Nixon, Richard M(ilhous) (1913–1994)
37th president of the USA 1969–74, a Republican. He attracted attention as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, and was vice-president to Eisenhower 1953–61. As president he was responsible for US withdrawal from Vietnam, and the normalization of relations with communist China, but at home his culpability in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal and the existence of a ‘slush fund’ for political machinations during his re-election campaign of 1972 led him to resign in 1974 when threatened with impeachment.
Political career
Nixon, a Californian, entered Congress in 1947, and rose to prominence during the McCarthyite era of the 1950s. As a member of the Un-American Activities Committee, he pressed for the investigation of Alger
Hiss, accused of being a spy. Nixon was senator for California from 1951 until elected vice-president. He played a more extensive role in government than previous vice-presidents, in part because of the poor health of President Dwight D Eisenhower. He narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election to J F Kennedy, partly because televised electoral debates put him at a disadvantage.
Presidency
He did not seek presidential nomination in 1964, but in a ‘law and order’ campaign defeated vice-president Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Facing a Democratic Congress, Nixon sought to extricate the USA from the war in Vietnam. He formulated the
Nixon Doctrine in 1969, abandoning close involvement with Asian countries, but escalated the war in Cambodia by massive bombing, although the USA was not officially at war with neutral Cambodia.
Resignation
Nixon was re-elected in 1972 in a landslide victory over George McGovern, and immediately faced allegations of irregularities and illegalities conducted on his behalf in his re-election campaign and within the White House. Despite his success in extricating the USA from Vietnam, congressional and judicial investigations, along with press exposures of the Watergate affair, undermined public support. He resigned in 1974, the first and only US president to do so, under threat of impeachment on three counts: obstruction of the administration of justice in the investigation of Watergate; violation of constitutional rights of citizens – for example, attempting to use the Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Central Intelligence Agency as weapons against political opponents; and failure to produce ‘papers and things’ as ordered by the Judiciary Committee.
He was granted a pardon in 1974 by President Ford and turned to lecturing and writing.
Background Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, of a lower-middle-class Quaker family that had migrated from the Midwest; he grew up in Whittier, California, and studied at Whittier College and Duke University Law School. He practised law 1937–42, then served in the navy 1942–46, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. |
Character Nixon's career was characterized by both ruthless ambition and an insecurity stemming from his feeling of social inferiority. He tasted bitter defeat in the 1960 US presidential and 1962 California governorship elections, but fought back, adopting a less rigid public image, dubbed the ‘New Nixon’. Bridging the new-right ‘Main Street’ and liberal ‘Wall Street’ wings of Republican philosophy, as president he pursued a course of cautious conservatism. Stymied at home by a hostile, Democrat-controlled Congress, Nixon turned to the diplomatic arena, achieving rapprochement with Maoist China and negotiating a nuclear-arms limitation treaty (see Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) with the USSR. |
| These achievements will for ever be overshadowed by Watergate – the bungling, Republican-sponsored break-in of the Democrats' headquarters 1972 and the sleazy cover-up that followed. The action, though unnecessary, was symptomatic of increasing paranoia in an inward-looking administration. Unlike his closest aides, Nixon – the only president ever to resign his office – escaped imprisonment, being pardoned by President Ford. By the 1980s he had established himself in some quarters as an elder statesman. |
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