NIXON, Richard Milhous

(b. 9 January 1913 in Yorba Linda, California; d. 22 April 1994 in New York City), thirty-seventh president of the United States, who enjoyed success during his first term, particularly in foreign affairs, but was forced to resign in 1974 because of his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

Nixon was born in the small town of Yorba Linda in Orange County, California, in 1913, the second of the five sons of Francis Anthony (Frank) Nixon, a farmer and grocery store owner, and Hannah Milhous Nixon, a homemaker whose Quaker religion the family adopted.

Nixon grew up in a small, Sears kit house without electricity or running water. His father experienced failure in several businesses until he settled down in nearby East Whittier as proprietor of a service station and grocery store. Nixon began working at an early age both inside and outside the home to help support the family. Nonetheless, he was able to find time for his studies, earning valedictorian status in eighth grade and finishing third in his high school class, second at Whittier College (1930–1934), and third at Duke University Law School (1934–1937), which he attended on scholarship. He was also a successful school politician, widely admired for his leadership abilities, prize winning debate skills, and photographic memory. Paradoxically, he was a shy and bookish fellow who had difficulty forging intimate relationships.

After failing to secure a position in New York City with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1937, Nixon returned to Whittier to work in the law firm Wingert and Bewley, where he was made a partner within a year, and began to dabble in Republican politics. In 1938, while acting in a community theater production, he met Patricia Ryan, a schoolteacher; for him it was love at first sight. Born Thelma Catherine Ryan in a miner's shack in Ely, Nevada, in 1912, Pat was a graduate of the University of Southern California who had worked in New York City and as an extra in Hollywood films. After being pursued by a dogged Nixon for two years, she married him in 1940. They had two children—Tricia, who was born in 1946, and Julie, born in 1948. Although Pat worked loyally and quite effectively in campaigns and later as first lady, she was never happy with the rough-and-tumble of politics and the glare of publicity that fell on her private life. On several occasions her husband promised her he would take up a new profession.

After serving in the Office of Price Administration for several months in 1942, where he developed a strong distaste for government bureaucracy, Nixon enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he was commissioned as a lieutenant and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. During World War II he served in the Pacific theater in Bougainville and Green Island. Even though he did not see combat, he took on the sobriquet the "Fighting Quaker" when he ran for Congress in 1946. He answered the call from Republicans in his old Twelfth Congressional District in Orange County for a candidate to challenge the veteran Democratic representative, Horace Jeremiah ("Jerry") Voorhis. Nixon ran in support of "practical liberalism" as an "antidote to … New Deal idealism." In a very controversial campaign full of dirty tricks and mudslinging that blemished Nixon's reputation forever, he defeated Voorhis by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin. His defenders contended that Voorhis gave as good as he got and that, in any event, Nixon's tactics were not that unusual in the blood sport of California politics.

As a first-term congressman Nixon served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), where he was a voice of relative moderation, and the House Education and Labor Committee, where he was one of the architects of the Taft-Hartley Act. More important was his fact-finding mission to war-torn Europe in 1947, during which he developed a lifelong interest in foreign affairs and a belief in internationalism that stood in sharp contrast to the isolationism and unilateralism of many of his Republican colleagues. The energetic young congressman became famous in 1948 through his sensational work on HUAC investigating Alger Hiss, a former State Department official who was charged with espionage for the Soviet Union. Hiss was ultimately found guilty of perjury and sentenced to a five-year prison term. For many years the case was a cause célèbre among liberals and radicals who, it now appears erroneously, accused Nixon and the FBI of railroading an innocent Hiss.

