Richard M. Nixon

Richard M. Nixon was the 36th vice president of the

United States from January 20, 1953, until January 20,

1961, and was the 37th president of the United States,

serving from January 20, 1969 until August 9, 1974.

He was the only person ever elected twice as vice president

and twice as president, and was the only president

to have resigned the presidency.

Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9,

1913, at Yorba Linda, California, the son of Frank

Nixon, an owner of a service station, and Hannah (née

Milhous), a strong Quaker. Richard, the second of five

children, attended Whittier College, then Duke University

Law School, graduating in 1937. He then returned

to Whittier where he practiced law, and also met Thelma

Catherine (“Pat”) Ryan when the two were cast in

the same play at a local community theater. They married

in 1940.

Moving to Washington, D.C., Nixon worked in

the Office of Price Administration and in August 1942

joined the U.S. Navy, becoming an aviation ground officer

in the Pacific and ending up as a lieutenant commander

at the end of the war. He then entered politics

and in 1946 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives

for the 12th district of California, defeating the

incumbent, Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis.

Voorhis had been elected for five consecutive terms, and

Nixon was critical of him for his liberal views. In 1948Nixon was able to win both the Democratic and the

Republican primaries, and on his return to Washington,

became a leading member of the House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAAC) until 1950. He rose to

national, if not international, attention in his investigation

of Alger Hiss.

Nixon’s cross-examination of Hiss before the

HUAC established his anticommunist credentials, and

in 1950, Nixon ran for the Senate against the Democrat

Helen Gahagan Douglas. This campaign also

included innuendoes, with “pink sheets” being distributed

comparing how Douglas voted in the Senate with

the voting record of Vito Marcantonio, a left-wing

senator from New York. This led to Nixon earning his

nickname “Tricky Dick,” coined by a small Californian

newspaper, the Independent Review, and taken

up by Douglas.

In 1952 Nixon managed to win the vice presidential

nomination on a ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Nixon was seen as an uncompromising anticommunist,

but was tainted with allegations of corruption. Journalists

discovered that Nixon had operated a slush fund

with money from Southern Californian businessmen,

and Nixon went on the attack. He listed his family’s

assets, admitting that his six-year-old daughter Tricia

had received, as a gift, a cocker spaniel called Checkers,

and he announced that the family would be keeping it.

The public responded favorably to Nixon’s frankness,

and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won 442 electoral

college votes.

Nixon had two terms as vice president and during

that time is said to have redefined the role of the office.

He became a prominent spokesman for the Eisenhower

administration, particularly on aspects of foreign policy.

Nixon chaired a number of cabinet sessions when

Eisenhower was incapacitated owing to illness, but

Eisenhower left most power with some advisers, with

Nixon always excluded from the inner circle. He also

went on a tour of Latin America in 1958, his progress

being followed by anti-American demonstrators, and to

the Soviet Union in 1959 where he met with Soviet premier

Nikita Khrushchev.

Nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential

candidate in 1960, Nixon used his experience as vice

president to try to upstage the Democrat Party’s choice

of John F. Kennedy. The campaign has become bestknown

for the first television debates between the two

candidates. Kennedy was able to portray himself as representing

a generational change in leadership, looking

younger and “fresher” than Nixon. He was certainly

able to respond to Nixon’s attacks, but although Nixonlooked terrible in some of his television appearances,

many people who listened to the debates on the radio

felt that he did better than Kennedy. The election was

close, with Nixon losing by fewer than 120,000 votes,

with queries about the voting in Illinois and Texas.

Nixon chose not to challenge the results too much, and

his dignity won him the support of many.

Retiring to private life in California, Nixon then

wrote a book, Six Crises, in which he described his role

facing six crises in his career as a congressman, senator,

and then vice president. It was influential, and Mao

Zedong was to read it in preparation for Nixon’s 1972

visit to China. Nixon contested the governorship of

California in 1962, losing to the incumbent, Democrat

Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown. He then again retired from

politics and went to New York, where he practiced law

as the senior partner in Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie

and Alexander.

