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 (20 January 1969 to 9 August 1974) and one of the dominant figures of the post-World War II era. Because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon became the only president ever forced to resign his office.

Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, a tiny town in southern California, and grew up in nearby Whittier. The region’s deep conservative temper would inform his political views, but the more important influences in his boyhood were psychological. From his early boyhood, he exhibited a combustible mix of intelligence and suspiciousness, ambition and rage—qualities that would become hallmarks of his political persona.

Nixon’s father, Francis Anthony, known as Frank, was an Ohio-born Methodist who struggled in various jobs before eventually opening a successful grocery and gas station. Hot-tempered and prone to violence, Frank strictly enforced his will. In 1908 Frank married Hannah Milhous, a devout Quaker. Hannah was equally strong-willed in her own way, quietly preaching a stern ethical code. Nixon remembered his father as “a common man” or a “little man” and idealized his mother as a “saint.”

The Nixons had five sons: Harold in 1909, Richard, Francis Donald (called Donald) in 1914, Arthur in 1918, and Edward in 1930. Two of them died young: Arthur from encephalitis in 1925, Harold from tuberculosis in 1933. Apart from these traumas, the family also faced financial hardship, though not dire poverty. Richard worked odd jobs until he finished law school and always bore a deep resentment toward the privileged and fortunate.

Diligent and precociously serious, Nixon excelled academically. After two years at Fullerton High School, he transferred to Whittier High School in 1928, from which he graduated third in his class in 1930. Though not a natural athlete, he played football, serving dutifully as a benchwarmer; he fared better in drama and debating. In 1930 he enrolled at Whittier College where he continued these pursuits. He also founded a club there, called the “Orthogonians,” to rival the established “Franklins,” whose well-to-do members dominated campus life. In 1934 Nixon graduated second in his class, winning a scholarship to Duke Law School in North Carolina.

At Duke, Nixon maintained his reputation for assiduous work habits (he had an “iron butt,” one friend remarked) and a saturnine demeanor (he was nicknamed “Gloomy Gus”). He lived abstemiously, residing at one point in an abandoned toolshed. Although he graduated third in his class in 1937, he failed to get a job at a New York firm or the FBI, to his lasting disappointment.

After law school, Nixon returned to Whittier to begin private practice. While acting in community theater there in 1938, he met Thelma Catherine (“Pat”) Ryan, a schoolteacher, whom he courted doggedly, even chauffeuring her to dates with other men. His perseverance triumphed: they were married on 21 June 1940 in a Quaker ceremony.

In January 1942 the Nixons moved to Washington, D.C., where Richard joined the wartime Office of Price Administration. But federal bureaucracy frustrated him. That same year he entered the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant, serving first at an air station in Iowa, and then, in 1944, as a transport-control officer in the Pacific. He was not assigned to combat, though his base suffered Japanese attacks. He finished his service in January 1946 in Maryland, terminating navy contracts.

In September 1945 Nixon received a call from Herman Perry, a Whittier banker. Perry belonged to a group of southern California businessmen seeking a Republican candidate to challenge the incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis for the Twelfth District Congressional seat. Nixon leapt at Perry’s offer to audition before the “Committee of One Hundred.” He flew to California in November, where he impressed the local solons with his articulateness, feistiness and support for their anti—New Deal ideology. Portraying himself as a clean-cut veteran, a young father (Pat gave birth to a daughter, Tricia, on 21 February 1946), and spokesman of “the forgotten man,” he won the Republican nomination in June 1946.

An underdog against Voorhis, Nixon campaigned aggressively. He secured endorsements from the mostly Republican local newspapers, including the powerful Los Angeles Times. Amid unemployment, labor unrest, and food shortages, he articulated the kind of anti—big government agenda that would become popular a generation later. Distorting his opponent’s record, he attacked Voorhis—in speeches, advertisements, and a series of public debates—as a communist sympathizer or dupe. Nixon won the election with 57 percent of the vote, helping his party capture control of Congress.

