Richard Nixon (1913–1994) — Biography & Facts

Richard Nixon: The Peacemaker Who Bugged Himself

In February 1972, on an airfield outside Peking, Richard Nixon came down the steps of Air Force One and put out his hand to Zhou Enlai. John Foster Dulles had refused that same hand in 1954. The gesture was choreographed to the second, and it ended twenty-five years in which the United States and the world's most populous country had not spoken. Two and a half years later Nixon became the only American president to resign. Both facts are his, and neither cancels the other.

Yorba Linda

He was born on 9 January 1913 in Yorba Linda, California, to Francis Nixon and Hannah Milhous Nixon, a Quaker family with no money. "We were poor," he said later, "but the glory of it was we didn't know it." He graduated summa cum laude from Whittier College in 1934 with a degree in history, then took a law degree at Duke in 1937, finishing third in his class. Commissioned into the Naval Reserve in June 1942, he served in the South Pacific with Marine Aircraft Group 25, was commended for meritorious service, and left active duty as a lieutenant commander in March 1946. He was thirty-three, ambitious, and entirely without the connections that made careers.

The Hiss Case

He won a House seat in 1946 by beating the Democrat Jerry Voorhis, then made himself nationally famous in August 1948 by pressing the case against Alger Hiss when more senior figures wanted it dropped. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. It was a genuine feat of investigative persistence and it taught Nixon a lesson he never unlearned: that the establishment would concede nothing to him and that he could beat it anyway. In 1950 he took a Senate seat from Helen Gahagan Douglas in a campaign built around the "Pink Sheet," a flyer setting out her voting record beside a communist congressman's. He won. He also acquired a reputation for viciousness that trailed him for a quarter of a century.

Checkers

Eisenhower picked him for the ticket in 1952 and then nearly dropped him over a political fund. On 23 September 1952 Nixon went on television, laid out his personal finances in humiliating detail before sixty million people, and refused to give back one gift: a cocker spaniel his daughter had named Checkers. It worked. He stayed on the ticket and served eight years as vice president with more responsibility than the office had carried before, including the impromptu "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev in July 1959.

The Wilderness

He lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy by 112,827 votes — two tenths of one per cent — and, despite fraud allegations in Texas and Illinois, declined to contest it. He lost the California governorship to Pat Brown in 1962 and told reporters, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because this is my last press conference." It was not. In 1968 he beat Hubert Humphrey 301 electoral votes to 191, the first non-incumbent vice president ever elected president. His inaugural named the ambition plainly: "The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker."

Vietnamization

He inherited a war killing about three hundred Americans a week. His answer was Vietnamization — handing the fighting to South Vietnamese forces while American troops withdrew — combined with escalation his own public had not been told about. Operation Menu, the secret B-52 carpet bombing of Cambodia, began in March 1969 without Cambodian consent. When he announced a ground invasion of Cambodia on 30 April 1970, the campuses erupted; Ohio National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State. He ended conscription by 1973, creating the all-volunteer military. The Paris Peace Accords of early 1973 bought a ceasefire and an American exit while leaving 160,000 North Vietnamese regulars inside South Vietnam.

China, Moscow, and the Rest of the World

The China opening was Nixon's own idea, set out in print before he held power: there was, he wrote in *Foreign Affairs*, "no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation." He built it in secret through Henry Kissinger, took the opening offered by ping-pong diplomacy in 1971, prepared with more than forty hours of briefings, and signed a joint communiqué acknowledging Taiwan as part of China. The Nixon Library records his private rationale: restoring communication to reduce the "suspicion and miscalculation, which could lead to war." Full diplomatic relations followed in 1979.

Moscow noticed. At the summit of 22 May 1972 he and Leonid Brezhnev signed SALT I, the first comprehensive superpower arms limitation agreement, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. At home the record is stranger than his reputation allows: he created the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA, signed the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, lowered the voting age to eighteen, took the dollar off gold in 1971, imposed wage and price controls, launched the War on Cancer and the War on Drugs, and presided over Apollo 11. Elsewhere he ran a covert campaign against Salvador Allende in Chile, and airlifted arms to Israel in 1973.

Watergate

He crushed George McGovern in 1972 in one of the largest landslides in American history, and then destroyed himself over a burglary at an office he had no need to burgle. The break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters was arranged by his own officials; the cover-up, which he knew about, unravelled through 1973 as the taping system he had installed in his own offices produced the evidence against him. On 9 August 1974, facing certain impeachment and removal, he resigned. Gerald Ford then issued a pardon that has stayed controversial ever since.

Why Richard Is Called a Genius

Nixon is the rare modern president whose claim rests on analytical intelligence rather than charm, and the evidence is unusually clean. He wrote the China policy down before he had any power to enact it, identified precisely why isolation was dangerous — miscalculation, not ideology — and then executed it against the instincts of his own party, which had spent twenty years treating recognition of Peking as treason. The same conceptual habit produced linkage, the idea of tying arms control to conduct elsewhere, and the triangular diplomacy that made Moscow bid for détente once Peking was in play. He was, by training and temperament, a strategist: he thought in systems and long horizons, and he did his own homework.

The counter-case is that the same mind was his executioner. The persistence that broke Hiss curdled into a conviction that enemies were everywhere and that any method was licensed against them — the Pink Sheet, the secret bombing of a neutral country, the covert war on Allende, and finally a conspiracy of concealment over an election he was going to win in a landslide. No opponent brought Nixon down. He was convicted on recordings he chose to make, in a system he installed, of conversations nobody forced him to have. Whatever intelligence means, it did not include the capacity to see himself.

Legacy

He spent twenty years after the resignation writing nine books, travelling, and slowly recasting himself as an elder statesman on foreign affairs — the longest and most deliberate rehabilitation in American political life. He suffered a stroke on 18 April 1994 and died four days later. What survives him is a strange, uneven inheritance: an environmental state built by a Republican, an arms control architecture that outlived the Soviet Union, a relationship with China that reshaped the century, and a word — Watergate — that every subsequent American scandal has been forced to borrow.