The cardboard man, the mad monk, Slick Rick, Gloomy Gus, Tricky Dick by any name, the 37 president of the United States left the White House stained with scandal. So let's not beat around the bush. This is the Richard Nixon episode. Buckle up. It doesn't get much weirder than this. Welcome to very presidential, a podcast original, I'm your host, Ashleigh Flowers, you can find all episodes of very presidential and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify.

And if you like what you're hearing, reach out on Facebook and Instagram at podcast and Twitter at podcast network. Today, we're covering Richard Nixon High School Theater kid turned leader of the free world. Those that knew him best politically said that he was the strangest man they'd ever met. And to clear up any confusion, he was definitely a crook.

All of that is coming up. Stay with us. This is going to sound absolutely insane, but trust me, it's true. Every July since 1893, thousands of the world's most influential men participate in a two week long retreat on a private 20 700 acre plot of land in the redwood forest called the Bohemian Grove. They smoke cigars, drink until they're sick, urinate on protected trees dressed in drag and carry out bizarre rituals.

During their so-called opening ceremony, a bunch of men in silver robes and red capes sing and chant under a 30 foot stone owl lit by fire for a finale. They burn an effigy made to look human in ritual sacrifice.

The Bohemian Club, as they're called, has been accused of trying to create a new world order by hand, selecting leaders who will push their agenda. Sure, it's a bit of a stretch, but the first meeting of the Manhattan Project, the program that created the atomic bomb, was held at the Bohemian Grove. Among the names we know have at least appeared in their woods are Hearst, Roosevelt, Bush, Cheney, Reagan, Ford, Rumsfeld, Hoover and Scalia.

And in July 1967, Richard Nixon delivered a speech in front of the Bohemian Club. In his autobiography, he wrote, quote, It marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency, and it did.

But the road that led to Nixon's downfall, his Shakespearean tragedy of life, starts much earlier. An eight year old Nixon is fussy, neat and hates hugs. He's literally the kid who takes the football and doesn't give it back until everyone promises to follow the rules. And his adolescence is defined by two things personal loss and public embarrassment. When he makes the high school football team, the other boys use him as a human punching bag. Those aren't my words.

They're his coaches. When he lands the lead in a school play, he's so uncomfortable about kissing his scene partner on opening night that the audience erupts into laughter. The production has to screech to a grinding halt until the ridicule dies down. Girls start referring to him as gloomy Gus in the hallways. He wants nothing more than to be liked, but he doesn't know how to make that happen. So one day he brings home a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People and asks his family to read it together.

His family is lower middle class.

His father runs a small grocery store and his mother scrubs bedpans for extra cash. Nixon spends many nights drowning out his parents tense, borderline abusive relationship, listening to train whistles and staring at a poster of Abraham Lincoln above his bed by fifteen Nixons working to help support his family. By twenty, he loses two of his brothers, Arthur and Harold. Harold's death is particularly hard on the Nixon family because he was the golden child. Athletic, charming, fun loving everything a young Richard wasn't.

After Harold's death, Nixon's father reportedly wondered, why is it that the best and the finest of the flock have to be taken? Nixon pretty much spends the rest of his life trying to prove himself worthy of being the son that survived so well. He becomes president.

When Nixon wins the election in 1968, he's thrilled he runs over to his Manhattan apartment, opens the windows and blast Richard Rodgers victory at sea as loud as he can. He says he wants everybody on Fifth Avenue, five floors below to hear. And by everybody, he means his laundry list of haters, both real and imagined. It's this triumphant, cathartic moment, but it comes with a dark lining. Nixon's music is drowning out the sounds of a country tearing at the seams.

Race riots, draft protests, American flags going up in flames. He's inheriting Lyndon B. Johnson's America. And no matter how hard LBJ tried, he couldn't drink the Vietnam War away. But for now, Nixon doesn't care about any of that. He lost two presidential elections to get here, one in high school to a popular jock named Robert and another in 1960 to a popular rich kid named John F. Kennedy. So he's not thinking about the fact that he's promised to end the Vietnam War without having any sort of real plan.

He's just happy to have power.

On January 20th, 1969, Nixon takes the oath of office and steps into the White House with a chip on his shoulder that he's been growing since childhood. Now he lets himself enjoy Inauguration Day, but then he gets straight to work on a good day. Nixon's paranoia hovers at nine or 10 out of 10.

