37th president of the United States. Nixon served as vice-president under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1952 to 1960. He was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for presidency in 1960. He was elected president in 1968 over Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey and reelected in 1972 over Democrat George S. McGovern. Nixon resigned from presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, because of his revealed involvement in the so-called Watergate scandal.

Early life
Nixon was born Jan. 9, 1913, on a lemon farm in Yorba Linda, CA, to Francis A. Nixon and Hannah Milhous Nixon. He was second from five children, all of whom were boys. When he was nine years old, the family moved to Whittier, CA, where he worked after school in his father’s combination grocery store and gasoline station. Nixon ranked second in the 1934 class of Whittier Collage, where he was student body president and a star debater. He graduated third in the 1937 class of Duke University’s School of Law, Durham, N.C., where he was president of the Student Bar Association and a member of the Order of Coif, a national honorary law fraternity.
Nixon became a partner in Whittier’s oldest law firm, Wingert and Bewley, specializing in taxes and trial work. He became, at the age of 26, the youngest trustee of Whittier Collage. He met his future wife, Thelma Catherine Patricia “Pat” Ryan while both were trying out for an amateur play and couple was married June 21, 1940. They became parents of two daughters: Patricia and Julie. After World War II began Nixon went to work in the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C. In August 1942 he entered the Navy as a lieutenant. He spend most of his service as an aviation ground officer in the Pacific and was discharged as a lieutenant commander in 1946.

Early political Career
Back home, Nixon was persuaded by a group of California Republicans to challenge Democratic Representative Jerry Vorhees in the 1946 election. In a preview of the hard-hitting style of his later campaigns, Nixon charged Vorhees with being “soft on Communism” and a tool of organized labor. Nixon won by 15,592 votes.
In Congress, Nixon, as a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, helped draft the Taft-Hertley labor law. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he pressed the investigation of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of passing classified documents to Whitaker Chambers, a confessed former Communist Party member.

Nixon was the only first-term member of a select House committee that helped lay the groundwork for Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe. His performance in Congress won him the Democratic as well as the Republican nomination for reelection in 1948. He won the second term with 141,500 votes.
Just two years later he ran against Democratic Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas for a California seat in the U.S. Senate. He again seized on the popular issue of Communism and internal security with charges that Mrs. Douglas was soft on Communism, and in a slashing campaign that prompted many observers to brand him as ruthless he defeated Douglas by 2,183,454 votes to 1,502,507. His aggressive campaign came to the notice of party leaders across the nation. In 1952 the Republican nominee for, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, chose Nixon as his vice-president running mate.
Again Nixon campaigned with fire, calling the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, an appeaser on matters relating to Communism. But he suddenly found himself on the defensive. It was disclosed that California supporters had raised a special fund of $18,000 to supplement Nixon’s Senate salary. Amid suggestions from important Republicans that he drop from the ticket, Nixon went on national television to explain that the money had not been for personal use but to help defray cost to the taxpayers of operating his office. His own finances were very tight, he said, and he acknowledged accepting one gift – a dog named Chackers. His daughter loved him, he said, and “regardless of what they say about it, we’re going keep it.” His “Chackers speech” was so effective that Nixon’s position on the Eisenhower ticket was strengthened. The ticket won easily. In 1956 Eisenhower and Nixon were reelected – again over a Democratic ticket headed by Stevenson.

Vice-president
Eisenhower delegated more responsibility than any of his predecessors to his vice-president. Nixon sat in most meetings with Cabinet and congressional leadership. As chairman of the President’s Commission on Government Contracts, Nixon rooted out discriminatory hiring practices by federal contractors. As chairman of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Growth, he played an important role in ending the 1959 steel strike. He assumed most of the chief executive’s administrative functions three times, in 1955, ’56 and ’57, when Eisenhower was temporarily incapacitated by illness. He traveled some 160,000 miles to 55 countries as the president’s representative, the heaviest foreign travel assignment ever given a vice-president. Two trips gained particular attention.

