alone, you ache for physical touch and then you basically don't get it.
So your ache becomes your enemy.
If you are beaten or hit as a child, then what happens is your skin becomes your enemy.
It becomes a mechanism for punishing you.
It becomes your enemy.
And this creates a lot of the mind-body dichotomy that is so bedeviled Western philosophy and to some degree Eastern philosophy.
Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, would later comment on the lack of love in Nixon's early life.
Can you imagine what this man would have been like had somebody loved him?
He went on to explain, I don't think anybody ever did.
Not his parents, nor his peers.
There may have been a teacher, but nobody knows.
It's not recorded.
He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.
Now, if Henry Kissinger is saying that you're a little shy on the love department, You are, in fact, a little shy in the love department.
Nixon was a top student thanks to his intelligence, prodigious memory and hard-working nature.
He graduated from Whittier College and later obtained a law degree from the Duke University School of Law.
Throughout his education, Nixon demonstrated a tremendous affinity and ability for debating.
It was, quote, the activity into which Dick threw himself totally.
Back then, he already knew that he wanted to be a politician and the goal of becoming president had taken root in his young mind.
Nixon's high school debating coach said, he was so good, it kind of disturbed me.
He had this ability to kind of slide round on an argument instead of meeting it head on, and he could take any side of a debate.
He was a crafty debater, sometimes pulling out what was really a blank piece of paper and claiming to quote an authoritative source, remarked one of Nixon's biographers.
Nixon expressed an ominous view in a 1962 book.
He said, I've never had much sympathy for the point of view, it isn't whether you win or lose that counts, but how you play the game.
How you play the game does count, but one must put top consideration on the will, the desire, and the determination to win.
I believe the preface was written by one F. Nietzsche.
The hunger for power.
This is very important when it comes to looking at the motives and drives for those who seek power, in particular political power.
So emotionally neglected children often have a damaged dopamine reward system, which results in lower overall levels of happiness and an increased risk for depression.
Unless that dopamine is increased artificially.
So Hannah's cold personality, lack of touch, and boundless and bottomless capacity for soul-destroying verbal abuse did have a profound effect on young Richard Nixon.
Now, since Quakers are raised to exercise self-control by abstaining from drugs and alcohol, which are common sources of self-medication, Nixon chose another drug that would bring him happiness – political power.
So, you have basically lowered Happy Joy Joy Juice capacities in the brain, so your happiness is like 30 or 40, whereas most people are around 100.
When you get power, you get to 80 or 90, or 100, which means you feel normal, which means you're aware of how unhappy you've been.
You maybe just thought that was a standard state of nature, and it was the reason why he was called Gloomy Gus as a child.
So then when you crash, you have a desire to go back.
This is basically the cycle of addiction, and I've done a couple of speeches on this, but the book to read is Gabor Maté's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
Dr. Ian Robertson, cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist, has noted, quote, baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get promoted to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly.
Dopamine is Like the trail of candy that leads kids to the windowless van of political power.
It is the reward that you get in your brain to increase your happiness if you achieve dominance or greater dominance in whatever hierarchy you're in.
So to achieve the power that he wanted and craved, Nixon embraced the most successful strategies that he acquired through his parents.
In his public life, Nixon embodied his mother, restrained, unemotional, and deeply religious.
Hannah was very popular in her local community while everyone disliked or avoided her husband Frank.
However, in his private life, Nixon adopted what worked for his father in the family environment, and would often explode in profanity-laced, angry outbursts, a well-known feature of his White House tapes.
Nixon recorded a lot of what went on in the Oval Office.
He wasn't the first person to do that, but it is what got him the most trouble.
So this dynamic of Nixon's power-hunger defined his presidency.
Publicly, pious and unemotional.
Privately, he turned into his father, a raging lunatic.
So after graduation, Nixon worked as an attorney.
After serving in World War II, he was able to enter politics as a congressman.
But it wasn't until he served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC, that he really launched his political career.
Very, very briefly, and we'll be doing another presentation on this down the road.
But very briefly, there was reports that came out of an ex-Soviet spy, ex-communist member named Whittaker Chambers.