So naturally, as one of his first acts as president, he removes all of the wiretaps that LBJ installed in the White House, which in hindsight is dripping with irony. Yes, a touch of paranoia can be useful in politics to keep you on your toes. But Nixon lacked most qualities you'd expect in a president. Let's start with his coordination. There's a reason he rode the bench in football. Nixon drops everything.

When Major League Baseball invited him to throw the first pitch on opening day, he dropped the ball.

He was once handed a pen to sign a bill, but for whatever reason, he put the cap back on before trying to sign. Then he fumbled, took the cap off again, stabbed his own hand and dropped the cap on the ground.

A witness said total chaos ensued as half the cabinet looked for a pen cap, according to biographer Evan Thomas. Nixon, quote, dropped so many medals at award ceremonies or inadvertently stabbed the recipient that the White House had the medals affixed with Clip-On devices instead of pins.

After spilling soup on himself at dinner, Nixon tried to take soup off the White House menu, saying men don't really like soup. And according to Nixon, men don't cry either.

Like all expressions of vulnerability, he viewed tears as signs of weakness.

Repressing human emotions was something of a favorite pastime for the thirty seven president. Along with reading Plato, listening to Brahms and shoving his foot in his mouth, he once greeted a White House guest who happened to be using a wheelchair by announcing that he'd recently met some differently abled children. Another time, Nixon went up to a police officer bleeding on the ground and not knowing what to say, asked, Do you like your job?

This is to say that Nixon had the social graces of a thumbtack.

He was excruciatingly awkward. He struggled with eye contact and knowing what to do with his hands during White House dinners, he had his aides interrupt any of his conversations that lasted more than five minutes, midsentence if need be. And when Nixon talked to himself, it was often in the third person. Now Nixon compensated for his social shortcomings with over preparation. He worked non-stop, often overnight. And because he was so awkward, he preferred the phone. He didn't care for the grandeur of the Oval Office.

So he spent most of his time in a hideaway in a more discreet executive office building.

There, he listened to classical music to pump himself up and scribble ideas on yellow legal pads. He'd make lists of the type of leader he hoped to be compassionate, bold, open minded, good on one he jotted down. Not lonely, awesome. He never included the words crass, manipulative or vindictive. Maybe because he saw self reflection as a sign of weakness, too. But Nixon's suffocated emotions had a habit of bubbling to the surface. One day, President Nixon approaches Secretary of State Bill Rogers and says, I want you to fire at this entire team of people.

Got it. Good. Now Rogers freaks out. He can't bring himself to do it. He eventually returns to Nixon with his tail between his legs and his like, hey, so about all of those people you wanted me to kicked to the curb. I just want you to know I couldn't do it. What is Nixon do?

He looks at Roger's confused and is basically like, oh, did I tell you to fire someone? Nixon had this habit of making sweeping impulsive demands and then letting his aides decide whether or not they should act on his words and risk losing their job or defy his orders and risk losing their job.

It's this constant game of catch. Twenty two with occasionally nuclear stakes. In April 1969, Nixon's third month in office, North Korea shoots down a U.S. reconnaissance plane somewhere over the Sea of Japan.

31 Americans lost their lives. Nixon's blood boils. North Korea is under a communist regime, and he's made a career out of destroying the lives of anyone even tangentially associated with the word commun. It's earned him the nickname the Red Hunter, while the loss of the American spy plane is a terrible tragedy. In a word, Nixon overreacts. He immediately escalates to nuclear warfare and his aides beg him to take a breath. They're like, we're still in a Cold War.

Dropping an atomic bomb might kill millions of people and set off a chain of events that changes the face of our planet. So what do you say we just like, wait until the morning to decide when you're not drunk and high? Yeah, because Nixon shares a few vices with his predecessors.

He's not dosing enough drugs to kill a horse like Kennedy and he can't hold his liquor like LBJ. But that's because he mixes his drug cocktails with his actual cocktails. Nixon's paranoia, anxiety and stress make it hard for him to sleep. He takes his first sleeping pill back when he's a congressman in 1948. But one pill turns to two, which turns to, well, we don't really know how many.

Over the course of his career, Nixon pops amphetamines, sleeping pills and barbiturate based tranquilizers so strong that they later get pulled off the market.