During a 1958 tour of eight Latin American countries Nixon’s life was endangered by demonstrators. Nixon responded coolly and calmly. A year later Nixon opened a U.S. exhibition in Moscow, where he engaged in an impromptu public exchange with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev amid the exhibit’s display of U.S. kitchen appliances. On the final day of his visit Nixon made an unprecedented address on Soviet television.

Years of Defeat
Nixon was clearly in line to receive the presidential nomination in 1960, and he was nominated by the Republican National Convention on July 20, 1960. Nixon chose as his running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a former U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. Nixon campaigned in every state. He asked the voters to continue the progress of the Eisenhower presidency. His Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, whose running mate was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, assailed the Eisenhower record, calling on the voters “to get America moving again.” In an unprecedented action, the two candidates held four nationally televised debates. Appearance more than substance won the initial debate for Kennedy. Because of bad lighting, poor makeup, and fatigue, Nixon projected a stammering, washed-out image in contrast to the quick-witted intelligence displayed by Kennedy. That single debate was widely believed to have lost Nixon the election. Although Kennedy won with a decisive majority in electoral college, he squeaked by with a margin of only 120.000 popular votes.
Nixon returned to private law practice in California, although he kept up a strenuous pace of speaking and writing. In 1962 Nixon tried to unseat California’s popular governor, Brown, but was swamped by 300.000 votes. Nixon’s political career seemed ended.

The Road Back
In 1963 he moved to NYC to join a major Wall Street law firm. But he was soon on the stump again, this time campaigning relentlessly for the 1964 unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. Over the next two years Nixon engineered the most spectacular comeback in U.S. political history. He campaigned for Republican candidates in 1966, when the Republicans made significant gain in the House. On Feb. 1, 1968, Nixon announced his candidacy for president. Despite challenges by governors G. Rommey of Michigan, N. Rockefeller of New York and R. Reagan of California, Nixon was nominated once again by the Republican National Convention, on Aug. 7, 1968. For his running mate, Nixon selected the little-known governor of Maryland, Spiro T.

Agnew. In the campaign, Nixon appealed to a nation tired of crime, protests and the kind of violence that had marred the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Nixon won a sparse 31.770.237 votes to 3.270.553 for his Democratic opponent, Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey and 9.906.141 for former Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran on the American Independent Part ticket.

The Presidential Years
Nixon carried into White House his moderately conservative approach to domestic affairs. In the face of strong Congressional opposition, he pared federal spending for social programs; dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity, created in 1964 to deal with problems of poverty; launched a new farm program reducing subsidies; spoke out firmly against busing as a means of achieving racial balance in schools; and denounced a growing permissiveness that had fostered violent demonstrations. He named strict constitutional constructionists to four Supreme Court vacancies, halting the court’s nearly two-decade-old liberal swing. He capsuled his philosophy of a new self-reliance for America’s citizens in his second inaugural address when he said, “In our own lives, let each of us ask not just what will government do for me, but what I can do for myself.”
Internationally, Nixon was preoccupied from the outset with his campaign pledge to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and bring “peace with honor.” At a stop in Guam during a seven-nation world tour in July 1969, Nixon announced his intended policy: that while the United States would continue to aid Asian nations resisting Communism, it would no longer engage troops in Asian land wars. This “doctrine” carried a message for all U.S. allies to do more for themselves but did not suggest that Nixon intended for his nation to relinquish any of its status as a superpower. He made this point clear in April 1970, when he ordered troops into Cambodia to destroy Communist “sanctuaries” and bolster a newly established pro-Western government. The action unleashed a fresh outbreak of campus demonstrations, which resulted in the deaths of four students in Kent State University in Ohio at the hands of National Guard troops. Nixon ignored the national outrage and continued “Vietnamization,” turning the ground combat role over to South Vietnamese troops. In May 1972he ordered the mining of North Vietnamese ports and waterways. On October 26, just before the 1972elections, his national security adviser, Henry A.