Unopposed for reelection to the House in 1948, Nixon ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1950 in another famously scurrilous campaign during which opponents began calling him "Tricky Dick," a nickname that dogged him throughout his career. As in 1946, both sides played rough, but many Americans later remembered Nixon's celebrated attack on the liberal Douglas as a "Pink Lady" who was implicitly close to being a full-blown "Red" or Communist. Nixon won by almost 700,000 votes, the largest plurality of any senatorial candidate in 1950. The second youngest senator at the time, he generally supported President Harry Truman's foreign policy of containment, especially in Europe, while opposing Fair Deal domestic politics and assailing corruption in the executive branch. In 1952, because of his popularity among Republicans, his perceived conservatism and fervent anticommunism, his youth, and his western background, Nixon emerged as the ideal vice-presidential candidate to serve as a counterpoint to the older, more moderate, and eastern-oriented party standard-bearer, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the 1952 campaign Nixon took the partisan low road while Eisenhower stayed above the fray. Nixon labeled the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, "Adlai the appeaser … who got a Ph.D. degree from [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson's College of Cowardly Containment." During the campaign he became involved in a potentially career-ending scandal when journalists discovered that he had a private "slush fund" from wealthy backers to help support his campaigning. With many Republican leaders calling for his resignation from the ticket and with Eisenhower wavering, Nixon took the unusual tack of going on live television to defend himself in what came to be called the "Checkers Speech" because of his reference to the little dog his daughters received as a gift that he refused to return to his benefactors. Although highbrow critics lambasted the performance as maudlin and mawkish, most of the public loved it, especially the Republicans, who convinced Eisenhower to retain Nixon on the ticket. They took 55 percent of the popular vote in 1952 and swept the electoral college by a 442 to 89 margin.

Nixon was an unusually active vice president, especially helpful to Eisenhower as a liaison between the White House and the Republicans in Congress. During Eisenhower's three major illnesses, a heart attack in 1955, ileitis in 1956, and a stroke in 1957, Nixon handled his potentially awkward position diplomatically. In 1958 he and the president worked out formal procedures for future presidential disabilities that looked to some degree like the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1967.

Yet despite Nixon's generally exemplary performance, Eisenhower contemplated dropping him from the ticket in 1956 because his fierce partisanship and rough political style made him a lightning rod for attacks by Democrats, and also because the president believed that he needed a running mate with more experience in government. Nor was Eisenhower especially impressed with his vice president's leadership abilities or his personal maturity. But Nixon remained on the ticket in 1956, and he and Eisenhower beat Stevenson again with an impressive 57 percent of the vote and swept the electoral college by a 457 to 73 margin. During the second term Nixon made headlines with his activities in the international arena, bravely confronting violent demonstrators in Latin America in May 1958, standing in for the president in April 1959 in a meeting with the new Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, and trading rhetorical jabs in a much-publicized "kitchen debate" with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in July 1959.

Although the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, Nixon faced stiff competition from the moderate branch of the party led by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and from the fast-growing conservative branch led by Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. He won the nomination on the first ballot at the Chicago convention in July after earlier making a deal with Rockefeller called "the Compact of Fifth Avenue," in which he moved toward the moderates' positions on many issues. His selection of a running mate, former Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was ill-advised, as Lodge turned out to be a weak and indifferent campaigner. Eisenhower was not entirely happy with Nixon's campaign, in which the vice president suggested that he would do things differently from his mentor when he reached the White House. For his part Nixon confronted a recession that he thought might have been eased had Eisenhower adopted different economic strategies. In addition, he was not helped when the president, who was asked in August to name one policy that his vice president initiated, responded flippantly, "If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don't remember."

Nixon's opponent, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, was a charismatic candidate burdened by his Catholic faith and his relatively undistinguished résumé based upon his role as a backbencher in the House, which he entered the same year as Nixon, and the Senate, to which he was elected in 1952. Nixon unwittingly helped Kennedy establish his gravitas by agreeing to an unprecedented series of four televised debates during which the intelligent and media-savvy Democrat demonstrated that he could hold his own with the more experienced, though far less photogenic, vice president. On the eve of the election Kennedy picked up the support of many Republican African Americans after he intervened publicly to try to protect Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been arrested during a civil rights demonstration. He needed all the votes he could get, since he won the popular vote by the slimmest of margins, 49.7 to 49.5 percent, and the electoral vote by 303 to 219. The Republicans cried foul, contending that there had been widespread ballot-box stuffing in two close states, Texas and, especially, Illinois, which had been expected to go for Nixon. For a while Nixon considered demanding a recount, but he feared that such an action would "tear the country apart."