He's even willing to bypass getting actual prescriptions. This one time, he pulls strings to get his hands on a thousand pills of a wonder drug called Dilantin. Taken on their own. Nixon's drugs are mind altering, mixed together, their world bending, mixed together with alcohol. Nixon is an international security threat. You'd never know that he was raised by a Quaker mother drunkenly threatening nuclear warfare, according to reports made by CIA agents.

It didn't just happen in April 1969. It was almost routine.

Now, Nixon had this tactical idea that he called his madman theory. According to Nixon, he only played the role of an unstable leader. That way, people took him seriously.

When he threatened something. He said it gave him leverage when it came to compromising. Of course, if his madman theory sounds like a convenient excuse not to take ownership of his explosive, drug riddled behavior, there's a reason for that. In the words of Nixon's national security adviser, if the president had his way, there would be a nuclear war each week. Sure, he was kidding sometimes, but when he wasn't kidding and his aides weren't taking him seriously, he'd look them in the eyes and reference the utter destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible.

Remember Lot's wife? He'd say, never look back. And they didn't. Not even after they bypassed Congress to drop two point seven million tons of bombs on Cambodia. Coming up, Nixon runs away from the Secret Service. Hi, listeners, I'm Kate from Parks Network, and I'm here to share about an all new original series that will send shivers up your spine called Haunted Places Ghost Stories. Starting October 1st, we're bringing you the scariest, most hair raising ghost stories ever imagined.

Join host Alistair Murden as he resurrects fictions from all over the world, including Japan and India and even ancient Rome, and brings to life a new heart racing tale every Thursday. Don't miss stone-Cold classics like The Kitbag by Algernon Blackwood, a sinister account of a condemned murderer's final wish and the lengths he'd go to fulfill it. And the misery. A Spanish tale of a wandering musician who hears a terrifyingly beautiful song in a burned out monastery and is doomed to capture its notes until he dies.

You can find and follow haunted places, ghost stories free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget, October is our favorite month and one of our busiest. So make sure to search Sparkasse network in the Spotify search bar to see all our new shows. And now back to the story. It didn't take much to provoke Nixon's temper, especially after he chased a few pills with a martini, his reaction to most international crises usually sounded something like drop a bomb on it and call it a day.

Naturally, this got him into some trouble. Four months into his first term, in May of nineteen sixty nine, The New York Times publishes an article about some classified bomb strikes that Nixon ordered against Cambodia. Someone leaked information to the press. Nixon's constant state of irrational paranoia now feels justified. There's a rat inside the White House, so he approaches J. Edgar Hoover over at the FBI.

It is like, listen, remember those wiretaps that I had you remove? Yeah, I'ma need those back now.

Come fall. The wiretaps haven't told Nixon anything, but the White House decides to put a PR Band-Aid on the leaking faucet. That is Vietnam. They roll out American flag, SWAC pins, shirts, bumper stickers. The intended message is, if you're anti-war, you're anti American. And this works to divide the country even further. But for Nixon, seeing the American flag everywhere highlights that he's not just considered a war criminal. Emboldened by the fans that he does have, Nixon announces that he plans to send tens of thousands of U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to invade Cambodia.

Naturally, reactions are a mixed bag. Anti-war protests erupt, colleges and universities shut down. But Nixon supporters are all for it. They bond with the president at the Pentagon as he shouts, let's blow the hell out of them.

In true Nixon fashion, he gets a little carried away, forgets that he's president and calls student protesters spoiled, disrespectful bums. This immediately comes back to bite him.

Days later, the National Guard opens fire on protesters at Kent State University for students get killed the next day. Photographs of the victims appear in almost every newspaper, with quotes from grieving parents saying, my child is not a bum. Enough people march on Washington that the White House tapes their windows in anticipation of stones being thrown. Nixon snaps. But he doesn't just lose his temper. He loses his mind. On May 9th, 1970, around four a.m., after making forty seven different frantic phone calls to White House staff, Nixon puts a concerto on his record player and just stares out the window at nothing.

He then calls up his valet driver, Manolo Sanchez, and says that he wants to take a ride without telling the Secret Service, which, as you can imagine, is not standard protocol. The Secret Service doesn't know the president's leaving until they see him aimlessly wandering across the White House lawn. Of course they follow him. Manolo drives Nixon to the Lincoln Memorial. When they arrive, Nixon starts acting like Manolo's crazed tour guide with the president's impromptu tour stops when he spots a group of student protesters.