Kissinger, announced that “peace is the hand.” But the promised settlement resembling the 1954 Geneva accords, collapsed after the elections, and on December 18, Nixon ordered the most relentless bombing of North Vietnam of the war. Peace negotiations were resumed in Paris on Jan. 8, 1973. On January 27 a cease-fire agreement was reached. However, bombing continued in Cambodia until August.
In 1972 Nixon made diplomatic history with visits to Peking and Moscow. In China, Nixon began paving the way for an exchange of unofficial delegations a year later. In Moscow, he entered into a series of trade agreements, a treaty limiting antiballistic missile sites, and an agreement limiting offensive missiles. Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid Brezhnev traveled to Washington in June 1973 and still new accords were reached. A severe test of detente came in the following October as war broke put once more between Israel and Arab nations. Nixon ordered U.S. strategic and tactical forces around the globe onto alert after receiving reports of possible major Soviet intervention in the war.
At home, Nixon inherited at the start of his presidency an overheated boom economy that had resulted in severe inflation. Nixon instituted restrictive budget and monetary policies. By early1970 the rate of inflation had slowed, but the economy over-cooled and the nation slipped into recession. Nixon relaxed monetary policies and plotted a large budget deficit to revive the economy, but again inflation spiraled. Finally in August ’71 Nixon overcame his abhorrence of direct government intervention in the economy and instituted wage and price controls, beginning with a 90-days freeze. At the same time, to improve the international position of the U.S. economy, he took steps to force a realignment of exchange rates and devalue the dollar. Inflation slowed somewhat but spiraled again in 1973, mainly because of rise on food prices caused by massive grain sales to the Soviet Union the previous summer and a second devaluation of the dollar in February 1973.
In his handling of foreign affairs and economy, Nixon had begun an unprecedented centralization of executive power. Although Congress went along with him, many of its members began to chafe at their own seeming relinquishment of power. The initial friction was as much due to the Nixon style as to substance. Nixon dealt with Congress at arm’s length trough a protective screen of White House aides. With complaint from Congress that he had become the most isolated president in history, Nixon began bypassing Congress to achieve his ends. When Congress appropriated more for a program than he wanted, Nixon resorted to presidential veto.

He also began to impound funds by refusing to spend money Congress had appropriated. Nixon also sought to broaden the concept of executive privilege, the unwritten right of every president to assure the confidentiality of private presidential communications. For a time Nixon sought to extend this privilege to his White House and Cabinet aides called to testify before Congressional committees. He ultimately relented in practice, if not in principle, as scandal lessened his muscle over Congress in 1973. He virtually ignored Congress in his execution of foreign policy, rarely extending the courtesy of presidential briefings until policy was cemented.
Nixon’s bent toward sidestepping traditional channels of accountability was seen in his attempts to reorganize the executive branch. In 1972 Nixon proposed replacing seven existing departments with four new ones, But Congress did not act. Immediately after his landslide reelection over Democrat George S. McGovern in 1972 Nixon announced plans to channel department policy through a super-cabinet of several White House counselors. He had already created a new Office of Management and Budget, with greater powers than the old Bureau of the Budget and a Domestic White House Council, which many critics felt was usurping Cabinet power. New howls of outrage resounded in Congress. Nixon’s choice of new Cabinet secretaries at the start of his second tern added to discontent. During his first term his selections had reflected the traditional assortment of politicians and scholars who evinced independence of the administration. His new appointments, on the other hand, reflected only loyalty to Nixon. With the outbreak of scandal, Congress reluctance to challenge the president quickly waned and in November 1973 Congress voted to override Nixon’s veto of a war power bill requiring congressional approval of presidential commitment of U.S. combat troops abroad. The November action was the first symbolic show of the failing confidence of Congress in a president who, it felt, had dealt with it too lightly. Nixon could no longer expect unqualified support as he sought to undo the irreparable damage of what became known as the Watergate scandal.