There were reports that there were literally hundreds of Soviet, on the pay of Moscow, Soviet spies.
In the State Department and in high other government positions of power.
These were incredibly powerful people, some of whom advised FDR during the altar conference when Eastern Europe was given to the Soviets.
So there was a concern, which actually turned out to be very true, that there were in fact many, many Soviet spies at very high levels of the American government.
To put that in perspective, that literally is like People in very high positions of power in the U.S.
government at the moment being on the payroll of al-Qaeda and receiving their orders from bin Laden while he was still alive.
It was huge and terrifying and powerful.
A former communist appeared before the committee in 1948 claiming that U.S.
State Department official Alger Hiss was himself a communist.
Hiss later appeared before the committee to clear his name and all were convinced of his innocence except for Richard Nixon.
So if you've seen the movie, Nixon, Ron Howard's movie, there's always this myth put forward that Nixon resented all the Ivy League guys for having all their easy success while he had to work his way up and so on.
There's that drunken midnight phone call that he makes to David Frost in the Ron Howard movie and so on.
This is all nonsense.
There's no evidence for it whatsoever.
It's just that Alger Hiss was an Ivy League guy, a patrician from a very old family, and the fact that Richard Nixon went after this scion of the East Coast establishment, people couldn't imagine that Alger Hiss was in fact A Soviet spy and so they said well the only reason why Richard Nixon must be going after this Ivy League guy is because he just hates and resents Ivy League guys and all that so none of it was particularly true.
Historian Tim Weiner pointed out this was a crucial point.
to clear his name.
Infiltration and invisible political influence were immoral, but arguably not illegal.
Espionage was treason, traditionally punishable by death.
So, if Alger Hiss had been convicted of being a Soviet spy and of passing information across to the Soviets, Then he would have been put to death.
And this would have been a huge blow to the East Coast establishment if somebody who I believe was a Harvard man and very well educated and very well liked and his brother also worked in the government and so on, if it had turned out that he was in fact a communist spy, it would have been catastrophic to the East Coast establishment.
Courtesy of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon had been studying the FBI's documented evidence for five months, and his high-profile political career was launched in the hot pursuit of Alger Hiss and other alleged communists within the U.S.
government.
So, to make a long story short, in the 1990s, declassified Soviet, Eastern European, and U.S.
intelligence archives corroborated the allegations Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and passed information across to the Soviets.
Even though Algerist was ultimately convicted of perjury, not espionage, in the eyes of most Americans, Nixon became the premier anti-communist congressman.
This was the war on terror of the fifties.
This popular support accelerated his political ascension.
He became a vice president in the Eisenhower administration in 1952 and lost the presidential 1960 election to charismatic John F. Kennedy by the smallest popular vote margin in American history.
Which, let's say, we'll get into more when we do the truth about JFK, had some questionable aspects to it.
It's also interesting that one of the turning points in the campaign was a debate.
People listening on the radio were convinced, in general, that Nixon won the debate.
People watching the television and watching Nixon exude flop sweat like a garden spray thought that John F. Kennedy won the debate because the visuals were very important.
Two years later, Nixon ran for governor of California, but after losing, most people thought he would not return to politics.
But he's not one to give up easily.
He spent the next few years campaigning for Republicans, traveling across the globe and meeting world leaders.
In 68, Nixon saw another opportunity to run for the presidency.
After defeating Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, Nixon became the 37th president of the United States.
It was another close election, but this time he succeeded in claiming the most powerful position in the world.
As president, Nixon's economic policies, sometimes called Nixonomics, had a profound effect on the development of the United States.
For the better?
We shall see.
In August 1971, Nixon announced his decision to take America off the gold standard, claiming, the effect of this action will be to stabilize the dollar.
I guess we've noticed a huge whack load of that ever since.
So, very briefly, Gold is impossible to run off the printing press.
Gold, you've got to dig it up from the ground, you've got to refine it, you've got to smelt it, put it into blocks, store it, whatever, right?
Put it in your teeth.
So, governments can't just create money out of thin air if they're on the gold standard.
