American presidents

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes.

It's 50 years since Richard Nixon became the first US president in history to resign, following the Watergate scandal.

To mark this anniversary, we're featuring first hand accounts from major moments in US presidential history.

We start with the first ever presidential television debate. In 1956, the Democratic and Republican candidates sent female representatives. They were Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Chase Smith.

Our expert guest, Dr Kathryn Brownell, from Purdue University in Indiana in the US, discovers other key television debate moments in presidential history.

Then, we hear about the rise of the religious right in America, exploring the emergence of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s.

Following that, we look at one of the closest and most contested elections in history, as Al Gore went head-to-head with George W Bush in the battle for the White House in 2000.

Finally, we hear from the photographer inside the Situation Room as the US closed in on terrorist Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

Contributors: Tom DeFrank - Journalist. Dr Kathryn Brownell - Associate professor of history at Purdue University. Kate Scott and Janann Sherman - Historians. Richard Viguerie - One of the founders of the Moral Majority. Callie Shell - The official photographer for Al Gore's presidential campaign. Pete Souza - Chief Official White House Photographer during Barack Obama's presidency.

(Photo: Richard Nixon waves after becoming the first US president to resign. Credit: Bettmann / Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service
0:08.0	with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:12.0	This week with the American presidential
0:14.5	election campaign having been thrown onto a completely new trajectory with
0:19.0	Joe Biden the incumbent pulling out and Vice President Kamala Harris stepping up as the Democratic
0:24.0	candidate, we're taking a look at moments from US electoral and presidential
0:28.3	history, including from the 1950s the first proper live TV election debate to women representing the Republicans
0:35.6	and Democrats. You're about to see the widow of the late Democratic president
0:39.1	Mrs Franklin D Roosevelt and the only woman to have served in both the House and Senate of the United States,
0:45.6	Mrs Margaret Chase Smith, faced the nation.
0:48.4	Also the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s and Bush versus Gore in the year 2000.
0:55.0	The last rally we did was November 7th in Florida.
0:59.3	So it's kind of wild that the last rally was in Florida and the end of the election would all sit on Florida.
1:06.7	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but we're going to start with Richard Nixon
1:11.8	because it's 50 years this week since he became the first ever
1:16.0	president to resign from office.
1:18.4	The scandal began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Building in 1972.
1:25.2	The break-in was linked to Nixon's re-election campaign.
1:28.9	In 2014, Fuhana-Heider spoke to the journalist Tom DeFrank who watched the Watergate scandal unfold.
1:35.0	This was an extraordinary moment. You'd had two and a half years of open warfare.
1:40.0	You just had exposé after exp expose and after two and a half years it all came
1:47.1	to a crescendo in the first week in August of 1974.
	...

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