Nixon distinguished himself among congressional freshmen. He helped draft the Taft-Hartley Act, which prevented unions from keeping closed shops. His experiences touring Europe with a congressional committee persuaded him that his party should abandon its isolationism for an active role in world affairs. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he cosponsored the Mundt-Nixon Bill restricting the freedoms of domestic Communist party members.

The summer of 1948 raised Nixon’s profile. After the birth of a second daughter, Julie, on 5 July 1948, Nixon became embroiled in the case of Alger Hiss, a Democratic ex—State Department official who Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers had charged was a communist spy. Hiss sued Chambers for slander, inaugurating a national drama. Nixon led the charge against Hiss, and when Chambers produced incriminating microfilm that he had stored in a pumpkin on his farm, Nixon was vindicated. Hiss eventually served time for perjury.

Nixon won reelection handily in 1948. In 1950 he ran for the Senate against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a stylish former actress and New Deal Democrat. With the help of Murray Chotiner, a pioneer in campaign strategy, Nixon again spotlighted communism (and made Douglas’s gender a tacit issue) as he called his opponent “pink right down to her underwear.” His campaign circulated a “pink sheet” comparing her voting record to that of a well-known communist congressman. Some anti-Semitic Nixon supporters also played up Douglas’s marriage to the Jewish actor Melvyn Douglas. Douglas ran a poor campaign and lost badly. Her main contribution was to saddle Nixon with a lasting epithet: “Tricky Dick.”

Now a rising star, Nixon became a favorite Republican speaker. In July 1952 General Dwight Eisenhower, the party’s presidential nominee, chose Nixon as his running mate. In September, newspapers revealed that Nixon’s California supporters maintained a fund to cover his professional expenses—possibly an illegal practice. Editorials demanded his withdrawal from the ticket. On 23 September, he delivered a televised speech defending himself, citing at one point a gift he had been given: a cocker spaniel for his daughters named Checkers. The “Checkers” speech galled liberals as maudlin and manipulative, but viewers overwhelmingly praised Nixon’s sincerity. Eisenhower kept him on board, and the Republican ticket triumphed in November.

As vice president, Nixon maintained a higher profile than previous understudies. Letting Eisenhower abstain from direct political combat, Nixon barnstormed the country in 1954 and 1956 on his party’s behalf (he remained Eisenhower’s running mate in 1956 despite an abortive “Dump Nixon” boomlet). Liberals grew to loathe him for his red-baiting, his combativeness, his rhetorical deviousness, and what they considered his phoniness. Nixon’s face became a household image. Caricatures mocked his pendulous jowls, his ski-jump nose, and his perennial five-o’clock shadow. Magazine profiles noted, often with criticism or condescension, his painstakingly rigid and clear speaking style, his social awkwardness, and his skill at attacking liberal elites.

Detested as he was in some circles, Nixon also commanded deep support. When crowds harassed him on his visit to South America in 1958, Americans back home cheered him as a patriot. In Moscow in 1959, he won praise for out-debating Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a model U.S. kitchen, proclaiming the superiority of freedom and capitalism to Soviet communism. In the 1960 presidential race, he sewed up his party’s nomination after placating his main rival, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, by adopting many of the governor’s liberal positions.

For the general election, the Democrats nominated the forty-three-year-old Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. The election thus matched up two young up-and-comers, a moderate Republican and a cold war liberal. More than ideology, style separated the candidates. Kennedy possessed the charm, grace, and wit that detractors felt Nixon lacked. In four televised debates—the first ever—Nixon’s forensic skills flagged. Kennedy appeared cool and polished, while the ill-at-ease Nixon faltered, sweat streaking his pancake makeup in the first debate. Kennedy also outflanked Nixon on cold war politics, promising to aid anticommunist forces in Cuba, which Nixon refused to do (though he knew Eisenhower had begun such efforts). Kennedy won the election by a whisker, 49.7 to 49.5 percent. Nixon claimed that Kennedy “stole” the election, although no one ever substantiated the charge.