Accepting defeat, Nixon returned to California to work in a Los Angeles law firm and to write his memoirs, Six Crises (the Hiss investigation, the "Checkers" speech, Eisenhower's heart attack, the Latin American trip, the Khrushchev debate, and the presidential election), which became a best-seller in 1962. California Republicans drafted him to run for governor that year against incumbent Democrat Edmund "Pat" Brown. After he lost the election by almost 300,000 votes, his political career appeared to be over. On the morning after his defeat, a bleary-eyed Nixon offered bitter comments to the press, most famously, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."

Soon after, he left California for New York City to work in the law firm Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd. Although he had been hired primarily as a "rainmaker" to bring in influential clients, he did a highly professional job in a losing cause arguing an important case, Time, Inc. v. Hill, before the Supreme Court in 1966. By 1964 Nixon returned to national politics as a Republican leader, waiting in the wings for the presidential nomination in case the candidacy of Barry Goldwater faltered. But Goldwater received the nomination, much to the dismay of the eastern Republican establishment. Unlike many Republicans who were appalled by what they perceived to be Goldwater's extremism, Nixon worked loyally in a losing cause and thus secured his support among leaders of the conservative wing of his party. Given President Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over the Arizona senator, Nixon, a centrist, found himself in a strong position for the next round of presidential politics.

Preparing for the contest for the 1968 nomination, Nixon began building a political staff, hiring the journalist Pat Buchanan in 1965 and touring the country on the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking to some six hundred groups of the party faithful in forty states over a two-year period. In addition, he made several well-publicized international trips and wrote articles about foreign affairs that burnished his image as a statesman. Although few recognized it at the time, Nixon was something of a closet intellectual who read widely and thought deeply about history and diplomacy. After the front-running Republican candidate for president, Michigan governor George Romney, self-destructed in 1967, Nixon assumed his position, opposed by supporters of Rockefeller and the new conservative leader, California governor Ronald Reagan. He beat back their challenge on the first ballot at the Miami Beach convention in August, owing in good measure to his promise to southern conservatives to slow the pace of desegregation in their region.

He also appealed to southerners with his vice-presidential candidate, Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland, a one time Rockefeller Republican who moved to the right after a celebrated conflict with African-American leaders in his state. He was Nixon's Nixon in the campaign, offering tough partisan speeches dominated by a call for "law and order." The Republicans (and third-party candidate George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama) were responding to the unprecedented wave of urban rebellions in U.S. cities since 1965, the increasingly obstreperous antiwar protestors, the countercultural movement that advocated sexual liberation and the legalization of marijuana, and the general assault against middle-class values promoted by hippies, the New Left, and liberal intellectuals. For many Americans these forces represented all that was wrong with their country during the turbulent 1960s.

That turbulence was underscored by the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago in August, where the police and Mayor Richard J. Daley confronted ten thousand protestors in the streets and hundreds of delegates inside the convention hall who opposed the nomination of Johnson's handpicked candidate, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. All of the primaries had been won by antiwar senators Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota and Robert F. Kennedy from Massachusetts, but most states did not have primaries in 1968, and, in any event, the stronger of the two candidates, Kennedy, had been assassinated in Los Angeles in June. The violence in Chicago, which a government panel later labeled a "police riot," weakened the Democratic Party considerably.

Eschewing debates with Humphrey as well as press conferences, Nixon's campaign manager, John Mitchell, ran one of the most carefully managed campaigns in history, relying especially on tightly controlled, televised town meetings that looked more spontaneous than they really were. Both Humphrey and Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, but both were vague about their policies. Although he never said it directly, Nixon implied that he had a secret plan to end the war. Such a plan did not exist. Moreover, Nixon claimed that it would be unseemly for him to discuss the specifics of the phantom plan while Johnson was trying to arrange peace talks with the Vietnamese Communists. Nixon led during the entire campaign with Humphrey closing the gap as the election neared, in part because many blue-collar northerners returned to the Democrats after flirting with the idea of voting for the populism and racism of George Wallace, who promised to be even tougher on protestors and rioters than Nixon had been.

