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U.S. Presidents & Presidency: Nixon

A topic guide covering the Presidents of the United States. This is an ongoing project. As such, additional individuals will be added over time.

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon served as the 37th president of the United States from 1969 - 1974. Nixon resigned from the presidency for his role in the Watergate scandal. Prior to his role as president, he served as a representative and was the vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

Nixon died on April 22, 1994 in New York City, NY. 

Resources

Reference, Archives, & Primary Sources

Nixon By Nixon: In His Own Words

Nixon and Watergate

By the standards of his later Republican successors, President Richard Nixon was a center or even liberal Republican. Nixon won easily in 1972 against George McGovern, but was ruined by revelations over the next two years that he had known of a break-in of McGovern's campaign headquarters and had tried to orchestrate a cover-up. He resigned in disgrace in 1974.

Source: Kanopy

Perspectives

Richard Nixon

From a prize-winning biographer comes the defining portrait of a man who led America in a time of turmoil and left us a darker age. We live today, John A. Farrell shows, in a world Richard Nixon made.   At the end of WWII, navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returned from the Pacific and set his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now-legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. The story of that transformation is the stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial biography of the president who came to embody postwar American resentment and division.      Within four years of his first victory, Nixon was a U.S. senat∨ in six, the vice president of the United States of America. "Few came so far, so fast, and so alone," Farrell writes. Nixon's sins as a candidate were legion; and in one unlawful secret plot, as Farrell reveals here, Nixon acted to prolong the Vietnam War for his own political purposes. Finally elected president in 1969, Nixon packed his staff with bright young men who devised forward-thinking reforms addressing health care, welfare, civil rights, and protection of the environment. It was a fine legacy, but Nixon cared little for it. He aspired to make his mark on the world stage instead, and his 1972 opening to China was the first great crack in the Cold War.      Nixon had another legacy, too: an America divided and polarized. He was elected to end the war in Vietnam, but his bombing of Cambodia and Laos enraged the antiwar movement. It was Nixon who launched the McCarthy era, who played white against black with a "southern strategy," and spurred the Silent Majority to despise and distrust the country's elites. Ever insecure and increasingly paranoid, he persuaded Americans to gnaw, as he did, on grievances--and to look at one another as enemies. Finally, in August 1974, after two years of the mesmerizing intrigue and scandal of Watergate, Nixon became the only president to resign in disgrace.      Richard Nixon is a gripping and unsparing portrayal of our darkest president. Meticulously researched, brilliantly crafted, and offering fresh revelations, it will be hailed as a master work.

The Nixon Tapes

The famous -- and infamous -- Nixon White House tapes that reveal President Richard Nixon uncensored, unfiltered, and in his own words President Nixon's voice-activated taping system captured every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and other key locations in the White House, and at Camp David -- 3,700 hours of recordings between 1971 and 1973. Yet less than 5 percent of those conversations have ever been transcribed and published. Now, thanks to professor Luke Nichter's massive effort to digitize and transcribe the tapes, the world can finally read an unprecedented account of one of the most important and controversial presidencies in U.S. history. The Nixon Tapes, with annotations and commentary by Nichter and Professor Douglas Brinkley, offers a selection of fascinating scenes from the year Nixon opened relations with China, negotiated the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union, and won a landslide reelection victory. All the while, the growing shadow of Watergate and Nixon's political downfall crept ever closer.The Nixon Tapes provides a unique glimpse into a flawed president's hubris, paranoia, and political genius.

The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It

Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA's widespread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after Nixon was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of his involvement in Watergate. Former White House Counsel John W Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Nixon's secret recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives.

Cold War Progress: Nixon