For whatever reason, Nixon decides to approach them, saying, I know most of you think I'm an soby. And yeah, they did. It's five days after the Kent State shooting, but Nixon doesn't leave it at that. He engages with them. If he's not high on drugs, he might as well be. Instead of addressing the tragedy, he asked them how old they are and what they're studying in school. Then he apparently launches into a rambling conversation about surfing and football.

One of the students told a reporter he didn't look anyone in the eyes. When people asked him to speak up, he would boom one word and no more. As far as sentence structure, there was none. The Secret Service agents that followed Nixon tried to discreetly remove him from the situation, but he wouldn't budge. Nixon reportedly ends his rant with ending. The war is not going to solve the spiritual hunger all of us have, which, of course, has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time, whatever that means.

Now, Nixon's not shocked when the press has a field day with his trip to the Lincoln Memorial, he's convinced the media is out to get him. He spends hours reading his press summaries, making notes like off with their heads next to reporters he feels are tarnishing his image. The Nixon's media adviser, Roger Ailes, points out another way that Nixon could help his public image. He's like, how about you pay some attention to your wife?

Voters like that. Now, to get a clearer picture of Tricky Dick's wildly complicated relationship with his wife, Pat, it's helpful to get a little back story.

A twenty four year old Nixon first meets Pat while they're both performing in a community theater production of The Dark Tower. Nixon takes an immediate interest in Pat, but when he asked her to go on a date with him, Pat's like, Oh, thank you.

That's flattering and all. But you're really, what's the word? Strange.

But Nixon interprets Pat's hard no as a soft maybe, and essentially stalks her for weeks. He writes her letters, shows up unannounced. He even volunteers to drive her around so she can go on dates with other men to prove he's, I don't know, helpful, I guess.

Anyway, Pat eventually gives in. She's like, you know, well, in a certain light he could pass for handsome and he is career driven and ambitious. Maybe he's not a stalker. Maybe he just knows what he wants. She even tells one of her friends that she supposes he might be president someday.

Three years later, Nixon drives Pat to the California coast, parks his Oldsmobile overlooking the Pacific Ocean and proposes kind of sweet, right? But instead of a ring, Nixon gives her an IOU. Years later, Pat basically tells her daughter that she really wasn't that into it, though in the moment she said yes.

Then on the day Nixon is supposed to meet Pat for lunch and finally give her the ring, he doesn't show up. He's apparently too busy. So he stands her up and then later sends a messenger to deliver the ring for him. Pat refuses to even put the ring on until a co-worker makes her, but she does. Pat sets aside her reservations about Gloomy Gus, his behavior, Nick. Sun sets aside Patts indifference and they get married by the time the Nixons are in the White House, Tricky Dick has broken more promises than he can drop, most of which are different iterations of I promise I'll quit politics.

He always puts his thirst for power ahead of their family, and the resentment is palpable in the White House. Nixon ignores his wife, only showing the rare sign of affection when he's in public and people are watching. They sleep in different beds. They don't share meals together. According to Nixon's personal aide, Nixon eats dinner alone four out of five nights in his hideaway in a full suit and tie. They don't even sit together when they're flying on Air Force One.

Pat sips her martinis in an entirely separate compartment. One day, Pat's sitting on the South Lawn. When a White House staffer starts talking your ear off, the guy is like, I love working here. Your husband's so great at his job. I especially love his approach to international relations, yada, yada. And now what does Pat do? Well, she stares at him like he has three heads and softly replies, Oh, dear, you haven't seen through him yet.

Then she doesn't say another word. By almost every account, Nixon was an emotionally abusive husband, but a few accounts suggest that he may have been physically abusive to. According to journalists like Seymour Hersh, Nixon kicked the hell out of Pat on a handful of occasions, he even beat her so badly that he blackened her eye and sent her to the hospital. Now, in her lifetime, Pat Nixon never came forward about any of this. And their daughter, Tricia, denies that any abuse ever happened in their home.

And maybe so. But Nixon did have a history of violence. According to some reports, Nixon slapped a journalist after she asked him a question he didn't like in the midst of a temper tantrum. He punched one of his aides in the chest right where the guy had a rib removed. Nixon even shoved his press secretary while cameras were rolling for no other reason than he'd been walking too close to him. When told that footage existed, Nixon's administration gaslighted the media by saying they'd misinterpreted what their cameras recorded.