Fearing the election of their old foe, Nixon, the Russians pushed the North Vietnamese to accept Johnson's terms for opening peace talks. One week before the election an agreement was reached, the announcement of which led many voters to make a last-minute move toward Humphrey. However, the trend was reversed on the weekend before the election when the South Vietnamese government publicly quashed the deal. In activities that came close to treason, a Republican operative had urged the South Vietnamese, who did not need much urging, to reject the deal, promising a better arrangement when Nixon became president. The Johnson administration knew about this violation of the Logan Act since it had been wiretapping the operative, Anna Chennault, as well as South Vietnam's embassy in Washington and government offices in Saigon itself. Because the president did not want to reveal the wiretapping, and also because he lacked a specific smoking gun linking Chennault to the Nixon campaign, he and Humphrey chose not to reveal the illegal Republican meddling in official U.S. diplomacy. Nixon won the popular vote with 43.4 percent to Humphrey's 42.7 percent and Wallace's 13.5 percent, and the electoral vote of 301 to 191 to 46. Several weeks after being elected, Nixon quietly urged Saigon to accept the deal that Johnson had crafted in his "October Surprise."

Nixon promised in his campaign to "Bring Us Together," no mean feat for any president in 1969, let alone the intensely partisan Nixon. He had won in good measure through the politics of polarization, an approach that continued throughout his administration. Nixon's cabinet was made up of white males, at least seven of whom were millionaires, albeit self-made men. But in this administration the cabinet was far less important than at any other time in American history, with Nixon operating his foreign and domestic policy through his White House staff. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, and domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, along with their aides, played key policy-making roles in all aspects of the administration, and in Kissinger's case, executed policy as well. Nixon chose this course because in the foreign-policy field he felt that he could not trust the State Department to keep a secret. As for the domestic arena, he correctly concluded that the permanent bureaucracies in the departments were dominated by Democrats and liberals who would oppose his attempts to dismantle parts of the welfare state, and especially the Great Society reforms of Johnson. Among the most suspicious, secretive, and even paranoid of all presidents, Nixon, the quintessential micromanager, tried to centralize all government activities in the White House, where he could control access to information about his strategies and initiatives.

Nixon was far less interested in domestic politics than he was in foreign policy, where he knew he had more freedom from Congress to operate. He was able to control access to his foreign policies through Kissinger's National Security Council (NSC) so thoroughly that an agent for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the White House had to steal thousands of documents to keep the admirals and generals informed about what the president was up to in the international arena. Nixon wanted to demonstrate to his "enemies" that he could operate a secret diplomacy just as they did and that he would not be pushed around by antiwar mobs in the streets, Congress, and his special enemy, the media.

His first order of business was to end the Vietnam War. To accomplish "peace with honor," he adopted Vietnamization, the slow but steady withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, to relieve the antiwar and antidraft pressure at home. At the same time, under loopholes in the agreement Johnson made with the Communists, he increased the bombing of North Vietnam and secretly began bombing areas in neutral Cambodia used by Hanoi to send supplies and cadres south. When a journalist ran a story about the covert bombing, Nixon ordered illegal wiretapping to find the person responsible for leaking the information, the first of many such surveillance operations that became part of the bill of particulars of impeachment against the president five years later.

Despite a 1 November 1969 ultimatum to Hanoi and the increased bombing, the Communists clung to their bargaining position. They forced the United States to make concessions because of the timetable for the inevitable withdrawal of all U.S. troops and because of the power of the antiwar movement. The movement's clout was demonstrated on 15 October 1969, when more than two million people turned out for the Moratorium in two hundred U.S. cities to express their opposition to the slow pace of withdrawal from Vietnam. During the Moratorium, the movement's most successful demonstration, the participants—most of whom were middle-class adults—took time off from work or college to attend rallies and prayer sessions and to picket and distribute leaflets.

