Richard Nixon

7 Key excerpts on "Richard Nixon"

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  Hatred of America's Presidents

  Personal Attacks on the White House from Washington to Trump

  • Lori Cox Han(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  37. Richard M. Nixon Born: January 9, 1913 Died: April 22, 1994 Time in Office: 37th President of the United States, January 20, 1969, to August 9, 1974

  Election Results: 1960 Election: 49.5% of popular vote, 219 (40.8%) Electoral College votes; 1968 Election: 43.4% of popular vote, 301 (55.9%) Electoral College votes; 1972 Election: 60.7% of popular vote, 520 (96.7%) Electoral College votes

  Spouse: Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan (m. 1940) Children: Patricia and Julie

  Few figures in American life have aroused such strong negative feelings as Richard M. Nixon. Despite his enormous political successes, including one of the largest electoral landslides in the history of presidential elections in 1972, Nixon remained throughout his career the target of public ridicule and animus. Many have sought to account for this curious capacity to mobilize winning popular majorities while simultaneously producing such negative responses. Some point to his psychology, others to his character, and others to lapses in public morality. His supporters maintain that Nixon was opposed, even hated, by liberal elites because he defeated their agenda and represented the voice of the forgotten middle America rather than vocal liberal constituencies such as racial minorities and left-wing activists. But whatever the source for this unique combination of political success and strong political backlash, Nixon became iconic as the corrupt, power-hungry, and ultimately tragically flawed American political leader. As the only president to have ever resigned the office as a result of Watergate, arguably the worst political scandal in modern American history, Nixon was the recipient of a tremendous storm of criticism of sometimes vitriolic intensity. However, Nixon’s acute sense of the animosity directed against him originated well before the Watergate scandal began to be reported in the pages of the Washington Post

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  Political Leadership in an Era of Decolonisation

  Case Studies from Across the Globe

  • Malcolm Murfett(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 The rise and fall of Richard Nixon as a global leader Umberto Tulli DOI: 10.4324/9781003426165-8 Towards the end of his life, Richard Nixon drew a balance of his years at the White House: I will be known historically for two things. Watergate and the opening to China … I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but Watergate, that silly, silly thing, is going to rank up there historically with what I did here. 1 He was not pessimistic at all in making this statement. Watergate obscured much of what he had realised as President, especially in international affairs. By the time of his resignation in August 1974, with the lowest approval rating for a sitting president (a mere 24%), Nixon had achieved several unprecedented advances in foreign policy: détente with the Soviets and international agreements to limit the nuclear race; a redefinition of global financial relations; the end of the Vietnam War; an unprecedented agreement in the Middle East between Egypt and Israel; the opening to the People’s Republic of China; and a new – albeit short-lived – domestic consensus regarding foreign policy. While this record can be accurately characterised as one of the ‘most pro-active and dynamic of the Cold War presidencies,’ as scholar Asaf Siniver wrote, it was nevertheless subject to criticism and, to some extent, proved ephemeral and short-lived. 2 Moreover, most of these initiatives were not radically new. For example, although the Johnson administration was entrapped in the ongoing military escalation in Vietnam, it had been diligently searching for an exit strategy from such a conflict. Similarly, Nixon’s détente with the Soviets was based on policy the Kennedy administration had initiated in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. Although it was proactive, Nixon’s foreign policy was less revolutionary than generally credited, in terms of both means and ends

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  The President as Leader

  • Michael Eric Siegel(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 2

  Richard Milhous Nixon, Watergate, and the Transformation of the Presidency

  Courtesy: Richard Nixon Library

  R ichard Nixon wanted to be the “architect of his times,” according to Elliot Richardson, who held three cabinet posts under Nixon and resigned from the last one for refusing to follow Nixon’s orders to dismiss a Watergate special prosecutor.1 Though he possessed the intellectual power and strategic insight to be such an architect, Nixon did not possess many of the traits normally associated with successful politicians. Remarkably, he was uncomfortable with people and in groups, and was “in his element … alone with his yellow pad and thoughts.”2 Nixon sometimes referred to himself as an “introvert in an extrovert’s business.”3 Political science professor James David Barber, author of the pioneering book The Presidential Character, said that “In essaying Nixon’s personal style the easiest place to begin is with the elimination of personal relations as a primary focus of his energy in adapting to political roles.”4

  Indeed, Nixon, who ascended to the presidency in January 1969, structured the White House and the executive branch of government in ways that reinforced his preference for isolation and his predilection for centralized power. For instance, only four people had walk-in access to the Oval Office,5 and anyone else—including his cabinet secretaries—who sought an audience with the president would have to arrange an appointment through Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman.6

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  High Crimes and Misdemeanors

  A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump

  • Frank O. Bowman III(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 The Fall of President Richard Nixon On August 8, 1974, Richard M. Nixon sat behind the desk in the Oval Office of the White House, looked into a camera lens, and announced that he would resign the presidency effective at noon on the following day. Two days before, a delegation of senior Republican lawmakers – House Minority Leader John Rhodes, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and the dean of senatorial conservatives, Barry Goldwater – visited the president to tell him that impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate were near certainties. In the Senate, they said, he might secure as few as a dozen not guilty votes. Goldwater discussed the three articles of impeachment recently approved by the House Judiciary Committee, saying that good lawyering might secure acquittal on Articles 1 and 3. When Nixon asked about the second article, alleging abuse of presidential power, Goldwater replied, “I’m leaning that way myself, Mr. President.” 1 President Nixon’s resignation was the finale of a two-year saga which began with the famous “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex that lent its name to the crisis and its suffix to every real and imagined political scandal since. Although the formal impeachment process never got farther than committee approval of articles, the Nixon affair is customarily thought of as establishing a range of important precedents. Some have to do with the definition of impeachable conduct, because as we will see, Nixon’s opponents accused him of the widest array of misbehavior of any impeachment controversy in American history. But the Nixon case may be most important in what it taught about how presidential conduct is to be investigated. In the trial of Andrew Johnson, there was never any serious dispute about the facts. Johnson was impeached for his official acts and public speeches. The question was whether what he did was properly impeachable.