Because people used to travel around with gold, but then they'd lose it or get it stolen, so they started traveling around with pieces of paper that were a claim on gold.
Governments took that over and started printing the money, and then started printing way more money, because that's how they buy votes, than they had relative to gold.
So his goal, of course, was to stabilize the dollar, and this is really, of course, not the case.
Nixon also imposed a 90-day freeze on wages and prices to supposedly counter inflation, which was running, I believe, at the Then ungodly sum of 4.7% which would not be too bad these days.
This was an unprecedented move marking the first time the U.S.
government had enacted such policies outside of wartime was also the trigger point for the founding in 1971 of the American Libertarian Party.
These policies collectively became known as the Nixon shock and were considered a wild success since both the American public and media cheered the president's decision.
New York Times said, we unhesitatingly applaud the boldness with which the president has moved Okay, so public relations and pamphlets aside, what were the hidden consequences of the Nixon shock?
This is U.S.
Consumer Price Index from 1800 to 2013.
It's a key inflation measure.
So, of course, there was the War of 1812, which you can see on the bottom left.
There was, of course, the Civil War, which were bad, but tiny compared to what came after.
Of course, you see not much occurring until the twenties.
It bumps up a little bit.
The Fed, of course, came in in 1913.
And then the government began printing a huge amount of money in the 1960s to pay for the welfare state that had been created by LBJ, what was called the Great Society.
Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and expansions of Social Security and so on.
The Nixon shock went in 1971.
As you can see since then, the currency has gone insane.
The currency is approaching Zimbabwe toilet paper status if this trend continues.
So by taking the dollar off gold, Nixon effectively put an end to something called the Bretton Woods System of 1944, which was, towards the end of World War II, Western leaders decided to peg their country's currencies to the US dollar, attempting to replicate the relatively fixed exchange rates they had in the centuries prior to World War II when currencies were backed by gold.
So, again, very briefly, how much is a British pound worth relative to An American dollar or a French franc?
Well, in the past, the common currency would be gold, right?
So a dollar would be worth a certain amount of gold, a pound would be worth a certain amount of gold, and that ratio would then... When British and European as a whole governments abandoned the gold standard as a result of World War I, they couldn't keep the massive war going because they were bleeding off all their gold reserves.
So they switched to fiat currencies in World War I. They really had no way of measuring the value of each other's currency.
So what they did was they said, okay, we were just going to peg it.
To the US dollar for for two reasons one of course the US was on its mainland at least Mostly unharmed by the Second World War and thus remained a significant industrial power and number two of course the US currency was the last Western currency to my knowledge to still a significant one for sure to still Have a gold standard therefore to peg your money to the US dollar was to some degree to peg it to the last remaining gold stand so the dollar was pegged to gold and was guaranteed to be worth 1 35th of an ounce of gold and
The planners of this system also established the International Monetary Fund, which was supposed to loan money pooled through member quotas to countries who had incurred balance of payments deficits.
In other words, they had more imports than exports through inflation or other unsound economic policies.
So they created a welfare system for world economies and many years later provided lyrics for a Bruce Coburn song.
Member countries could now inflate their money supplies and wreak havoc on their economies without suffering the consequences of such decisions, making the whole system a ticking time bomb.
As we know, people in power want to offer you $5 in benefits for every dollar they take in taxes.
That's what they are offering, basically, when they get into power.
You, or the military-industrial complex, or the farmers, or the poor, or the rich, or the financiers, the bankers, you name it.
Of course governments don't create any wealth.
They actually consume wealth.
They destroy wealth in general.
And so how can they offer you more in benefits than they take in taxes?
Well, they take your taxes, they use that money as collateral to print and borrow and deficit finance, and then They give you more money back, but as you can see from the previous graph, it's inflated like crazy.
So you get $5 back, but your $5 is actually worth 75 cents.
And so you've lost money, but it feels like you've got more money.
This drives inflation because everybody wants wage increases.
This drives interest rates, creates bubbles.
Anyway, it's a huge mess.
We'll get into that perhaps another time.
So since the value of everyone's currencies was pegged to the U.S.
dollar, everyone depended on the economic policies of America.