Nixon's attempt to weaken the Communists with incursions into Cambodia in May 1970 and Laos in February 1971 were failures. The Cambodian invasion created the greatest violence and instability in history on American campuses, including the killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in May 1970 and strong opposition in the Democratic-controlled Congress. Ultimately, Nixon had to agree to permit North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam after American troops left to move negotiations along before the 1972 election. When in October 1972 the Communists backed off on their demand that South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu had to resign before they would agree to a ceasefire, a provisional agreement was signed. But that came undone when the South Vietnamese rejected the deal, an action that Nixon attributed to North Vietnamese obstructionism—obstructionism that led to the B-52 "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi and Haiphong to bring the Communists back to the peace table. The Americans and the Vietnamese Communists finally signed a treaty on 27 January 1973, which closely resembled the treaty originally initialed the previous October and which so favored Hanoi that it easily conquered all of Vietnam in April 1975. Nixon thought he had made the best deal that he could and counted upon his promise to return with military force if the Communists refused to abide by the terms of the treaty, particularly those that related to the political process in South Vietnam. He never expected that his presidency would soon be emasculated by the trials and tribulations of the Watergate scandal, which did not become a crisis for him until April 1973.

Nixon was far more successful with his brilliant triangular diplomacy that led to detente with the Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in May 1972 and his celebrated, mediagenic, ten-day visit to China in February 1972. Pressured by anticommunists like Nixon, successive American governments since the Communist takeover of China in 1949 had refused to recognize Beijing. By cleverly playing off China and the Soviet Union's mutual fears that the United States would ally with their enemy against them, the now apparently amoral Nixon was able to establish relatively friendly relations with Moscow and Beijing, thus providing a salutary reduction in his country's cold war tensions and insecurities.

In many ways, despite later ups and downs, the normalization of relations with the two Communist giants led to the ending of the cold war. One of those ups and downs had to do with the Yom Kippur War of 1973, begun when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel to regain the territories Israel had conquered in 1967. During that war the United States went on full nuclear alert when it appeared that the Soviet Union was going to intervene to aid Egypt. Despite that scare, Nixon's policies of relative evenhandedness toward the Arabs, particularly Anwar Sadat's Egypt, paved the way for the Camp David accords of 1978.

The Nixon administration's destabilization of the democratically elected government of Chile's Marxist president Salvador Allende contributed to conditions that resulted in Allende's overthrow in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet, who established a brutal, authoritarian regime. In other areas of the Third World, his administration was not as sympathetic to or interested in liberation movements as had been the Democrats.

Although elected to rein in big government and the welfare state that had grown under Democratic leadership, Nixon's domestic record includes either active or passive support for so many liberal programs that he could be considered the last liberal president of the twentieth century. His attorney general, John Mitchell, explained, "watch what we do, rather than what we say." Nowhere could this be seen as clearly as in the contentious area of school desegregation. Despite his promises to the South to slow the pace of desegregation, Nixon deftly moved the issue out of the executive branch to the judicial branch of government so that he would not be blamed for what happened in the region. The courts then moved swiftly to desegregate more southern school districts during Nixon's tenure than during the previous eight years of Democratic rule. The president did appeal to the South, which with the election of 1968 finalized its transition from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold. He spoke out against busing, one of the remedies for segregation recommended by the courts, and failed in an attempt to emasculate the Voting Rights Act and to appoint two conservative southerners to the Supreme Court, Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., and G. Harrold Carswell, both of whom the Senate rejected.

Nixon did leave a conservative imprint on the court with the appointment of Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1969, Harry Blackmun in 1970, and Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist, both in 1971. However, Blackmun and Powell did not turn out to be as conservative as the president expected, with the former writing the majority opinion in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion. Serving as president during the heyday of the women's liberation movement, Nixon supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. More importantly, he strengthened the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to deal with issues of gender discrimination and, under Title IX, broadened the power of the Civil Rights Commission to prohibit gender discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funds, an initiative that led to a revolution in university programs for female athletes.

