Nixon, Richard M.
(1913–1994), thirty-seventh president of the United States.
Born in Yorba Linda, California, to Quaker (Society of Friends) parents who had moved from the Middle West, Richard Milhous Nixon excelled at Whittier College, a Quaker school. A scholarship student at Duke Law School, he graduated third in his class in 1937. Returning to Whittier, he married Catherine (Pat) Ryan in 1940; they had two daughters. After working in the wartime Office of Price Administration, Nixon obtained a naval commission in 1942 and served in the South Pacific during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.
Running for Congress as a Republican in 1946, he defeated five-term liberal Democrat Jerry Vorhees. In 1950 he won a U.S. Senate seat from California, defeating the equally liberal Helen Gahagan Douglas. From the first, Nixon generated controversy, as he accused his opponents of communist leanings. Such tactics earned him a reputation as a ruthless political polarizer who would do anything to win. In 1948 he proposed the Mundt-Nixon bill requiring communist organizations and individuals to register with the government. On the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he effectively ended the career of Alger Hiss by accusing him of communist connections and espionage in the 1930s. Although many scholars now believe Hiss guilty of the perjury charge for which he was convicted, some liberals never forgave Nixon for bringing down Hiss and using the case to promote his own career. He did not make anticommunism a major theme after the Hiss case, however, and kept his distance from Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Tapped as Dwight D. Eisenhower's running mate in 1952, Nixon faced charges that wealthy friends had created a secret fund to further his career. In a nationwide television broadcast, Nixon successfully defended himself and salvaged his place on the ticket. The speech is best remembered for Nixon's maudlin declaration that his daughters would keep their cocker spaniel “Checkers,” a gift from a supporter.
During eight years as vice president, Nixon campaigned widely for Republican candidates. His reputation as the party's hatchet man related especially to his attacks on Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. He also, however, supported educational reform and civil rights; honed his foreign-policy skills; and campaigned for moderate as well as conservative Republicans, broadening his base of party support. His popularity rose after his car was stoned during a 1958 visit to Venezuela and his 1959 “kitchen debate” with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev at a U.S. exhibition in Moscow. Although Eisenhower excluded Nixon from his inner circle, gave him few responsibilities, and occasionally humiliated him in public, Nixon upgraded the vice presidency to a more meaningful office than it had been before. Through Eisenhower's various medical crises in 1955–1957, Nixon displayed tact and restraint, presiding over numerous cabinet and National Security Council meetings.
Nixon's party services and “centrist” image assured his presidential nomination in 1960, but his loss to John F. Kennedy created bitternesses—and taught him lessons—he never forgot. While the press described Kennedy as a “youthful” candidate representing a new generation, Nixon was in reality only four years older. Nixon's more liberal record on social and foreign-policy issues was generally ignored in the media blitz surrounding the charismatic Kennedy, as were Kennedy's womanizing and medical problems. Finally, the one-on-one TV debates with Kennedy taught Nixon that the television tactics he had honed in the 1950s were outmoded. Nixon lost by 112,000 votes—the closest presidential election since 1884. To his credit, he did not challenge the results despite evidence of election fraud in Illinois and Texas.
Returning to private life, Nixon practiced law in New York and wrote a political memoir, Six Crises (1961). His defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race prompted his much-quoted remark to reporters that they would not “have Nixon to kick around anymore.” He tirelessly campaigned for Republican candidates and played a centrist role, especially after the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater's 1964 loss to Lyndon B. Johnson.
Winning the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Nixon faced a Democratic party divided over the Vietnam War, shaken by demonstrations at its Chicago convention, and haplessly led by Hubert Humphrey after Johnson's withdrawal. Appealing to a “silent majority” of northern blue-collar workers and southern whites, Nixon campaigned as a “law and order” candidate who would quell domestic protests and end the war. He won by 500,000 popular votes, garnering 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191 and George Wallace's 46. He did well in the South, Wallace's home turf.