The did he or didn't he? Debate amongst historians has never reached a conclusion. So we may never know if Nixon ever struck his wife, but we can pretty confidently say that unlike many presidents before him, he never cheated on his wife with another woman, though he may have cheated on her with another man.

Coming up, Nixon questions his desire for sweet wine and gets intimate with his best friend, Bebe Rebozo.

And now back to the story.

In 1971, as Nixon's thinking about running for a second term, a 7000 page, highly classified report on the Vietnam War leaks to the world. You might know this better by its nickname, the Pentagon Papers. Now the papers kick up some incriminating dirt, but Nixon's basically just a footnote, which probably bruises his ego. But it's also a huge relief. Plenty of information is locked away in government filing cabinets and safes that could ruin his political career.

To give you a taste, Nixon's campaign tactics included intimidation, black bag jobs, propaganda, encouraging riots, using the IRS as a political weapon and using taxpayers money to pay government spies to destroy his political enemies. He quite literally formed a committee known as the Department of Dirty Tricks. While campaigning in 1968, Nixon almost definitely plotted to make sure the bloodshed of the Vietnam War kept going because it benefited him politically. So to protect himself from future leaks, the Red Hunter starts hunting rats instead of communists.

In February 1971, in addition to the wiretaps he has, Nixon orders voice activated tape recorders to be installed all over the White House, voice activated because Butterfingers Nixon can't handle too many buttons. He also installs a few at Camp David, this cabin in the Woods style retreat for presidents located in Maryland. Now, Nixon spends a lot of time at Camp David, usually when he's stressed. In fact, during his presidency, Nixon's only ever at the White House about half the time.

The rest of the time, he's at Camp David or vacationing in Florida with a Cuban banker and businessman named Bebe Rebozo. Depending on who you ask, Bibi and Dick are the very best of friends or their lovers. The theory that Nixon's relationship with Bebe might have been sexual was first suggested by former White House correspondent Don Fulsom in his book, Nixon's Darkest Secrets. It's particularly interesting and controversial because history remembers Nixon as notoriously homophobic. Tricky Dick called gay men ill and said the acceptance of homosexuality marked the end of any civilization, he considered intellectuals too feminine and idolized hyper masculine movie stars like John Wayne.

According to biographer Evan Thomas, he surrounded himself with attractive, vigorous young men, and he was terrified of being perceived as weak or anything other than manly. This one time President Nixon's talking to broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite at a party. When Cronkite offers Nixon a drink, Nixon gives him a simple no thank you. But then Nixon starts to worry. What will people say if he doesn't have a drink in his hand? So he changes his mind. He's like, oh, you know what?

I'll have a glass of sherry. But now he starts worrying that people might get the wrong impression about his relationship to fortified wine. So like a true lunatic, he blurts out, make it a double.

But while Nixon's preoccupied with stereotypical gender roles, none of that has any bearing on whether or not he was gay, bisexual or fluid. What matters is who he was attracted to and who he loved and regardless of whether there was any physical attraction. Nixon loved Bebe Rebozo. Unlike Nixon, Bibi's charming and can stand up straight. Both men are self-made. They clawed their way from humble beginnings to make a name for themselves. Babies, a first generation American with loose connections to the Mafia.

His parents immigrated from Cuba, and he got rich in the banking industry. When Nixon travels to Florida to visit Beebee, he almost always leaves Pat behind. When she does come along, she stays in an entirely separate house, and Bebe treats his wife similarly. She once told a reporter that Nixon topped Beebe's list of favorite things with a pulse. First came Nixon, then Bibi's cat, then her. 1972 is the year that Nixon's reelected by what is at the time the biggest landslide victory in American history, but it's also the year that journalist Bonnie Angello dropped something on the ground at a restaurant and looked up to CBB and Nixon drunkenly holding hands for upwards of a minute.

A similarly intoxicated Nixon once put his arm around Beeby in a manner that witnesses interpreted to be intimate. One described the gesture as the way you cuddle your senior prom date. Sure, yes. Two straight men can both love each other and hold hands without sleeping together. These small physical displays of affection would be more negligible if Nixon showed any of this to his wife, but he didn't. By some accounts, he reserved almost all of his intimacy for Beebee.

