Nixon, Richard Milhous

I

Introduction

Nixon, Richard Milhous (1913-1994), 37th president of the United States (1969-1974), and the only one to have resigned from office.

Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, on January 9, 1913. His parents were poor, and his early life was one of hard work and study. He was a gifted student, graduating in 1934 as second in his class at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and third in his class at Duke University Law School in 1937. Unable to find a position with a Wall Street (New York) law firm after his graduation, Nixon returned to Whittier to practise. There he met Thelma Catherine (Pat) Ryan, whom he married in 1940. Nixon enlisted in the United States Navy in 1942 and served as a supply officer in the South Pacific during World War II. He left the service as a lieutenant commander.

Back in Whittier in 1946, Nixon was persuaded by a group of southern California Republicans to challenge Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis. Nixon campaigned vigorously, branding the liberal Voorhis as a dangerous left-winger, and won by 16,000 votes. In 1948 and 1949 Nixon achieved a national reputation in the United States House of Representatives as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its investigation of what became known as the Hiss Case. In 1950 Nixon ran for the United States Senate against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he labelled the “Pink Lady” for what he alleged to be her pro-Communist sympathies. He won the election, but his campaign tactics, opportunistically exploiting the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, were widely criticized.

II

Vice-President

In 1952 the Republicans nominated Nixon to be the running mate of presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. When it was disclosed that as a senator Nixon had accepted an $18,000 fund for “political expenses” from California businessmen, he was nearly dropped from the Republican ticket. Nixon's televised self-defence, called the “Checkers” speech because of a sentimental reference to his dog Checkers, saved his political life. As Vice-President, Nixon emerged as a vigorous Republican spokesman during the Eisenhower years, campaigning in a style that contrasted with Eisenhower's non-partisan aloofness. In non-election years, Nixon toured the country trying to bolster Republican party finances and spirit. He also developed foreign affairs credentials by visiting numerous other countries, including the Soviet Union, where an impromptu “kitchen debate” with Nikita S. Khrushchev made worldwide headlines in July 1959. His instinctive hostility to Fidel Castro in their meeting that same year, however, has been seen by many as instrumental in driving Castro into alliance with the Soviet Union. As undisputed party leader at the end of Eisenhower's second term, Nixon easily won the presidential nomination in 1960. Against the articulate, wealthy, and politically well-connected John F. Kennedy, however, the Nixon edge in experience and prominence melted away. Kennedy won with a narrow popular-vote margin of 113,000 votes out of 68.8 million cast.

Returning to California, Nixon sought to revitalize his political career by challenging Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in the 1962 gubernatorial race. Defeated, Nixon angrily announced his withdrawal from active politics. He moved to New York and began a lucrative law practice. He continued, however, to speak out on foreign policy issues, address Republican fund rallies, and maintain his strong influence in the party. By 1968 he was poised again to try for the presidency, this time as a more seasoned and temperate “new Nixon”. With Spiro T. Agnew as the vice-presidential candidate, the Republican campaign made skilful use of television, benefited from national dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam, and profited from factional divisions in the Democratic camp. Nixon defeated Hubert H. Humphrey with a popular-vote majority of about 500,000 votes.

III

President

At the pinnacle in 1969, President Nixon organized the White House to protect his energy and time. He left routine matters and most administrative affairs to such powerful aides as H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson. This allowed him time for what had become his absorbing interest: international affairs. With Henry A. Kissinger as his most trusted foreign policy adviser, Nixon redefined the American role in the world, suggesting limits to US resources and commitments. “After a period of confrontation”, he declared in his inaugural address, “we are entering an era of negotiation”. He ordered a gradual withdrawal of the 500,000 US troops in South Vietnam. The withdrawal took four years, however, during which the Vietnam War raged and US casualties mounted. Nixon authorized a US incursion into Cambodia in 1970 and the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong harbour in 1972. These actions were unpopular, but he credited them with helping to bring about a negotiated settlement by which all US forces were withdrawn and all known US prisoners of war released before the end of March 1973.