Publically committing himself to “government reform such as this nation has not witnessed in half a century,” Nixon focused on five areas of domestic policy: welfare, the environment, some aspects of civil rights, and executive-branch reorganization. He supported increased Social Security benefits, expansion of the Job Corps, quotas to increase minority access to skilled employment, an innovative plan to replace welfare with a guaranteed annual income for the poor, and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). On the economic front, he adopted various strategies—including, for a time, Keynesian deficit spending—to combat the inflation and budget deficits inherited from Johnson's efforts to wage the Vietnam War and fund his Great Society programs without raising taxes. Underrated at the time, Nixon's domestic record appears more impressive in retrospect. Pursuing his “southern strategy,” Nixon opposed court-ordered school busing and extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, urged a slowdown of southern school integration, and unsuccessfully nominated two southern conservatives to the Supreme Court. (He also made four successful Supreme Court appointments: Warren Burger as chief justice, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and future chief justice William Rehnquist.)
In the global arena, Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of state) Henry Kissinger pursued better relations with America's Cold War adversaries, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Nixon triumphantly visited China in February 1972, laying the groundwork for later diplomatic recognition, and that May in Moscow signed agreements with the Soviets to reduce the risk of military confrontations and to promote cooperation in science, technology, health, environmental matters, and space exploration. The two powers also signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an interim Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), and a document entitled “Basic Principles of U.S.-Soviet Relations.” This brief détente anticipated the Cold War's eventual end, but in the short run it foundered in the later 1970s and early 1980s.
A central goal of these initiatives was to improve chances for a favorable Vietnam settlement, but this effort failed. Despite Nixon's strategy of “Vietnamization” and protracted U.S. North Vietnamese negotiations, the conflict dragged on until 1975, finally ending in a North Vietnamese victory. Elsewhere, the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy involved geopolitical considerations largely unrelated to economic realities or the interests of the peoples involved. Among other instances, these priorities emerged in the United States' tilt toward Pakistan in its 1971 war with India and in the clandestine use of U.S. power to overthrow the democratically elected leftist government of Salvadore Allende in Chile. In the Middle East, Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy produced more show than substance. Overall, Nixon's foreign-policy record was mixed at best, despite his unquestioned expertise in this area.
Though hardly photogenic, Nixon employed television in innovative and widely imitated ways, including effective use of prime-time broadcasts, interviews on morning talk shows, speaking live with orbiting astronauts, and assuring satellite coverage of his foreign policy triumphs. These public-relations tactics, coupled with his domestic record and foreign-policy achievements, all but assured Nixon's reelection in 1972. By nominating the antiwar candidate George McGovern, the badly divided Democrats turned the election into a rout. Nixon amassed a plurality of almost 18 million popular votes, and won 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17.
Nixon's second term proved disastrous. In 1973 came Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation amid charges of tax evasion and accepting bribes, to be replaced by Congressman Gerald Ford. Far more serious was the Watergate crisis, involving a foiled break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on 17 June 1972 by burglars linked to the White House, and the administration's subsequent cover-up of its involvement, including payoffs to the arrested burglars. The break-in was conducted by a secret White House unit, dubbed “the Plumbers,” created in 1971 to plug leaks and to harrass persons on Nixon's “enemies list.” As the media, federal judge John Sirica, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a special Senate committee, and eventually the House Judiciary Committee conducted investigations, the pressure on Nixon built steadily in 1973–1974, especially after the release of White House tapes with incriminating Oval Office conversations. On 9 August 1974, with impeachment looming, Nixon resigned—the only president ever to do so. The Watergate scandal ultimately resulted in the conviction of twenty men, including not only those directly involved in the burglary, but also such top administration figures as Nixon advisers John Ehrlichman and H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, presidential counsel John Dean, special assistant Charles Colson, and Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon himself received a full pardon in September 1974 from President Ford. Phoenix-like, ex-president Nixon worked to rehabilitate his reputation, by publishing books on foreign policy, for example. As a younger generation arose that did not remember Watergate, the scandal's centrality somewhat faded. (It had never loomed as large abroad as it did domestically.)
Richard Nixon remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial politicians of the post–World War II era. Highly intelligent and a master of politics, he was also consumed by gnawing grievances and a preoccupation with shadowy “enemies.” Nevertheless, he ranks without question as one of the most important presidents of the twentieth century.
See also Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Foreign Relations; Keynesianism; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Republican Party; Sixties, The.
Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of a Self-Made Man, 1970.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan, 1973.
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Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, 1978.
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James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations, 1981.
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Robert S. Litwack, Détente and the Nixon Doctrine, 1984.
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Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1987.
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Herbert Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America, 1990.
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Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered, 1994.
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Stanley Kutler, Abuse of Power, 1997.
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Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon, 1999.
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