Nixon returned to California, where he wrote a well-received memoir, Six Crises. Still attracted to politics, he ran for governor against Edmund G. (”Pat”) Brown in 1962. He again tried to label his opponent “soft on communism,” but the Red Scare was over and his gambit failed. After Brown won, Nixon berated reporters and told them, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” His career seemed finished. ABC News ran a special called “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.”

In 1963 Nixon moved to New York City, joined a Wall Street law firm, and rebuilt his reputation within his party. By 1968 he had emerged as a presidential nominee acceptable to conservatives, who otherwise preferred California governor Ronald Reagan, and moderates, whose first choice was Michigan governor George Romney or Rockefeller. On 8 August 1968 Nixon accepted the nomination at the Republican convention in Miami. He returned to his theme of extolling the common man. Offering himself as an exemplar of the American Dream, he recalled, as a boy, “hear[ing] a train go by at night and… dream [ing] of faraway places”—suggesting that with his election he and the American people alike might reach their long-sought goals.

As a candidate, Nixon pledged to end the Vietnam War “with honor,” without ever revealing his precise plan for doing so. He championed “law and order,” a concise phrase promising toughness against rising crime, urban riots, and antiwar agitation. With a “Southern strategy” of conservative racial rhetoric, he sought to neutralize the third-party campaign of segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama.

Aided by new media experts, Nixon in 1968 pioneered a television-era strategy of image making. He tightly controlled his television appearances and his contact with the press. Although analysts had been hailing a “new Nixon”—more mellow, less pugilistic—since the mid-1950s, the 1968 strategy convinced many that he had arrived. With the Democratic party a shambles after a riottorn convention in Chicago, Nixon won a slim victory on 5 November 1968 over Vice President Hubert Humphrey (43.4 to 42.7 percent, with Wallace running third). The concern with image and public relations that Nixon exhibited in the campaign would dominate his presidency and usher in an era in national politics where such matters received enormous attention by politicians, journalists, and the public.

Nixon took the oath of office on 20 January 1969. He promised to end the war and heal domestic divisions. “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker,” he said. From the start, however, his presidency witnessed not unity but increased discord.

The first president since Zachary Taylor to face a Congress controlled by the opposition party, Nixon could not dismantle Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society as he had promised. Rather, with the public broadly endorsing government activism, Nixon pragmatically mixed concessions to the Democrats with high-profile efforts to thwart them. Staffing his administration with a mix of conservative ideologues and liberal policy wonks, he produced an inconsistent domestic record.

Prodded by his liberal adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon proposed as his first major domestic initiative a “Family Assistance Plan” on 8 August 1969. FAP would replace the existing welfare system with direct payments to poor families, eliminating the bureaucratic web of more complex social-service programs. Ultimately FAP was defeated by Republicans who rejected it as “big government” and Democrats who thought its provisions too stingy. Still, the Nixon administration and Congress expanded social services in other ways, from indexing Social Security benefits (to rise with inflation), to establishing Supplemental Security Income (a system for aiding disabled workers), to enlarging the food stamps program.

Nixon confronted an economy straining under the twin perils of inflation and unemployment (conditions that worsened after the 1973 oil crisis). Though a believer in laissez-faire economics, Nixon tried different remedies. In 1971 he declared, “Now I am a Keynesian” and on 15 August imposed a freeze on wages and prices; he lifted them when the recession began to threaten his reelection. Nixon also suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold to make American goods more competitive overseas, a historic change to the global economic system known as Bretton Woods. On business regulation, Nixon sometimes acceded to Democratic wishes, establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; at other times, he pleased the business world, vetoing regulations and impounding funds (illegally, as the Supreme Court later ruled) that were earmarked for environmental and other programs.