In the end, does it matter if Nixon was gay? In short, no. It didn't make him a better or worse politician. But if Nixon spent a lifetime hiding who he was from the world, it would certainly inform our understanding of his motivations. Maybe it's not a coincidence that Nixon always felt like he was on the edge of being found out in June 1972. Tricky Dick is swimming with Bibi when he finds out that five of his employees were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Convention at the Watergate office building.

Naturally, Nixon tries to play it cool, he says to. Hmm. I wonder what they were doing there and then returns to splashing around in the sun. But thank God Nixon is in a pool because at this point he has to be sweating. He knew all about the break in. You see, after the Pentagon Papers leaked, Nixon created an unconstitutional unofficial police brigade dedicated to ending the leaks in the White House by any means necessary. He called them the plumbers and it was the plumbers that broke into the Watergate building.

Of course, word eventually spreads across the whole country. And when it does, Nixon's in the midst of the biggest political scandal in history.

At first, he denies having any connection to the break-In. He emphatically tells the American people, I am not a crook. But there's one huge problem the wiretaps and voice activated recorders. Nixon has been documenting his administration's conversations for quite some time now, and investigators want those tapes.

So Nixon's like, well, I'm not handing them over, but not because I'm guilty or I don't want you to have them, but because I'm president and I make the rules. Eventually, the legal system forces Nixon to hand over all the recordings from the White House, and they include more than thirty five hundred hours of conversation. One exchange in particular, historians have called the smoking gun. It doesn't just imply that Nixon was involved. He casually agrees to the cover up of the break-In and it was all done on his word.

Nixon's exposed for what he is a liar, a cheat and a fraud. He's more than just complicit. He's the ringleader. The irony being Nixon sort of handcuffed himself by installing these recorders in the first place. Over time, the tapes reveal a lot more. In one recording, he calls Indira Gandhi an old witch and calls Jewish politicians disloyal, devious and born spies. He discusses blackmailing former President Lyndon B. Johnson when speaking on how little he cared about the lives of the Vietnamese people.

He says, quote, These little brown people so far away, we don't know them very well, end quote. From testimony from White House staff, we've since learned that Nixon kept actual lists of enemies, he'd talk about the ones he needed to have done in or thrown out of an airplane, and he wasn't always kidding. Nixon actually plotted to assassinate an American journalist. The idea was to place the steering wheel of his car with an explosive amount of LSD.

Even knowing as much about Nixon as we do from these tapes, which is arguably more than any president that's ever been in office, there are still mysteries out there. Nixon's administration managed to erase 18 and a half minutes of the Watergate tapes before they were turned over.

To this day, we have no idea what was discussed in that time. And due to the sheer volume of the Watergate tapes, we do have many hours still haven't been transcribed. So we are still learning new damning information almost 50 years after Watergate.

In the end, on August 9th, 1974, Richard Nixon becomes the first American president to ever resign from office. And incredibly, despite the fact that Nixon fully deserves to go to jail, he doesn't. On October 17th, 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, for reasons that still baffle historians, offers Richard Nixon an official pardon.

And he lives the rest of his days a free man.

But Tricky Dick is forever haunted by a legacy he never imagined he'd have. Certainly not when he was a kid, lying awake at night, staring at a poster of Abraham Lincoln, dreaming of entering politics so that he could be of some good to the people.

Next to that Lincoln poster was a Longfellow poem that his grandmother gave him. Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing. Leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. Nixon left dirty footprints all over American history and stepped on its throat for good measure.

His hunger for power ruined his own chance at being remembered as great or even good. Maybe he summed up his own legacy best, he said. Once you get into this stream of history, you can't get out. But I'd add if you're Nixon, you drown. Thanks for listening, if you want to hear more episodes of very presidential, you can find them all for free on Spotify.

Very presidential was created by Max Cutler and Ashley Flowers in his Sparkasse Studios Original, starring Ashley Flowers, it's executive produced by Max Cutler, Sound Design by Carrie Murphy with production assistance by Ron Shapiro and Carly Madden. This episode, a very presidential, was written by Connor Sampson with writing assistance by Kate Gallagher. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all audio Chuck Originals.

If you're ready to get into the spooky spirit of the season, remember to follow haunted places ghost stories every Thursday, Alistaire Murden brings a new, surprising, chilling, spine tingling story to life. Follow haunted places, ghost stories free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.