He was disappointed when Barry Goldwater was

chosen as the Republican Party choice in the 1964 elections,

writing that Goldwater lost the entire campaign

when he (Goldwater) declared that “extremism in the

defense of liberty is no vice.” By contrast, Nixon built

up a reputation as a moderate and an expert in foreign

policy, which contributed to the Republican Party

choosing him as their candidate in 1968.

By 1968 Nixon had put together a coalition of supporters

that managed to ally itself with Southern conservatives

led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Nixon promised to name a Southerner to the Supreme

Court, oppose court-ordered “busing” urged by the civil

rights movement, and chose a hard-line vice-presidential

candidate who would have Southern support. His

choice was Maryland governor Spiro Agnew. Nixon

stood against a disunited Democratic Party, which was

split between supporters of Eugene McCarthy and

Robert Kennedy who opposed the Vietnam War, and

Hubert Humphrey, choice of the mainstream Democratic

Party. Robert Kennedy’s assassination had resulted in

Humphrey being chosen as the candidate after a torrid

party gathering at Chicago which led to fighting in the

streets. Nixon promised that he would get “peace with

honor” in Vietnam but was not specific about how he

was going to achieve this. It did not stop him criticizing

Vice President Humphrey, who, as part of the Lyndon

B. Johnson administration, was blamed for the increasing

casualties there, especially with the Tet Offensive

at the start of the election campaign. Nixon, however,

was more worried that the candidacy of George Wallace,

as a pro-segregationist party, might split his vote

in the South. Nixon won comfortably with 301 electoral

college seats to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46.

However, the popular vote was far closer: Nixon, 31.7

million, and Humphrey, 30.9 million.

After the election, Nixon was determined to introduce

a number of reforms. As soon as he became president,

he changed the civil rights and law enforcement

legislation. He established the Environmental Protection

Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation,

the Drug Enforcement Administration, and

the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Nixon

pushed through the space project, with Neil Armstrong

landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and speaking

to Nixon from the Moon. In January 1972 Nixon also

approved the Space Shuttle Program. He also launched,

in his State of the Union speech in January 1971, an

additional $100 million to be added to the National

Cancer Institute budget for cancer research, inaugurating

his “War on Cancer.” He had also proposed the

Family Assistance Program (FAP) to replace the Aid

to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), whichwould have provided poor families with a guaranteed

annual income. The move was defeated in the Senate,

but it did lead to the Supplemental Security Income

program and many other related programs. Overall,

Nixon’s aim was to reduce inflation by limiting government

spending, but from 1971 the government ran up

what was then the biggest deficit in U.S. history.

Nixon’s main aim was to achieve an “honorable”

settlement to the conflict in Vietnam. To achieve this,

his first major task was to increase “Vietnamization,”

by which the United States reduced the number of its

soldiers while increasing the number of South Vietnamese

soldiers. This became known as the Guam Doctrine,

or the Nixon Doctrine. With the U.S. command worried

about the state of readiness of the South Vietnamese

troops, Nixon resumed the bombing of North Vietnam,

which had been suspended by Lyndon Johnson just

before the 1968 elections. In fact, Nixon expanded the

war by organizing the secret bombing of Cambodia in

March 1969, and supporting the overthrow of Cambodia’s

ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in March 1970.

Straight after this, the Vietnamese Communists tried to

gain control of Cambodia, and soon afterwards Nixon

ordered U.S. soldiers and South Vietnamese forces to

attack Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia.

nixon and china

Nixon also started a series of initially secret negotiations

with the North Vietnamese through his National Security

Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who met with the North

Vietnamese foreign minister, Le Duc Tho. As these progressed,

Nixon began establishing links with the People’s

Republic of China. The United States lifted its

trade and travel restrictions in 1971. When the Chinese

indicated that they would favor high-level contacts, the

U.S. and Chinese table-tennis teams took part in reciprocal

visits, with Kissinger visiting China, and then Nixon

making his own visit to China in February–March

1972—the first by a U.S. president while in office. Nixon

felt that better relations with China would put pressure

on the Soviet Union. Before Nixon left China, the Shanghai

Communiqué recorded that Nixon acknowledged the

“one China” policy by which the United States accepted

that Taiwan is a part of one China. In May 1972 Nixon

visited the Soviet Union and began détente, with several

talks on limiting nuclear weapons such as the Strategic

Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).