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  The Post-Heroic Presidency

  Leveraged Leadership in an Age of Limits

  • Michael A. Genovese, Todd L. Belt(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  It was a new era that brought about an opening of relations with China, pursued détente, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviets, a period when the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia was expanded, then ended, and when a relatively new approach and strategic orientation was introduced into U.S. foreign policy thinking.

  Under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, a reexamination and reorientation of the U.S. role in the world produced a new vision. There was an acceptance of the changing role and capacity of the United States, a recognition of the limits as well as uses of power, and an attempt to match the United States’ strategic vision with its capabilities. Had it not been for Watergate and the self-destruction of the Nixon presidency, there is no telling how the early stages of the Nixon foreign policy revolution might have eventually changed the United States and the world.

  As was the case in so many other aspects of his presidency, the foreign policy Nixon promoted was full of irony and contradiction. How could one of the United States’ premier anticommunists open the door to China and promote détente and arms control with the Soviet Union? How could the politician who kept promoting an “America first” attitude negotiate a deal with the Soviets, which effectively granted them nuclear parity with the United States? How could a president who promoted U.S. hegemony relinquish economic power and prestige? What accounts for these metamorphoses?

  Even Nixon’s most skeptical critics recognized that there truly was a different and more sophisticated approach to U.S. foreign policy under his watch. Nixon had a vision—a new strategic orientation—and attempted to take the steps necessary to bring this vision to fruition. One could argue that Nixon’s vision was inappropriate or incorrect, but the fact that Nixon had an integrated, complex, and sophisticated worldview seems clear. What that vision was, on what ideas it was based, how it fit into the realities of world politics, and how it attempted to deal with the relative decline are the subjects of this chapter.

  By the time he rose to the presidency, Richard Nixon had a clearer idea of where he wanted to lead the nation in foreign affairs than in any other area of policy. Nixon felt that the domestic arena could be run by a cabinet, but only the president could lead in foreign policy. Foreign policy was Richard Nixon’s domain, the area in which he felt most comfortable, most in command. And Nixon had some well-defined ideas as to where he wanted to lead the nation, the Western alliance, and the world.

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  A Strained Partnership? : US–UK relations in the era of détente, 1969–77

  • Thomas Robb(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Many existing accounts fail to actually do this and, worse yet, several historians have subscribed to a ‘personality disorder’ theory of the Nixon presidency. For these commentators, Nixon’s personality traits – especially the Introduction 15 ‘darker’ elements – largely explain the course of US foreign policy under his tutelage. 49 Such is the power of this train of thought that work undertaken by one usually authoritative author opens with the sentence: ‘Richard Nixon was a peculiar person.’ 50 This work prefers to avoid placing so much emphasis upon the supposedly peculiar personalities of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. This is not to downplay the role of individuals in making and executing foreign policy. As one leading commentator on international relations theory notes, ‘the interna- tional distribution of power can drive countries’ behaviour only by influencing the decisions of flesh and blood officials’. 51 Given this, US foreign policy is better understood by contextualising the world situation, as understood by US policy- makers at the time. 52 Thus, structural factors, domestic interests, and identity politics all influenced the decisions undertaken by US policy-makers. 53 It is by taking this approach that one can better appreciate and explain why certain policy choices were undertaken throughout the period. 54 On taking office in January 1969, Nixon was confronted with a myriad of domestic and foreign policy problems: a worsening economy, strategic nuclear parity with the USSR and, most pressing of all, the ongoing Vietnam War. 55 The domestic discontent the Vietnam War created had undermined Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and Nixon was aware that seeking a solution to Vietnam was as much a domestic as a foreign policy imperative. Vietnam, however, was only part of a more general problem that, in Nixon’s assessment, the US faced at the onset of his presidency.

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  Know All About Richard Nixon Political Era

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  Resignation In light of his loss of political support and the near certainty of impeachment, Nixon resigned the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974, after addressing the nation on television the previous evening. The resignation speech was delivered on August 8, 1974, at 9:01 pm Eastern time from the Oval Office and was carried live on radio and television. The core of the speech was Nixon's announcement that Gerald Ford, as Vice President, would succeed to the presidency, effective at noon Eastern time the next day. Around this announcement, he discussed his feelings about his presidential work and general political issues that would ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ need attention once he left. He never admitted to criminal wrongdoing, although he conceded errors of judgment. During the Watergate scandal, Nixon's approval rating fell to 23%. On May 28, 2009, speaking to Republicans in Litchfield Beach, South Carolina, Ed Nixon said that his brother did not resign in disgrace but resigned in honor. It was a disappointment to him because his missions were cut short. He also said that his brother held the office of president in high regard. Judicial appointments The highlighted countries are those visited by Richard Nixon during his presidency. He was the first president to visit many high profile countries. Nixon appointed the following justices to the Supreme Court of the United States: Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice in 1969, Harry Andrew Blackmun in 1970, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr. in 1972, and William Rehnquist later that year. Along with his four Supreme Court appointments, Nixon appointed 46 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, and 181 judges to the United States district courts. Nixon formally nominated one person, Charles A. Bane, for a federal appellate judgeship, who was never confirmed.

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