The Watergate Scandal and Resignation
In January 1973 seven men pleaded guilty or were convicted for their roles in two illegal entries in the spring of 1972 into Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office building in Washington D.C.; they had tried to place taps on two telephones and photograph documents. The men who directed the burglaries, G.

Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were former White House aides. A third, James W. McCord Jr., had been employed by the Committee for the Reelection of the President (CRP), as had Liddy. The entries were financed with secret cash contribution to CRP. McGovern had tried to make the Watergate case a prime issue in the 1972campaign with then unsubstantiated charges that the burglaries were part of a broader Republican plot of illegal campaign sabotage and surveillance that could be traced to Nixon’s office. The issue had no impact. Then in March McCord charged in a letter to U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica, who had presided at the Watergate trial, that ranking White House official were involved in covering up the true dimensions of the scandal and that he and his codefendants had been pressured to remain silent. The same month Nixon repeated earlier assertions that an internal investigation disclosed no White House involvement. But in April Nixon announced that “serious charges” had been brought to his attention as the result of a new inquiry. Many of the charges had already been aired in newspapers as the results of a renewed grand jury inquiry and initial probing by a select Senate committee, chaired by Sam J. Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.). The charges included these allegations: that John N. Mitchell, first director of CRP and Nixon’s long-time friend and his first attorney general, had approved and encouraged the burglaries; and that Nixon’s two top White House aides, John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, had participated in the cover-up, along with White House Counsel John W. Dean III. On April 30 Nixon ordered dean’s resignation and accepted the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst quit at the same time to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest in an investigation of Mitchell, who was his friend and predecessor as attorney general. Elliot L. Richardson replaced Kleindienst. In May Richardson, with Nixon’s concurrence after prodding by Congress, named Harvard law professor Archibald Cox as special federal prosecutor in charge of the Watergate investigation, with the understanding Cox could act without White House interference. The same month Ervin’s committee opened nationally televised hearings into the affair.
In the following months witness after witness confirmed what the press had reported and also added new detail.

Dean testified that it had been his impression from personal conversation with president that Nixon had been aware of the cover-up, which entailed perjury before a grand jury, as early as September 1972. Nixon subsequently acknowledged that he had recently learned of improprieties by some of his aides, but maintained his own noninvolvement. The hearings brought out that all presidential White House conversations had been taped as part of a historical project. Cox and the Ervin committee went to court to obtain tapes of key conversations that might determine Nixon’s involvement after Nixon refused to release them, citing executive privilege. Protection of separation of power, he declared, made it impossible to do so. In August Sirica ordered Nixon to surrender nine tapes subpoenaed by Cox, but Nixon temporized. On October 20 Nixon stated that Cox had exceeded his mandate as an agent of the executive branch and ordered Cox’s dismissal. However, Richardson and his chief deputy, William D. Rucklesshaus, resigned rather than carry out the order. Cries for Nixon’s resignation or impeachment, which had previously come mostly from Democrats, became bipartisan. On October 22 the House Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Peter Rodino (D.N.J.), was directed to begin an investigation into possible grounds for Nixon’s impeachment. On October 23 Nixon agreed to produce the tapes, but on October 31 his attorneys informed Sirica that two subpoenaed tapes never existed, raising deepened questions about Nixon’s probity/ Still later Nixon’s lawyers disclosed that part of a third tape was obliterated. Cries for impeachment grew louder. In early November Nixon, under pressure, appointed Leon Jaworski as a new special prosecutor for Watergate.
The damage of the Watergate scandal was intensified by a number of other scandals. Ehrlichman was among those indicted and convicted in connection with an unsuccessful White House attempt in 1971 to obtain derogatory files on Daniel J. Ellsberg by burglarizing Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Earlier in 1973 Ellsberg’s trial on charges of leaking secret defense department information was dismissed when the government disclosed that Ellsberg had been overheard on an illegal wiretap/ Two campaign workers were jailed for distributing campaign literature libelous to Democratic candidates in the 1972 Florida primaries. Executives of several large corporations were fined after pleading guilty to making illegal corporate campaign contributions to Nixon in 1972.