Nixon likewise produced a mixed record on racial issues. Cultivating southerners and working-class ethnic whites, he denounced school busing and quotas in job hiring, and he eliminated Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Yet he also enforced (albeit less vigorously than liberals wanted) Supreme Court mandates for southern school desegregation, and his Labor Department revived Johnson’s plan to require affirmative action among government contractors. He battled Congress, unsuccessfully, in seeking to name to the Supreme Court two southern conservatives—part of a larger effort to undo the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Conflict over social issues—civil liberties, student activism, minorities’ and women’s rights, drug use, and others—proved the most divisive of Nixon’s presidency. Along with Vice President Spiro Agnew (dubbed “Nixon’s Nixon”), the president defended those he called “Middle Americans” or the “Silent Majority.” These working-class Americans resented students, intellectuals, professionals, the news media, and others who they felt were undermining traditional values. From his efforts to reshape the courts to his battles with the press (which also stemmed from longstanding personal hatreds), Nixon’s denunciations of liberal elites provided a thread of continuity through a record of eclectic policies and positions.

Nixon’s foreign policy also proved controversial. Ending the Vietnam War proved harder than he and Henry Kissinger, his top adviser, imagined. They first aimed to calm domestic dissent with a program of “Vietnamization,” or training South Vietnamese soldiers to replace Americans. The policy, announced in 1969, along with changes in the draft a few months later, eased fears about American boys dying in an unpopular war. Yet dissent persisted. October and November 1969 saw massive antiwar demonstrations, the biggest in history.

Nixon countered on several fronts. His “Silent Majority” speech of 3 November 1969 successfully rallied support for his policies while stigmatizing antiwar protesters. He deftly manipulated the news media into portraying dissenters as dangerous radicals. His administration undertook covert actions, some of them illegal, such as surveillance, wiretaps, and infiltration to undermine the movement.

Meanwhile, owing partly to South Vietnamese intransigence, Kissinger faltered in the peace negotiations. Hoping to force concessions, Nixon escalated the war. In March 1969 he bombed enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia, a neutral country. On 30 April 1970 he announced an “incursion” into Cambodia, renewing antiwar protests (resulting in the National Guard’s slaying of four students at Ohio’s Kent State University). In February 1971 Nixon expanded the war into Laos. Periodic raids—notably the “Christmas bombing” of December 1972—devastated North Vietnam. Finally, on 27 January 1973 in Paris the combatants reached an armistice, on terms, critics noted, similar to those obtainable in 1969.

Nixon and Kissinger also sought to attain peace—and to shore up America’s power in the world—through diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union. In July 1971 Nixon sent Kissinger on a secret mission to Beijing, and on 17 February 1972 he himself traveled to China. He began to reverse America’s position on the legitimacy of the communist government, agreeing to admit “Red China” to the United Nations and to expel the Taiwanese delegation. Diplomatic relations commenced. Meanwhile, Nixon pursued a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, resulting in a freeze on certain nuclear missiles. On 12 May 1972 he and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a twelve-point agreement establishing what was called “détente”: a thaw in diplomatic as well as commercial relations between the superpowers. Other arms-control treaties ensued, including, most importantly, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972.

Elsewhere, Nixon’s foreign-policy record consisted of troubleshooting. After an Arab attack on Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur on 6 October 1973, Nixon delayed before responding with aid, endangering an American ally. In Chile, the administration supported a ruthless coup against a popularly elected socialist leader, installing a pro-Western dictator. Elsewhere, Nixon had to cope with conflicts between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, and warring factions in Angola.

Above all, Nixon’s presidency was known for the collection of crimes and scandals known as Watergate, the greatest constitutional crisis of the twentieth century. Watergate had its origins in the social conflicts of the 1960s; in Nixon’s ambition, suspiciousness, and unscrupulous-ness; and in the growth after World War II of what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., called the “imperial presidency.”

Possessed of a Manichean worldview, Nixon viewed political opponents as personal enemies. Fiercely secretive, and convinced that the press was determined to harm him, he became incensed when information was leaked to reporters. Kissinger shared Nixon’s penchant for secrecy. Starting in May 1969 and continuing through February 1971, they had the FBI tap the phones of various aides and newsmen—the first actions in what would be a long line of illegal and clandestine activities.