Nixon was also the greatest environmental president since Theodore Roosevelt, even though he considered the burgeoning movement "crap." Because of the popularity of that movement (the first Earth Day was in 1970) and the environmental credentials of his likely chief opponent in the 1972 presidential campaign, Maine senator Edmund Muskie, Nixon signed legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and approved Clean Air Act amendments, the Endangered Species Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, among many other measures.

He did not succeed in reforming the welfare program. Nixon's revolutionary Family Assistance Plan, a centerpiece of his first administration, was attacked by liberals who thought it too harsh and by conservatives who thought it too weak. It had been paired with a more successful project, the New Federalism, which returned billions of tax dollars from the federal government to the states in a massive decentralization program.

Among other examples of progressive legislation that Nixon did get approved were the ending of the Selective Service System and the adoption, in 1973, of an all-volunteer army; lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen; removing the Post Office from the cabinet to become the independent U.S. Postal Service; establishing AMTRAK, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Consumer Product Safety Act; increasing federal expenditures for the arts; and establishing wars against cancer and drugs. Although he was not happy signing off on all of those bills, he had little choice considering their popularity among the public and the Democratic Congress. If he hoped to be reelected in 1972, Nixon had to meet the liberals halfway.

That reelection was also endangered by the shaky economy he inherited from the Johnson administration, with spiraling inflation figures and growing unemployment ("stagflation") causing a good deal of pain among Americans. In August 1971, going against every economic principle in which he had once believed, Nixon approved wage and price controls that temporarily stabilized the economy. But it was a quick fix that fell apart in 1973, with the situation made even worse when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) both embargoed oil to the United States in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and raised the price per barrel as much as fourfold. The wage-and-price decision in 1971 was coupled with an even more dramatic announcement: the U.S. all but abandoned the gold standard by permitting the dollar to float against other currencies.

Nixon began his campaign for reelection in 1969 with a private slush fund of $2 million that could be used by his Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) for legal and extralegal political espionage and under-the-table payoffs to people like the Democratic Alabama politician who challenged George Wallace for governor in 1970. Using such funds Nixon also set up a secret, investigatory agency in the White House, called the Plumbers (to find leaks). Among other crimes, the group was involved in the 1971 break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was the man who leaked the Defense Department's history of the Vietnam War, the "Pentagon Papers," to the press. Some of those same operatives were involved in the 17 June 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington. Nixon and his aides successfully covered up the White House's ties to the burglars until after the election.

Owing to reforms in the Democratic Party nomination procedures and CREEP's extralegal and illegal political machinations, Nixon wound up running against his "favorite" opponent in the 1972 election, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, the most liberal of his potential rivals. Republicans labeled McGovern the AAA candidate for his support of amnesty for draft dodgers, abortion on demand, and appeasement toward the Vietnamese Communists. McGovern's campaign almost self-destructed at the start when he first supported and then removed from the ticket his vice-presidential candidate, Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, after news reports about Eagleton's earlier psychological illness. When on 26 October 1972 Henry Kissinger announced in his October Surprise that "Peace is at hand," McGovern lost his only winning issue. A week later he lost the election in a landslide, 61 percent to 38 percent in the popular vote, while capturing the electoral votes of only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Armed with that strong mandate from the voters and uncomfortable about being a "liberal" president, Nixon and his aides began planning a rightward shift during his second administration.

But in January 1973 everything began coming undone as the judge in the Watergate trial, the conservative Republican John J. Sirica, pressured the burglars with long jail terms until one of them, James McCord, began to talk about his links to the White House. Congress soon got into the act with a Senate investigation, during which White House counsel John Dean presented damning details about the president's involvement in the cover-up of the break-in. Even more important, during those same hearings another White House aide revealed that from 1971 through 1973 the president had secretly taped all of his conversations. A battle soon ensued between the president and Congress, mediated by the courts, about access to those soon-to-be incriminating tapes. During the same period investigative journalists, particularly Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post, began discovering other evidence of illegal and unconstitutional acts in which the president had a direct hand. And as if he did not have enough troubles, the president had to demand the resignation of Vice President Agnew in the fall because of Watergate-unrelated crimes connected to accepting kickbacks from contractors. Nixon selected and Congress approved Agnew's replacement, Michigan representative Gerald R. Ford, whom Nixon privately thought so unpresidential as to represent an insurance policy for him against impeachment.

