pplpod Episode 77 tracks Richard Nixon’s long, jagged arc—from California striver and HUAC prosecutor to Eisenhower’s vice president, from the 1960 heartbreak and “last press conference” to a 1968 comeback built on law-and-order politics and a shifting party map. We unpack the presidency’s two faces: foreign-policy audacity (opening China, détente and the first SALT treaty with the USSR, the “Vietnamization” endgame and Paris Peace Accords, a bold Mideast airlift in ’73) alongside a surprisingly muscular domestic record (EPA creation, Clean Air Act, OSHA, revenue sharing, Title IX, the opening moves of affirmative action). Then the rot: plumbers, leaks, the Pentagon Papers backlash, Watergate’s break-in to cover-up, the Saturday Night Massacre, and the tapes that ended it—culminating in the first presidential resignation in 1974 and an unquiet ex ...