Nixon was able to undertake such action because of the growing power of the presidency. During the cold war, Nixon’s predecessors had arrogated power to the office. They had countenanced illegal FBI and CIA surveillance and break-ins against potential subversives, justifying their actions under the increasingly broad rubric of “national security.” During the cultural tumult of the 1960s, such practices, rooted in defending the nation against espionage by the Soviet Union, were applied to homegrown radical movements, such as antiwar and black activists.

Nixon accelerated such practices. He had an aide, Tom Charles Huston, devise a plan for coordinating domestic intelligence activities, and on 23 July 1970 he approved the “Huston Plan” to bring such intelligence, including a variety of illegal activities, under White House control. Nixon soon abandoned it, however, when FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover balked.

On 13 June 1971 the New York Times began publishing a secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam known as the Pentagon Papers. Nixon sued to stop their publication but lost. The incident prompted Nixon to organize a White House security team, informally called the “Plumbers’ Unit,” to crack down on leaks. Daniel Ellsberg, the official who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, was its first target. Nixon had the Plumbers burglarize Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office on 3 September 1971 to find incriminating information about him. (When this news became public in 1973, the judge overseeing Ellsberg’s prosecution threw out the case.)

Other such practices, varying in severity from violations of the constitution to political chicanery (“dirty tricks”), proliferated as the 1972 election approached. Nixon considered firebombing the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. One administration official sought to assassinate the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson. Another aide forged cables to implicate President Kennedy in the 1963 assassination of South Vietnam’s premier, Ngo Dinh Diem. A third counterfeited a letter to a newspaper attributing bigoted comments to Senator Edmund Muskie, the Democratic front-runner in the 1972 presidential race, leading Muskie to withdraw.

On 17 June 1972 five burglars, hired by the White House, were caught breaking into Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Five days later Nixon publicly denied any role in the break-in.

However, the day after that, 23 June, he ordered his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman to have the CIA obstruct the FBI’s investigation of Watergate. And on 29 June aides began paying “hush money” to the burglars.

The press, led by two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, found evidence linking the burglars to the White House and to Nixon’s reelection committee. Yet for a while the revelations did not dent Nixon’s popularity. Nor did other scandals—such as a possibly illegal effort by International Telephone & Telegraph to settle an antitrust suit or shady campaign contributions from the dairy industry—endanger Nixon’s reelection.

In the 1972 campaign, Nixon enjoyed great popularity after his diplomatic effort to Moscow and Beijing. He easily repulsed primary challenges for the Republican nomination from both the left and right wings of his party. He got a boost when an assassin shot and crippled George Wallace, eliminating him as potential competition. Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee, South Dakota senator George Mc-Govern, ran on an unpopular left-wing platform. What was more, McGovern lost his best issue, ending the Vietnam War, when shortly before the election Kissinger announced (prematurely, it turned out) that “peace is at hand.” On 7 November 1972 Nixon and Agnew won reelection, capturing every state but Massachusetts.

After the election, however, Nixon’s fortunes nosedived. In January 1973, the Senate established a committee to investigate Watergate under the leadership of North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin. Concurrently, the Watergate burglars went to trial. These hearings loosed a string of revelations about what Attorney General John Mitchell called the “White House horrors.” Nixon’s popularity plummeted.

Nixon tried to protect himself. On 15 April 1973 he met with his lawyer, John W. Dean III, to discuss how to keep the illegal White House activities under wraps. On 30 April, hoping to stem the tide, Nixon announced the resignations of Dean, Haldeman, and aide John Ehrlichman. He continued to deny any involvement in Watergate. Nonetheless, on 18 May, Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School, to investigate.

More revelations ensued. In June, Dean told the Ervin Committee that Nixon maintained an “Enemies List” of political foes, reporters, and even celebrities such as Bill Cosby and Joe Namath, on some of whom the Internal Revenue Service had conducted tax audits. Dean also revealed Nixon’s role in the cover-up. In July, White House aide Alexander Butterfield disclosed that Nixon secretly taped his White House conversations. Both the Ervin Committee and Cox sought these important tapes, which Nixon refused to surrender. The protracted struggle consumed the summer.

