万花筒 Kaleidoscope 2007-06-24&25, 尼克松总统的传奇一生（在线收听） |
| Angela Drews and her colleagues at the National Archives have been packing for months. Plain cardboard boxes with odds and ends from the Nixon White House, including gifts given to the president, both priceless… The gemstones in here are pink sapphires, which are very rare. And worthless… This is just an ordinary beach rock that a donor found on the beach, and they thought it looked like Richard Nixon. Congress ordered all these stuff held here while all sorts of legal issues were settled. This is the Nixon White House taping system. John Powers has looked over and looked after a warehouse full of doodads and documents detailing the Nixon years. This is the tape box, for the 18 1/2-minute gap. The tapes are also kept here in a vault that is off-limits to the public to preserve them and protect some still classified conversations. Powers knows as much about the inner workings of the Nixon administration as you can, without ever having been indicted. So how well do you think you know Richard Nixon? I know him pretty well. You like him? At times. There are roughly 42 million pages of documents stored here, 500,000 photographs and 30,000 presidential gifts. It's a comprehensive record of history, not just as it was, but as it might have been. OK, here, now we've got a problem here. It turns out Nixon was prepared for anything, when the Apollo 13 spacecraft was severely damaged by an explosion. The astronauts made it back to earth, but if they hadn't, the president would have said this: they dared greatly, they died bravely. The world will long remember the searing human drama of Apollo 13. I shall resign the presidency effective… And though this is the most famous speech Nixon ever delivered, he also had one written that would have stunned the nation. He was prepared to announce he would not resign. He says, therefore, I shall see the constitutional process through whatever its outcome. Of course his dreams of fighting on to vindication were just words on a piece of paper. Now one of millions of documents researchers will soon start poring over, to help render history's judgment, on the legacy of Richard Nixon. Richard Schlesinger, CBS News, College Park, Maryland. |
| 原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/wanhuatong/2007/42036.html |