(1913 – 1994) United States president, 1969–74, Richard Nixon began his political career as a conservative McCarthyite member of Congress from California who pursued Alger Hiss.

He twice served as Eisenhower’s vice-president and then narrowly lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Following an embarrassing defeat in the California gubernatorial election of 1962, he seemed finished. But the resilient and resourceful Nixon bounced back to win the 1968 Republican Party nomination, fending off his more conservative and liberal adversaries (Ronald Reagan and Rockefeller, respectively), stealing a page from the racist demagogue George Wallace in fashioning what he later called “The Great Silent Majority of Americans,” and squeezing out a surprisingly close victory over a Hubert Humphrey battered and bruised by the events of 1968 (the Vietnam War, urban riots, campus disorder, the chaos of the Chicago Democratic Convention).

Nixon built a Southern strategy which thrived on the resentments experienced by many white Southerners and white, ethnic workers in the North. He slowed the pace of school integration, attacked “forced busing,” tried unsuccessfully to appoint segregationists to a Supreme Court which would support abortion rights in Roe v.

Wade (1973) and, ingeniously supported affirmative action as a wedge issue to divide trade unions from minorities.

Nixon’s domestic programs were remarkably liberal, in part because of the Democratic congressional majorities he confronted. Under his watch, Congress passed significant legislation regarding the environment, senior citizens, Social Security worker safety; important proposals regarding healthcare and a guaranteed national income (Family Assistance Plan) were considered before faltering. Nixon appropriated Keynesian measures to address mounting economic problems exacerbated by the OPEC oil boycott of 1973.

Foreign policy however, was Nixon’s preferred domain. He campaigned with a “secret plan” to end the war in Indochina. His efforts included: a contradictory mixture of great power and diplomacy (efforts to woo both the Soviets and the Chinese to impose a settlement on the Vietnamese); a madman approach which tried, unsuccessfully to bluff the Vietnamese into concessions by threatening to use nuclear weapons; Vietnamization, which sought to sustain domestic support through cutting US forces and, therefore, casualties and relying on air power; and, finally a more hawkish agenda which included the secret bombing of Cambodia, complicity in the overthrow of Sihanouk, the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, the mining of Haiphong harbor and the Christmas bombings of 1972. Finally, he and his “odd couple” aide, Henry Kissinger, fashioned a peace agreement which provided a “decent interval” before, in 1975, the Vietnamese communists crushed their Saigon adversaries and reunified Vietnam.

Nixon’s greatest accomplishment was his recognition of China and his efforts to achieve deténte with the Soviets. These were countered by his Vietnam failures and his support for right-wing dictatorships, for example Marcos, the Shah, South African apartheid and his complicity in the military coup which overthrew the democratically elected Socialist Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

Finally the Watergate scandal revealed Nixon’s least attractive qualities—his paranoia, his bigotry his resentments. The investigations uncovered illegal campaign funding, abuses of power and conspiracy to cover up crimes. Nixon’s taping system provided the “smoking gun” which finally forced him to resign in disgrace in August 1974.