This is why America became the Indispensable Nation, as it's called sometimes.
Lyndon B. Johnson, of course the president before Nixon, accelerated the collapse of Bretton Woods by funding his Great Society programs, the War on Poverty, Medicare, Medicaid, and the War on Vietnam through inflation.
So countries that held increasingly overvalued U.S.
dollars became concerned.
And they said, look, they're printing so much money that there's going to be inflation.
Each one of my dollars is going to be worth less.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to trade in my dollars for gold.
And so this began draining the U.S.
gold reserves.
Everybody saw the U.S.
was printing money like crazy to pay for all of this wars on every adjective in the dictionary.
So they said, okay, we're going to get the gold.
Here, take your paper.
I want the gold.
So this drained the U.S.
gold reserves, which was an accelerating process.
By now, of course, American politicians were addicted to printing money and dollar inflation didn't stop, even though the American gold stock kept shrinking.
By 1971, the U.S.
In 1971, the U.S. had only $2.23 worth of gold to redeem every $100 worth of paper promises.
Since this number doesn't include dollar-denominated deposits of foreign banks, America could redeem only a tiny fraction of a percent of its total paper obligations.
In other words, its liabilities-to-assets ratio was like 200 to 1, or something like that.
Completely illegal for a bank to do that, but of course, it's the government, right?
So, on a side note, sort of back then, an ounce of gold was theoretically worth $35.
As of September 2014, it's worth increased to $1000.
$222, in other words, the value of the dollar dropped by 3400% with respect to gold.
If wages had kept, there used to be silver in the early 60s in US quarters, and if they'd kept the silver in those US quarters, minimum wage would be like $26 an hour.
It's not the economy that's broken, it's the money that's been broken by the government.
Now, if you can't possibly pay off Your liabilities with your assets, you declare bankruptcy, but that would have been political suicide.
So Nixon did what most of the world leaders have done in the early part of the 20th century in World War I. He took America off the gold standard and implemented a number of policies that at the time were considered pretty anti-Republican.
So again, He was addicted to the dopamine provided by political power.
And asking a politician to do what is sensible with regards to the long-term health of the economy is like asking a heroin addict to do that which is sensible for the long-term health of his body.
It doesn't work.
So, what are some of his policies?
This was supposedly a Republican.
Well, the Environmental Protection Agency was created by an unconstitutional executive order Bypassing Congress completely gives the federal government massive control over all land, all air, and all water.
Federal revenue sharing was enacted wherein basically the federal government expands its power by bribing governments further down the chain of command.
Price and wage controls, unprecedented outside of wartime.
Massive increases in foreign aid and financial credit to communist dictatorships.
Significant increases in spending for entitlements, medical care, education, social services, social security, etc.
He enacted affirmative action.
Of course, the preferential hiring of minorities, which as we can all have seen in the decades since, has truly turned America into a colorblind society.
Highest income tax rate under Nixon was 70%.
Richard Nixon said, I am now a Keynesian in economics.
This didn't shock many Americans because they all just assumed that meant he was born in Kenya.
Keynesianism is basically the idea that when the economy is in a depression, government should spend a lot of money to drive economic activity.
When the economic activity accelerates, the government should cut back on its spending and balance things out.
Basically, this is the theory that the best way for a gambling addict to treat his addiction is to spend lots of money when he's high rolling, when he's winning a lot, and then to pay off all of his debts when he starts to lose.
Of course, we know that that's not what gambling addicts do, neither is that what governments do.
So, Nixon partly devalued the American dollar to enact the Keynesian idea of spending your way out of recessions.
And of course, this Republican, which is supposed to be more on the constitutional side and Bill of Rights and Rule of Law, when he was confronted by David Frost on the illegality or questionable legality of some of his actions, he said, well, wasn't that illegal?
But Nixon said, when the president does it, that means it's not illegal.
Yay Caligula!
The war on drugs, one of the most horrifying and terrifying legacies of Nixon's administration.
So during Nixon's first term in office, it was becoming increasingly apparent the US could not win the war of attrition against the North Vietnamese guerrillas.