On 20 October 1973 Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Instead, Richardson resigned, as did his deputy. The so-called Saturday Night Massacre prompted fears that Nixon might eventually try to hold onto power illegally. Cries arose for his impeachment.

Other scandals emerged that fall, worsening Nixon’s position. Vice President Agnew, under investigation for tax evasion and taking bribes while governor of Maryland, resigned on 10 October 1973, and was replaced by House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. Nixon was also found to have underpaid, and possibly cheated, on his income taxes and to have used government funds to improve his homes. Investigators also found that someone had erased eighteen-and-a-half minutes of a key Watergate tape. His credibility suffering, Nixon told reporters on 17 November, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

On 6 February 1974 the House voted to have its Judiciary Committee begin an impeachment investigation. Leon Jaworski, the new special prosecutor, and the House committee both continued to subpoena White House tapes. On 29 April 1974 Nixon announced he would provide only edited transcripts. When released, they shocked the nation. Even with “expletives deleted,” the conversations were full of foul-mouthed, bigoted, and vengeful talk.

Still seeking the tapes, Jaworski and the House took their case to the Supreme Court. On 24 July, the Court ruled 8–0 against Nixon. One tape, of the 23 June 1972 conversation—called the “smoking gun”—proved Nixon had obstructed justice. Nixon’s support, even among Republicans, crumbled. On 27 July the House approved the first of three articles of impeachment. On 9 August 1974 Nixon resigned.

Historians would debate the significance of Watergate for decades. The standard view held that Nixon’s crimes outstripped other presidents’ misdeeds and that Watergate defined his presidency. Defenders of Nixon argued that the crisis should not have overshadowed his diplomatic or domestic achievements. Most agreed, however, that Nixon’s historic resignation, and the acts that led to it, shook the nation. Americans came to view their president as a liar, a criminal, and in some cases a would-be dictator. Public faith in government and political leaders, weakened by Vietnam, further eroded.

Nixon retired to San Clemente, California. He was psychologically devastated by Watergate, and severely depressed. He also suffered from other medical problems, including a serious case of phlebitis that required surgery and hospitalization. He escaped prosecution because President Ford, on 8 September 1974, pardoned him completely.

During his physical and psychological recovery from Watergate, Nixon kept a low profile. In 1977 he conducted a series of televised interviews with the British talk-show host David Frost. He defended his behavior during Watergate, famously stating, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

After his resignation, Nixon worked tirelessly to rehabilitate himself. He brought endless lawsuits against the federal government, trying to recover control of, or hinder the release of, papers and tapes from his administration. He wrote nine books defending his behavior and trying to burnish his image as a foreign policy sage. The most important was his memoir RN (1978). Other books offered his views on foreign policy or recounted anecdotes about various world leaders he had met. In 1980 he and Pat moved back to New York City and later to Saddle River, New Jersey. He entertained journalists at his home, and many began to write that Nixon had made a comeback. A cover story in Newsweek in 1986 declared “He’s Back.”

Nixon died on 22 April 1994, ten months after Pat had passed away. He had suffered a stroke days earlier. President Bill Clinton declared a national day of mourning. Nixon was buried beside Pat on the grounds of the Nixon Presidential Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, on the site where his first boyhood home had been. His funeral, on 27 April, was a media event. Clinton, Kissinger, and other national figures delivered eulogies; and commentators extolled his achievements in foreign policy. Yet Watergate, as analysts had predicted years earlier, dominated the obituaries and discussions of his life and shaped his legacy.

In the years after his death, Nixon remained nothing if not controversial. Some historians began to revise their estimations of him, especially in the area of domestic policy, where he was reassessed as more of a liberal than contemporaries had realized. Yet the overriding image of Nixon in most people’s minds was still that of “Tricky Dick.” The image was reinforced by numerous references to Nixon in films, sitcoms, and the culture more generally, in which Nixon was invariably portrayed as sinister. The word “Nixonian” entered the language as a synonym for Machiavellian.