Still other investigations explored vast amounts of government money used to improve Nixon homes in San Clemente, CA and Key Biscayne, FL; the propriety of a sizable Nixon income tax deduction and a $100,000 cash transfer from industrialist Howard Hughes to Nixon intimate Charles G. Rebozo. A subsequent investigation by the Internal Revenue Service in early 1974 determined that Nixon owned $432,787 in taxes for the years 1969-1972. Although the statue of limitations had elapsed for 1969, Nixon announced that he planned to pay the nearly $200,000 he owned that year. On top of all this, on Oct. 10, 1973, in an unrelated investigation, Spiro T. Agnew resigned as vice-president after a Baltimore grand jury received evidence that Agnew had received kickbacks both while he was governor and vice-president. Nixon nominated as Agnew’s successor Gerald R. Ford Jr. of Michigan, Republican leader of the House. It was the Watergate scandal, however, that ultimately destroyed Nixon’s administration and led to his resignation. Jaworski’s continuing work resulted in the indictments on Mar. 1, 1974 of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and White House and CRP staff members for crimes in connection with the Watergate cover-up. It was later revealed that Nixon also had been named as an “unindicted co-conspirator.” Both Jaworski and the House Judiciary Committee issued more subpoenas for tapes. Nixon ignored the subpoenas, but when it became clear that the tapes had already been turned over Sirica would be made public in the Watergate trials, Nixon released edited transcription of recorded conversations. They were later shown to be at variance with transcripts of the same tapes that had been turned over to the Judiciary Committee by Sirica. The Nixon version, however, did not remove suspicion of complicity by Nixon and his aides. Moreover, it also revealed an amorality in presidential conversations that unleashed a wave of public criticism of Nixon’s respect for the law and public welfare.
Jaworski, in an attempt to obtain Nixon’s compliance with a subpoena for 64 additional tapes for the Watergate trials, appealed to the Supreme Court. Nixon’s lawyers contended that the president had a right to certain the tapes on grounds of executive privilege and the preservation of the separation of powers. The Court, however, on July 24, ruled 8-0 that Nixon must surrender the tapes.
Also in July the House Judiciary Committee, in televised hearings, voted to introduce in the House three articles of impeachment. Supported by Republicans as well as the Democrats, they accused Nixon of obstruction of justice, abuse of presidential power and refusal to obey House subpoenas.

It was evident that Nixon would be impeached.
Then, on August 5, Nixon made public several tapes subpoenaed by Jaworski and at the same time Nixon declared that he had withheld from his lawyers relevant evidence in the tapes. In a tape of a conversation with Haldeman on June 23,1972, days after the Watergate break-in, Nixon explicitly ordered an effort to halt an FBI investigation. The tape thus not only revealed that Nixon had been involved in cover-up activity, but also demonstrated that for two years he had been lying about his knowledge of events. Nixon’s aides and supporters in Congress felt betrayed and displayed their anger publicly. It soon became clear that Nixon’s support had been eroded so drastically that he would certainly be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. On August 8 Nixon announced that he would step down and on August 9, 1974, he became the first U.S. president to resign from office. On September 8 President ford granted Nixon an unconditional pardon for all federal crimes that the former president “committed or may have taken part in” while in office.

Later Years
Nixon retired in disgrace to his estate in San Clemente, CA. In 1976 he was disbarred by New York State, thus ending his law career. In the late 1970’s and the 1980’s , in an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, Nixon wrote a series of memoirs and several books on international affairs and also traveled abroad and met with various world leaders. In 1981 the Nixons moved to Saddle River, N.J., to be near their children. Pat Nixon died of cancer in June 1993. On Apr. 18, 1994, Nixon suffered a massive stroke at his home. He was taken to a hospital in New York City, where he died on Apr. 22, 1994.

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Richard Nixon biography