Basically the war in Vietnam ended because the military was falling apart.
Soldiers were fracking their offices.
They were on drugs.
They refused to obey orders.
And so they got out just before the entire military command collapsed.
How could this be explained?
Was it a bad war?
Was it a destructive disposable mail throw away or basically throwing what was the moral equivalent to the leaders of lead soldiers into the everlasting fire of useless warfare?
No!
Drugs!
Drugs did it!
It's the drugs!
As historian Jeremy Kusmarov pointed out, quote, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the media became flooded with sensational stories linking drugs to the breakdown of the American military mission.
While drugs were widely used as a coping mechanism, soldiers generally avoided them on the front lines because it meant almost certain death.
In May 1971, two congressmen returned from Vietnam with a shocking report.
15% of American troops in Vietnam were addicted to heroin.
So, you have people who are seeking dopamine hits at the very top levels of government, being in charge of those who are trying to maintain any kind of positive mood by taking artificial highs like heroin.
You have a number of drug addicts on both ends of the political spectrum, or the political hierarchy.
The following month, Nixon proclaimed, quote, America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.
In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
This marked the beginning of the war on drugs.
This new American war kept escalating even though studies found low re-addiction rates amongst veterans returning home as early as 1974.
Only 9% of true addicts reported re-addiction in the 8-12 month period after returning home.
They used drugs while they were in war, they came home, and more than 9 out of 10 of them stopped using drugs.
Let's examine the legacy of Nixon's war on drugs.
The U.S.
has spent between $1 trillion and $2.5 trillion fighting not illegal drugs, but those who use and profit from them.
After all, you can't fight wars against nouns or inanimate objects.
You can't put the pot plant on the stand.
Globally, the U.S.-led war on drugs has achieved the exact opposite of its intended goal, with the United Nations estimating that in the ten years between 1998 and 2008, Global use of opiates has increased by 34.5%, cocaine use is up by 27% and cannabis consumption has increased by 8.5%.
As a proportion of the population, the US has six times the incarceration rate of China and more people in prisons than were under Stalin's gulags.
Where do all these criminals come from?
More than half of federal inmates are in prison on drug convictions, about 1.66 million.
Americans were arrested on drug charges in 2009 alone, with 81% of, quote, criminals being locked up for mere possession.
The number of inmates convicted of drug-related crimes jumped almost tenfold in the 16 years between 1980 and 1996.
Of course, ultimately, the real cost of the war on drugs is not financial.
Millions rot behind bars for having the wrong piece of vegetation in their back pockets.
And they have few opportunities for employment when they get out.
Countless families, of course, are smashed up and broken apart, guaranteeing that the constant stream of drug users and addicts coming from fatherless homes will keep filling American prisons.
They find more criminal contacts in prisons.
They are traumatized and less able to work when they get out of prisons.
It is a massive power, lust-fueled vendetta against the peace and prosperity of the future.
During his election campaign, Nixon appeared to be the peacemaker America had wanted.
In his acceptance speech, he made a promise to Americans.
And I, Nixon, pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next administration will be to bring an honourable end to the war in Vietnam.
This honourable end could have turned into an all-out nuclear war with Soviet Russia within less than a year of Nixon's presidency.
In late October, 69 18 B-52 bombers loaded with nuclear weapons flew patterns close to Soviet Russia's border for three days.
The goal was to convince the Soviets that Nixon was willing to do anything to win the Vietnam War, which of course was funded to some degree and armed by the Soviets, an example of his madman theory of foreign policy.
He said, I call it the madman theory.
I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.
We'll just slip the word to them that, for God's sakes, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism.
We can't restrain him when he's angry.
And he has his hand on the nuclear button.
And Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace.
As Wired Magazine reported.
This was the only moment we know of when a president decided that it made strategic sense to pretend to launch World War III.
The bombing of Cambodia.
In 1965, the Lyndon Johnson administration started a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, targeting communist base camps and supply routes.
Nixon later escalated this campaign after a series of Viet Cong attacks came from Cambodia.
Nixon commanded Kissinger, I want everything that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them.
There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget.