Nixon’s legacy was manifold. His opening of relations with China changed global politics, and détente began an easing of the hostilities with the Soviet Union that, although temporarily reversed under President Ronald Reagan, ultimately helped clear the way toward normal relations. Nixon’s domestic stewardship paradoxically both continued the Great Society in some respects while hastening its downfall in others.

More than policy, Nixon shaped American politics. He was one of the first and most successful practitioners of a strategy that mobilized a “Silent Majority” against out-of-touch liberal elites. Nixon used this approach, starting with his first congressional campaign, long before others did. After him, almost all successful Republican politicians, from Reagan to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, would similarly play on resentments toward federal spending and bureaucrats, permissive courts, and elites who seemed to favor racial minorities.

In the end, there is no escaping the fact that Nixon’s greatest legacy was Watergate, which became the benchmark of political corruption. Afterward, whenever politicians became enmeshed in scandal, their misdeeds would be measured against Nixon’s—allowing some of them, such as Reagan and Clinton, to emerge relatively unscathed, since their transgressions seemed to pale next to Watergate.

The American experience with Nixon also helped breed a profound cynicism toward politics and political leaders. Faith in public leadership began to decline with the Vietnam War. Nixon’s continuation of the war fed the decline, and Watergate accelerated it. Nixon convinced many people that presidents were not heroes to be admired but criminals, liars, or at the very least opportunists who would say or do anything to get elected.

Nixon also fostered cynicism toward politics with his relentless focus on image making. This focus helped to create a political culture dominated by polling, advertising, and efforts to manipulate of the news media. As the public became hyper-aware of the extent to which politics had become a contest of political imagery, many people came to conclude all politics was devoid of real meaning.

During the first quarter century after World War II, Nixon was one of the central figures in American politics. During the next quarter century, virtually every aspect of the political culture bore his imprint. For this reason many analysts have called the postwar era the “Age of Nixon.”

Some of Nixon’s early papers and all of his post-presidential papers are at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. Other pre-presidential papers are at the Pacific regional branch of the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, California. His presidential papers and tapes are at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project in College Park, Maryland. Published sources of primary documents include Bruce Oudes, From the President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files (1989), H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (1994), and Stanley I. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (1997).

The published literature about Nixon is voluminous. Yet biographies covering his whole life, or most of it, are few. Stephen E. Ambrose’s three-volume Nixon (1987, 1989, and 1991) remains a standard, basic work. Herbert Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America (1990), tracks Nixon’s politics of resentment. Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (1991), is a thoughtful synthesis. Jonathan Aitken’s Nixon: A Life (1993) is a flattering account written by a friend. Covering Nixon’s early years are Roger Morris’s massive, critical and beautifully written Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (1990) and Irwin F. Gellman’s pro-Nixon The Contender: Richard Nixon, the Congress Years (1999). Fawn Brodie’s Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (1981), controversial for its psychoanalytic approach, remains provocative.

Studies of Nixon’s presidency include the comprehensive, even-handed The Presidency of Richard Nixon by Melvin Small (1999) and the brashly revisionist Nixon Reconsidered by Joan Hoff (1994). On Watergate, the most reliable is Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (1990). Important accounts from the Nixon era include Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All the President’s Men (1974) and The Final Days (1976); J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1975); and Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (1975).

Important studies of one aspect or another of Nixon’s life and career are Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President, 1968 (1969), Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1969), Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (1973), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (1973), Joseph Spear, Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy (1984), Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (1992), William Bundy, Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (1998), and David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow (2001). Nixon tells his side of the story in Six Crises (1962) and RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978). Other valuable memoirs include William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (1975), John Dean, Blind Ambition: The White House Years (1976), and Henry Kissinger, White House Years (1979) and Years of’ Upheaval (1982).

David Greenberg