Nixon's greatest innovation was his approach to the People's Republic of China. Sensing that the time was right to make an overture to China, Nixon sent Kissinger to confer secretly with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in July 1971. Nixon's own 1972 summit meeting in China was a diplomatic triumph that left the president's critics, accustomed to his fervent anti-Communism, astonished and off-balance. Within a few weeks, Nixon was in Moscow to negotiate the first step in a strategic arms limitation agreement, ushering in the era of détente—a search for accommodation between the two superpowers and an effort to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

Other parts of the world were not neglected. In the strategically vital Middle East, Nixon established links with Egypt while maintaining the US commitment to Israel. After the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the United States replaced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as the dominant influence in Egypt.

At home, Nixon adopted the New Federalism, a programme designed to end what he said was the Democratic habit of “throwing money at problems”. Congress passed part of the plan—revenue sharing with states and cities—and appropriated some $30 billion for local needs. While espousing the fiscal conservatism traditional to his party, Nixon held to no set economic course. After first advocating a balanced budget, he turned to deficit financing. Having decided against wage and price controls to battle rising inflation rates, he reversed himself dramatically in August 1971. He imposed controls, with limited success, in four phases extending into 1974. Nixon's economic policies were bold but inconsistent, and, partly because of rapidly rising energy costs, he was unable to avert a recession in 1974.

On racial matters, Nixon generally adopted a passive stance towards efforts by American blacks to achieve educational, economic, and social equality. He personally opposed bussing (the daily transport of children to sometimes distant schools in an effort to achieve a racial mix in each school) but insisted that the law be upheld in cases where the courts required it.

The Nixon response to rising urban crime rates included demands for stricter law enforcement and less “coddling” of criminals and radical activists. The leading voice for this politically popular theme of “law and order” was Attorney-General John N. Mitchell, the president's former law partner and campaign manager. Nixon's four Supreme Court appointees, men whom he called “strict constructionists”, brought a more conservative cast to the Court. They were Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, Jr., and William Rehnquist.

IV

Watergate and Resignation

Standing for re-election in 1972, Nixon was fresh from the Beijing and Moscow triumphs and enjoying the peak of his popularity. He defeated the Democratic senator George S. McGovern by one of the largest majorities in US history. Only one small cloud appeared on the horizon. The attempted burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office complex had been traced to men hired by some of the president's closest advisers. Newspaper reporters took the slender thread found at the Watergate burglary and followed it to the White House. Through determined investigative reporting, a larger picture of political corruption was uncovered. Illegal campaign contributions, political “dirty tricks”, and irregularities in Nixon's income taxes were unearthed as the story grew during 1973. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., revealed that extensive tape recordings existed of conversations held in Nixon's office. The various investigations, including that by Archibald Cox, who was appointed special prosecutor for the case in May 1973, began to focus on the release to the courts of these vital tapes.

Public trust in Nixon's leadership plummeted after he had Cox dismissed in October 1973. To compound the president's problems, Vice-President Agnew, facing bribery charges, resigned in the same month. In his choice of a replacement, Nixon settled on a popular US congressman certain of quick confirmation: Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, who was sworn in on December 6, 1973.

A federal grand jury named the president in March 1974 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a conspiracy to obstruct justice in the Watergate investigation. Attorney Leon Jaworski, who replaced Cox as special Watergate prosecutor, continued to press for the White House tapes, while the House Judiciary Committee began to investigate the case for impeachment.

Nixon tried to re-establish his authority with trips to the Middle East and the USSR in the summer of 1974. But the Watergate net closed around him tighter upon his return. On July 24, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the president had to turn over the last tapes. One of these, recording his order to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to halt its investigation of the Watergate break-in, was conclusive evidence—the “smoking gun”—of Nixon's primary role in a cover-up. The Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment to the full House of Representatives. On the evening of August 8, Nixon went on nationwide television to announce his decision, unprecedented in US history, to resign. At noon on August 9, Gerald Ford took the oath of office as Nixon was being flown to retirement in California.

Pardoned by his successor “for all offences against the United States which he ... committed or may have committed” in office, Nixon kept a low profile in retirement, but presented his memoirs and foreign policy insights in TV interviews and in print. He died of a stroke on April 22, 1994, and was buried next to his wife on the grounds of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California.