Richard Nixon

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Nixon was the only president in American history to resign from the office he held. On the 9th of August, 1974, he stepped away from the presidency under the weight of the Watergate scandal, a crisis rooted in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices that his own administration had ordered and then tried to cover up. His departure marked the end of a career that had begun in a house on a lemon ranch in Yorba Linda, California, where he was born on the 9th of January, 1913, into a poor Quaker family. Between those two moments stretched one of the most turbulent and consequential political lives in American history. Who was this man who opened China to the West, stood the United States down from the brink of nuclear confrontation during the Yom Kippur War, and yet presided over a scandal that made his name almost synonymous with political corruption? And what does his arc from a grocery store in Whittier to the White House to a forced resignation reveal about the fault lines of American political life? The answers begin not in Washington, but in Southern California.

• 2. A Quaker from Yorba Linda

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  Francis and Hannah Nixon raised five boys in a home shaped by Quaker observances: no alcohol, no dancing, no swearing. Four of those five brothers were named after British kings. Richard was named after Richard the Lionheart. The family’s lemon ranch failed in 1922, and Frank Nixon moved everyone to Whittier, where he opened a grocery store and gas station. The work was relentless. At the corner of Whittier Boulevard and Santa Gertrudes Avenue, the Nixon family attended East Whittier Friends Church and rebuilt their lives from scratch. Hardship arrived in multiple forms. Richard’s younger brother Arthur died in 1925 at the age of seven. When Richard was twelve, a spot was found on his lung; with tuberculosis in the family’s history, he was banned from sports. The spot turned out to be scar tissue from an earlier bout of pneumonia. These early years left their mark. Nixon later quoted Eisenhower in describing his childhood: “We were poor, but the glory of it was we didn’t know it.” His older brother Harold’s diagnosis of tuberculosis eventually pulled their mother away to Arizona, forcing Richard to shoulder more of the family workload and give up football entirely. He graduated from Whittier High School third in a class of 207.

• 3. The Making of a Politician

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  At Whittier College, Nixon was rejected by the only men’s literary society on campus, the Franklins, whose members largely came from prominent families. He responded by helping to found a rival organization, the Orthogonian Society. That pattern, of being shut out and then building his own door, would repeat itself throughout his career. He graduated summa cum laude in 1934, then earned a place at Duke University School of Law, which offered scholarships to top students and paid its professors salaries that drew faculty with national and international reputations. Competition for scholarships thinned sharply in the second and third years. Nixon kept his, was elected president of the Duke Bar Association, and graduated third in his class in June 1937. After law school, he applied to join the FBI. He received no response and learned only years later that he had actually been hired, but that his appointment had been canceled at the last minute because of budget cuts. He began practicing law in Whittier instead. In January 1938, he was cast in a Whittier Community Players production of The Dark Tower, where he played opposite a high school teacher named Thelma “Pat” Ryan. Nixon described the moment in his memoirs as “a case of love at first sight,” though Pat Ryan turned him down several times before agreeing to date him. They married in a small ceremony on the 21st of June, 1940, after a courtship of two years. While building his law practice, Nixon also served as president of the Citra-Frost Company, which tried to produce and sell frozen orange juice. The company went bankrupt after eighteen months. His first electoral victory came in 1946, when he defeated Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis for a California congressional seat. Nixon received 65,586 votes to Voorhis’s 49,994.

• 4. Anti-Communist and Rising Star

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  Nixon first gained national attention in August 1948, when his persistence on the House Un-American Activities Committee helped break the Alger Hiss case. Whittaker Chambers alleged that Hiss, a former State Department official, had been a Soviet spy. Many doubted Chambers; Nixon pressed the committee to continue investigating. After Hiss sued Chambers for defamation, Chambers produced supporting documents, including paper and microfilm copies that he had hidden overnight in a field. These materials became known as the “Pumpkin Papers.” Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying under oath that he had passed documents to Chambers. Nixon’s Senate campaign that same year was bitterly fought. A “Pink Sheet” distributed by the Nixon campaign suggested that his Democratic opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, held voting views similar to those of a congressman reputed to be a communist. Nixon won by almost twenty percentage points. During that campaign, his opponents first called him “Tricky Dick” for his tactics. His path to the vice presidency came from a speech he gave at a state Republican fundraiser in New York City on the 8th of May, 1952. Governor Thomas Dewey, who was in the audience and was organizing Eisenhower’s convention support from New York, was impressed enough to suggest privately that Nixon would make a suitable running mate. Eisenhower agreed. Nixon’s name sat at the top of Eisenhower’s list of seven potential candidates. The selection was nearly derailed in September 1952, when reports surfaced that Nixon had a political fund maintained by his backers. Nixon went on television on the 23rd of September, 1952, to address the nation. About 60 million Americans heard what became known as the Checkers speech, the largest audience ever for a television broadcast at that point.