Is that clear?
Kissinger then passed Nixon's order to General Alexander Haig.
He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.
He doesn't want to hear anything.
It's an order.
It's to be done.
The Nixon administration dropped 2.3 million tons of bombs over Cambodia, a country with a population smaller than New York and a territory about the size of Oklahoma, making it the most heavily bombed country in history, with LBJ's bombings included nearly 2.8 million tons in total.
For comparison, the Allies dropped only 1.9 million tons of bombs over Germany during World War II, also killing my grandmother, and just over 2 million As many as half a million Cambodians are estimated to have died during the U.S.
carpet bombing, 7% of the population.
Tragically, this wasn't even the end of it.
The bombing campaign destroyed the delicate balance of power within the region and incited many Cambodians to support the Khmer Rouge A U.S.
journalist once asked a Khmer Rouge officer if party leaders had used the bombings as part of their anti-U.S.
the Cambodian government.
See, you back the government and you bomb the villagers, and that won't turn anyone against you.
This, of course, was not to be the last time that an attempt to wipe out aggression in a foreign country created destabilizing anti-U.S. elements in that country.
A U.S. journalist once asked a Khmer Rouge officer if party leaders had used the bombings as part of their anti-U.S. propaganda.
Oh, yes, they did, he recalled, as Every time, after there had been bombings, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched.
The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came.
Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days.
Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told, that That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.
It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.
The CIA reported in May 1973 that the Khmer Rouge, quote, are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda.
The cadre tell the people that the government of Lan Nol has requested the airstrikes and is responsible for the damage and the suffering of innocent villagers.
The only way to stop the massive destruction of the country is to defeat Lan Nol and stop the bombing.
This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men.
Residents say that the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees and in areas which have been subject to B-52 strikes.
A few months later, amidst cries for the impeachment of Nixon, who had kept the Cambodian attack a secret and opposed its ending, U.S.
Congress cut off funding for the bombing and ended the campaign.
As one writer noted, civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began.
Setting in motion the expansion of ISIS Sorry, of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, the coup d'etat in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge and ultimately the Cambodian genocide, also known as the Killing Fields.
After the party got in power in 1975, it massacred 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the country's population and the modern day equivalent of slaughtering 80 million Americans.
And people complain about a burglary and some wiretapping.
In June 1972, the police caught five men who broke into the Democratic National Committee offices of the Watergate Hotel in an attempt to hide listening devices that would allow them to spy on conversations between committee members.
What actually they saw.
They put bugs in, it didn't work, they came in to fix them, but they taped over the locks so they closed the doors.
A security guard saw that and called the police.
The Nixon administration attempted to cover up its involvement, but a subsequent series of investigations revealed an array of illegal activities carried out by Nixon and his aides.
All the five men had ties to Nixon.
There was the Committee to Re-elect the President, also known as CREEP.
They had the phone number, and they were leaned on pretty heavily.
I mean, these guys got sometimes multi-decade sentences for a first-time robbery offense wherein nothing was stolen.
The Nixon administration had spied on political opponents as well as harassed activist groups and U.S.
officials through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service.
You see, harassing political opponents and potentially stealing, say, elections by using the powers of the Internal Revenue Service, Lois Lerner, is considered to be a terrible breach of presidential powers, a horrifying level of corruption, At least it was.
The president had also set up a covert investigations unit called the Plumbers who was tasked with suppressing the leaking of classified information amidst the unfolding Pentagon Papers controversy.
Media outlets had started leaking information related to the US involvement in Vietnam during the presidency of Truman, Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ.
The documents didn't directly threaten Nixon but he still decided to suppress them.
Nixon ultimately resigned before he could be impeached for abuse of power.
None of the articles of impeachment talked about slaughtering huge numbers of Cambodians in a secret bombing campaign.
First Lieutenant Stephen Millett pointed out to a sinister fact about Nixon's impeachment proceedings.
Quote, What undermined Nixon's second administration was not a foreign policy or military strategy, but a domestic political crisis.
This became evident in July 1974, when the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach the president on three articles alleging domestic abuses of power, but rejected an article of impeachment for the secret bombing of Cambodia.