By October 1972 Nixon was close to reaching an

agreement with the North Vietnamese, having achieved

most of his objectives just before the U.S. presidential

elections. The South Vietnamese raised objections, while

the North Vietnamese refused to compromise, knowing

how much Nixon wanted the agreement. No agreement

was reached by the elections, with the Christmas bombings

of North Vietnam forcing the North Vietnamese

back to the negotiation tables, and the final agreement

being signed in January 1973 in Paris.

All U.S. military personnel were to be withdrawn,

all prisoners of war were to be released, and there

would be a ceasefire, along with a heavy rearming of

the South Vietnamese. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were

awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, but Tho declined

to receive it.

Nixon also was involved in controversial actions

around the world. He oversaw the channeling of millions

of dollars to the Chilean opposition, and supported

the military overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile

in 1973, allying itself to the subsequent government of

General Augusto Pinochet. In the Middle East, Nixon

supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, an action

that led to the 1973 oil crisis. The administration also

supported General Yahya Khan in the Indo-Pakistan

War of 1971, seriously affecting relations between India

and the United States for many years.

In 1972 Nixon was renominated for the presidential

election along with Spiro Agnew. This led to the formation

of the Campaign for the Reelection of the President

(CRP), which was nicknamed by his opponents

CREEP. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for

being involved in a burglary at the Democratic Party

national headquarters in the Watergate Hotel complex

in Washington, D.C. It soon emerged that these men

had been hired by the CRP and were charged. With

no evidence available at the time linking Watergate to

Nixon, Nixon easily won the November 1972 elections

with 520 electoral college votes.

the cover-up

The Watergate scandal became a major issue in 1973,

with Nixon having White House counsel John Dean

organize a “cover-up.” Two journalists from the Washington

Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, felt

there was more in the Watergate story than was made

out, and started receiving information from a source

who went by the code name “Deep Throat,” who later

turned out to be Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI.

In February 1973 the Senate Select Committee on Presidential

Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam

Ervin, was established to investigate the Watergate

affair, and John Dean was interviewed in televised hearings.

He started accusing Nixon of involvement in the

cover-up of Watergate, with other witnesses testifyingabout illegal activities by Nixon and his administration,

which initiated an organized program of harassment of

other politicians, journalists, and others.

It became evident that Nixon had installed a recording

system in the Oval Office soon after he became

president, but Nixon refused to comply with a subpoena.

Nixon then ordered his attorney general to fire

Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating

Watergate.

When the attorney general, Elliot Richardson,

resigned, Nixon fired Richardson’s assistant when

he also refused to fire Cox. He then managed to get

solicitor-general Robert Bork to fire Cox. Finally in

July 1974 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that

Nixon’s claim of “executive privilege” was no excuse.

A transcript of one of Nixon’s conversations, made

available on August 5, 1974, showed that the president

had discussed the use of the Central Intelligence Agency

to block the FBI investigation of the Watergate breakin.

Three days later Nixon, faced with the prospect of

impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction

in the Senate, announced his resignation effective

at noon the following day.

Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned

his office in 1973 after facing charges of bribery,

extortion, and tax evasion. He had been replaced by

Gerald Ford, who followed Nixon as president.

On September 8, 1974, President Ford gave Nixon a

presidential pardon. In retirement, Nixon and his wife

settled at San Clemente, California, and he wrote his

memoirs. He then spent most of the rest of his life

writing about foreign policy. He was partly able to

restore some of his reputation as an elder statesman.

In 1980 he flew to Egypt, where he was present at the

funeral of the former shah of Iran, being highly critical

of the Jimmy Carter administration’s handling of

Iran. Pat Nixon died on June 22, 1993, and Richard

Nixon died from a massive stroke on April 22, 1994,

in New York City.