But that did not stop the House, whose judiciary committee had begun hearings on Watergate that led to investigations and even more revelations about illegal operations in the White House. During the same period independent prosecutors, first Archibald Cox and then Leon Jaworski, ran parallel investigations.

After the courts made Nixon release transcripts and then the tapes themselves, few in Congress, or in the nation in general, doubted that he had committed crimes worthy of impeachment. And it was not just the obvious criminal activity surrounding the cover-up of the break-in that concerned them. In many ways the White House appeared to be undermining American democracy. Nixon himself claimed that he was just playing the same hardball politics practiced by his predecessors, but although some of his shady activities had precedent, many did not, and those that had been practiced before were unprecedented in their scope. As if this was not bad enough, many Americans were astonished by the discovery that the proper, almost Victorian, public Nixon was caught on tape as profane and vulgar, anti-Semitic, racist, and mean-spirited.

Even before it received the famous "smoking gun" tape in early August 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted late in July, twenty-seven to eleven, to impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice, twenty-eight to ten for abuse of power, and twenty-one to seventeen for contempt of Congress. Among the abuses uncovered, aside from the original cover-up, were Nixon's political uses of the Internal Revenue Service, illegal wiretaps of political enemies, illegal campaign contributions, threats to the media, cheating on his personal taxes, selling ambassadorships, and a host of other acts that John Mitchell labeled the "White House Horrors." The accumulation of evidence led the president to resign on 9 August 1974, just before he certainly would have been impeached by the House of Representatives and then removed from office by the Senate. Those crimes also led to the conviction and imprisonment of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, and several other members of the administration and CREEP. Nixon himself escaped prosecution and potential imprisonment when President Ford pardoned him on 8 September 1974, an act that may have cost Ford the presidential election in 1976. Worried about Nixon's precarious health and concerned about putting the nation through another year of trauma as the former president prepared for several trials, Ford thought it best to end the "long national nightmare."

After recovering from a life-threatening attack of phlebitis and serious depression, Nixon began to campaign one more time, this time for "ex-president." And in a political comeback even more unlikely than the one he made after losing the California gubernatorial election in 1962, Nixon did achieve that status by the middle 1980s. He attained it through carefully planned public appearances and, especially, through writing first his memoirs in 1978, and then, in an incredible flurry, eight more best-selling books between 1980 and 1994 that outlined his views on diplomacy and evaluations of foreign leaders he had met. He had become a wise, elder statesman whose experience and allegedly brilliant record in foreign affairs made him a national asset. People had not forgotten Watergate, but they began to compartmentalize Nixon's career into unsavory domestic doings and distasteful personality traits caught on tape and his successful foreign-policy exploits. President Bill Clinton echoed this theme at Nixon's funeral in Yorba Linda, following his death from a stroke in 1994 in New York City, when he generously proclaimed, "May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close." Nixon is buried in Yorba Linda.

Nixon's presidential papers and the infamous Watergate tapes can be found in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. Most of his pre-presidential papers are located at the National Archive's regional facility in Laguna Niguel, California, while the privately operated Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda contains fragmentary pre-and post-presidential papers. Nixon's memoir RN (1978), though self-serving, is useful, but it needs to be read with three balanced studies, Stephen Ambrose's Nixon (three volumes, 1987, 1989, and 1991), Herbert S. Parmet's Richard Nixon and His America (1990), and Tom Wicker's One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (1995). Most favorable to Nixon are Jonathan Aitken, Nixon: A Life (1993), and Irwin Gellman, The Contender (1999), a revisionist approach to the period up to 1952. For the presidency itself the main monographs are Michael A. Genovese, The Nixon Presidency (1990); Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered ( 1994); Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (1999); and Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001). For Watergate, Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate (1992), is encyclopedic, and for Nixon's run for the ex-presidency, see Robert Sam Anson, Exile (1984). Obituaries are in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post (all 24 Apr. 1994).

Melvin Small