Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, in a farmhouse his father Frank had built from a kit ^[1]. The family's lemon grove failed, and in 1922 the Nixons moved to nearby Whittier, where Frank ran a grocery store and gas station. His mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, was a devout Quaker whose restraint and piety shaped the household. Two of Richard's four brothers died young: Arthur at age seven and Harold, after a long struggle with tuberculosis, in 1933 ^[1].

Money was tight throughout his childhood, and Nixon worked in the family store before school, a routine he later cited when describing his own drive. He excelled academically, finishing near the top of his class at Whittier High School. Harvard offered a tuition scholarship, but the family could not afford the travel and living costs, so he enrolled at Whittier College, a local Quaker institution ^[2]. There he debated, acted in plays, played reserve football with more determination than talent, and graduated second in his class in 1934.

A scholarship then took him to Duke University School of Law, where he lived frugally, at one point in a rented shack without plumbing, and earned a reputation for relentless study ^[2]. He graduated third in his class in 1937, failed to land a position with a major New York firm or the FBI, and returned to Whittier to practice law with the firm of Wingert and Bewley.

The Second World War pulled Nixon out of small-town law. After a brief stint at the Office of Price Administration in Washington, he received a Navy commission in 1942 despite his Quaker background, which could have exempted him from service ^[3]. He served as a logistics officer in the South Pacific, rose to lieutenant commander, and by most accounts supplemented his income skillfully at the poker table.

In 1946 Republican leaders in California's 12th congressional district recruited him to challenge five-term Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis. Nixon won after a hard-edged campaign that linked Voorhis to left-wing labor groups ^[3]. In the House he joined the Committee on Un-American Activities, where his dogged pursuit of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of passing documents to a Soviet agent, made him a national figure when Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 ^[4].

That same year Nixon won a Senate seat by defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas in a race remembered for his insinuations about her voting record; the campaign fixed his reputation for ruthlessness and earned him the nickname Tricky Dick from opponents ^[3]. Two years later Dwight Eisenhower chose the 39-year-old senator as his running mate. When reports of a private expense fund threatened to force him off the ticket, Nixon saved his career with a televised address in September 1952, the Checkers speech, named for the family dog he vowed to keep regardless of criticism ^[4]. He served eight years as vice president, traveling widely and famously sparring with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1959 Kitchen Debate in Moscow.

Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1960 and lost one of the closest presidential elections in American history to John F. Kennedy, trailing by roughly 112,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast ^[5]. Many observers thought the first televised presidential debates hurt him; viewers who saw the pale, recently hospitalized Nixon judged the encounter differently from radio listeners. Two years later he lost the California governor's race to Pat Brown and told reporters they would not have Nixon to kick around anymore, a line widely read as a political obituary ^[5].

It was premature. Nixon moved to New York, practiced law, and spent the mid-1960s campaigning tirelessly for Republican candidates, banking favors across the party. By 1968, with the country strained by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, he presented himself as a steady, experienced hand who spoke for what he later called the silent majority. He defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey and third-party candidate George Wallace in November 1968, completing one of the most improbable comebacks in American political history ^[5].

Foreign policy defined the Nixon presidency, and it is where Richard Nixon achievements remain most durable. Working closely with national security adviser Henry Kissinger, he pursued an opening to the People's Republic of China, a country the United States had refused to recognize since 1949. His visit to Beijing in February 1972, including meetings with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, stunned the world and began the normalization of relations between the two powers ^[6]. That May he flew to Moscow and signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Leonid Brezhnev, the first agreements limiting the superpowers' nuclear arsenals ^[6].

In Vietnam, Nixon pursued Vietnamization, the gradual transfer of combat duties to South Vietnamese forces while American troops withdrew. The policy coexisted with dramatic escalations, including the secret bombing of Cambodia beginning in 1969 and the incursion into Cambodia in 1970 that ignited protests on American campuses, among them the shootings at Kent State University ^[7]. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 ended direct American combat involvement, and the military draft ended that same year.

His domestic record was more expansive than his conservative reputation suggests. Nixon signed the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, approved the Clean Air Act amendments, ended the gold convertibility of the dollar in 1971, and imposed temporary wage and price controls to fight inflation ^[7]. Federal offices oversaw the peaceful desegregation of most Southern school districts during his first term, and in 1972 he signed Title IX, barring sex discrimination in federally funded education. He won reelection that year in a landslide, carrying 49 states against George McGovern ^[6].

On June 17, 1972, police arrested five men breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. The burglars had ties to Nixon's reelection campaign, and the White House moved quickly to contain the story ^[8]. Reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, along with a federal investigation and Senate hearings televised in 1973, gradually exposed a broader pattern of political espionage, illegal fundraising, and obstruction of justice.

The decisive revelation came in July 1973, when a White House aide disclosed that Nixon had taped his own Oval Office conversations. A yearlong legal battle over those recordings ended on July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the president had to surrender them ^[8]. One tape from June 23, 1972, recorded Nixon approving a plan to have the CIA block the FBI's investigation. After the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment and Republican senators told him conviction was certain, Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of August 8, 1974, effective at noon the next day ^[8].

Gerald Ford, who had become vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in a separate corruption case in 1973, succeeded him. A month later Ford granted Nixon a full pardon for any federal crimes he might have committed in office, a decision that spared Nixon prosecution and cost Ford considerable public support ^[9]. More than 40 government and campaign officials were eventually convicted of Watergate-related offenses.

Nixon met Thelma Catherine Ryan, known as Pat, in 1938 when both were cast in a Whittier community theater production. He proposed on their first date; she accepted two years later, and they married in June 1940 ^[1]. The couple had two daughters, Tricia, born in 1946, and Julie, born in 1948. Julie later married David Eisenhower, grandson of the president Nixon had served, and both daughters remained visible defenders of their father through the Watergate years.

Colleagues described Nixon as introverted, guarded, and awkward in casual company, an unusual temperament for a politician who spent nearly three decades seeking votes. He relaxed with long solitary walks, sports on television, and the piano, which he played with genuine enthusiasm; he once performed a composition of his own on national television ^[2]. Pat Nixon, reserved but widely respected, traveled extensively as first lady and promoted volunteerism. She died of lung cancer in June 1993, ten months before her husband.

Nixon left office in disgrace but refused to disappear. After nearly dying from complications of phlebitis in late 1974, he began a long campaign of rehabilitation. His 1977 interviews with British broadcaster David Frost drew enormous audiences and produced his closest approach to an apology, an admission that he had let the American people down ^[9]. He wrote ten books, including the memoir RN in 1978 and studies of foreign affairs, and traveled repeatedly to China and Russia. By the late 1980s presidents of both parties were quietly seeking his advice on foreign policy, particularly regarding the collapsing Soviet Union.

He suffered a severe stroke at his New Jersey home on April 18, 1994, and died four days later, on April 22, at New York Hospital in Manhattan at age 81 ^[10]. His funeral in Yorba Linda, held on the grounds of his birthplace and presidential library, drew all five living presidents. President Bill Clinton, in his eulogy, urged that Nixon be judged on his entire life and career.

That judgment remains contested, which is precisely why the question of who was Richard Nixon still animates historians. Scholars credit him with redrawing the map of the Cold War through the China opening and arms control, and with a domestic record on the environment and regulation that few later Republicans matched ^[6]. Against this stand the secret bombing campaigns, the enemies list, the abuse of federal agencies, and Watergate itself, which deepened public distrust of government in ways measurable decades later. Among the more sobering Richard Nixon facts is this pairing: the same man won 49 states in 1972 and resigned the presidency 21 months later. The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, near the house where he was born, now presents both halves of that story ^[10].