One biographer described post-resignation Nixon as a soul in torment.
A lifelong pursuit of power ended with a scandal that would bar the former president from re-entering American politics.
Like many addicts, Nixon quit his addiction when he hit rock bottom.
Now, the liberal media, and the media is in general liberal in America, has been for many decades, the liberal media really disliked Nixon for his pursuit of communists in the HUAC hearings and basically vowed to get him.
And once they found Watergate, they had the tools to do so.
After he became president in 1974, Gerald Ford gave Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for his crimes against the United States.
Nixon's aides, however, were not spared.
Some of them were convicted of very serious offenses and sent to federal prison.
In 2008, new evidence came out in support of a long-standing hypothesis that may explain the lead-up to Watergate, the Chennault affair.
Amongst all the Watergate tapes that had been released to date, There's direct evidence that Nixon authorized precisely one burglary, breaking into the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, and stealing a classified document detailing, as Nixon wrote in his autobiography, the events leading up to Johnson's announcement of the bombing halt at the end of the 1968 campaign.
I wanted to know what had actually happened.
I also wanted the information as potential leverage against those in Johnson's administration who were trying to undercut my war policy.
LBJ's decision to stop bombing the northern parts of North Vietnam and to initiate the Paris Peace Talks improved the public's trust in the Democratic Party.
When LBJ announced his decision to end the airstrikes against Hanoi, he succeeded in shrinking Nixon's electoral support down to 1% from a 16% lead against the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey.
America, of course, at this time, was so weary of the war that they just wanted Vietnam to end no matter what.
So if LBJ had been capable of achieving an end to the Vietnam War, Nixon's primary advantage, that he was going to be the peacemaker to end the Vietnam War, would have slipped away.
So Nixon nearly lost the presidency because his campaign was focused on the promise to end US involvement in the Vietnam War, a promise that made him popular even among Democratic supporters.
So why was Nixon willing to take such an enormous risk as authorizing this burglary to obtain Well, when a part of LBJ's archives were declassified in early 2013, scholars found a shocking series of recordings that revealed a previously missing piece of the puzzle.
Prior to the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, a Nixon campaign aide, Anna Chennault, approached the South Vietnamese leadership, offering them better terms under a future Nixon administration if they didn't agree to peace.
Saigon ultimately resisted the proposed settlements and the peace talks failed.
This is essential to understand that a Nixon campaign aide made an end run around the official US government's attempt to end the war in Vietnam, offering the Vietnamese leaders better terms if they did not agree to the current peace talks.
The CIA, FBI and NSA were all spying on the South Vietnamese.
Not surprisingly, LBJ eventually found out about Nixon's treason and confronted the Republican nominee, but decided not to go public with the information, likely because it meant confessing to egregious espionage against America's war ally.
This was the source of Nixon's obsession with suppressing the release of confidential information.
Had Nixon not interfered with the Paris peace talks, Indochina and Cambodia in particular may have been spared from annihilating carpet bombing, and 22,000 American soldiers alongside thousands and thousands and thousands more Vietnamese may have lived to see the end of the bloody war.
It's treason of the highest order.
To offer better terms, if an American enemy Does not agree to the current terms, thus prolonging a war.
Unconscionable.
At one point in 1975, Nixon had only $500 in the bank, but following the publication of his memoirs and an interview with British talk show host and producer David Frost, his financial situation gradually improved.
Nixon travelled to the United Kingdom in 1978 and in an address to the Oxford Union regarding Watergate, he stated, Some people say I didn't handle it properly, and they're right.
I screwed it up, mea culpa.
But let's get on to my achievements.
You'll be here in the year 2000, and we'll see how I'm regarded then.
Throughout the 1980s, Nixon was busy writing, giving speeches, traveling, and meeting foreign leaders.
The public's perception of him was gradually improving, and after a 1986 trip to the Soviet Union, a gal at Paul Rankin was one of the ten most admired men in the world.
Because crime doesn't pay.
In 1994, Nixon suffered a severe stroke, slipped into a deep coma, and died, aged 81, a few days later.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
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