• 5. The Vice Presidency and Near-Misses

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  Biographer Irwin Gellman credited Eisenhower with radically altering the role of his running mate by assigning Nixon real responsibilities in both foreign and domestic affairs, calling him “the first modern vice president.” Nixon attended Cabinet and National Security Council meetings and chaired them when Eisenhower was absent. When Eisenhower suffered a heart attack on the 24th of September, 1955, and was incapacitated for six weeks, Nixon presided over Cabinet meetings and ensured that no aide or Cabinet officer used the crisis to accumulate power. Biographer Stephen Ambrose wrote that Nixon “made no attempt to seize power” and had “earned the high praise he received for his conduct during the crisis.” Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy turned in part on the new medium of television. In the first of four televised debates, Nixon appeared pale, with a five o’clock shadow, next to the photogenic Kennedy. People listening on the radio thought Nixon had won. Those watching television did not. Kennedy won the popular vote by just 112,827 votes, a margin of 0.2 percent. Nixon refused to contest the results, fearing a prolonged controversy would harm America’s international standing. His 1962 campaign for governor of California ended in a loss to Pat Brown by more than five percentage points. The following morning, in an impromptu concession speech, Nixon told the press: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” He meant it as a final statement. Instead, it became one of the most famous premature political epitaphs in American history. In July 1959, Nixon had been sent to the Soviet Union for the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, where an impromptu exchange with Nikita Khrushchev in front of a model American kitchen became known as the Kitchen Debate, a moment that showed Nixon’s ability to hold his own in direct confrontation with the Soviet leader.

• 6. Opening China and Detente

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  A year before his election to the presidency, Nixon wrote in Foreign Affairs that there was “no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.” The breakthrough with China came through an unexpected channel. In early 1971, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong invited a team of American table tennis players to visit China and play against top Chinese players. Nixon followed up by sending National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to China for clandestine meetings. On the 15th of July, 1971, simultaneous announcements from Washington and Beijing revealed that the president would visit China the following February. Kissinger briefed Nixon for over forty hours in preparation. When Air Force One touched down, Nixon made a point of extending his hand to Premier Zhou Enlai in greeting, a deliberate gesture: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake Zhou’s hand when the two met in Geneva in 1954. Mao later told his doctor that he had been impressed by Nixon’s forthrightness. The joint communique following Nixon’s meeting with Zhou recognized Taiwan as part of China. Fearing a US-China alliance, the Soviet Union grew more receptive to détente. Nixon and Kissinger arrived in Moscow on the 22nd of May, 1972, and out of that summit came SALT I, the first comprehensive nuclear limitation pact signed by the two superpowers, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missiles. Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of “peaceful coexistence.” The strategy Nixon called “linkage” aimed to tie arms control to the resolution of problems including Vietnam, reasoning that Chinese and Soviet pressure might bring Hanoi to the table.

• 7. Domestic Record and Contradictions

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  Nixon took office in January 1969 with inflation running at 4.7 percent, its highest level since the Korean War, and with interest rates at their highest in a century. His economic instincts pushed against intervention, but by August 1971 he convened his advisers at Camp David and announced temporary wage and price controls, allowed the dollar to float freely, and ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold. The last of those decisions effectively took the United States off the gold standard and, according to economist Thomas Oatley, caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. The price controls produced unintended consequences: food shortages, meat disappearing from grocery stores, and farmers drowning chickens rather than sell them at a loss. Controls were slowly lifted and their legal authorization lapsed on the 30th of April, 1974. Nixon’s environmental record was more durable. He announced the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in June 1970, after observing the first Earth Day in April that year and concluding that environmental issues would energize voters. He signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act. He vetoed the Clean Water Act of 1972, not because he opposed its goals but because he considered the spending levels excessive. On civil rights, his presidency oversaw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South. He signed the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act on the 16th of May, 1972, after calling for increased funding for research, treatment, and education in February 1971. He also implemented the Twenty-sixth Amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, and ended the military draft in 1973 by shifting to an all-volunteer force.

• 8. Watergate and the Fall

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  Nixon was reelected in 1972 in what the source describes as one of the largest landslide victories in American history, defeating Democratic candidate George McGovern. The scandal that ended his presidency had its origins in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office that administration officials ordered. Nixon was aware of the cover-up efforts that followed. From 1973, a stream of revelations steadily eroded his support in Congress and across the country. Facing almost certain impeachment and removal from office, Nixon resigned on the 9th of August, 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, issued Nixon a pardon that became one of the most controversial acts in presidential history. Nixon spent nearly twenty years in retirement. He wrote nine books. He undertook many foreign trips, gradually rebuilding his standing into what observers recognized as the profile of an elder statesman and an authority on foreign affairs. On the 18th of April, 1994, he suffered a debilitating stroke. He died four days later, on the 22nd of April, 1994. His inaugural address had included a phrase that he chose to have placed on his gravestone: “the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.” Whether that was the title history ultimately bestowed on Nixon remained, and remains, a matter of genuine dispute.