a. Born January 9th, 1913
b. served from January 20th, 1969 to August 9th, 1974
c. He was a republican
2.
a. born in Yorba Linda California
b.
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c.
a. Nixon as a child
b. Nixon serving as president
c. Nixon with his family
4. Family Background
a. Nixon came from a poor family-his mother was a Quaker and his father had converted from Methodism after their marriage. Nixon said "We were poor, but the glory of it was we didn't know it"."
b. His father opened a gas station and a grocery store in Whittier, California after the family's ranch failed in 1922, and his mother was a stay at home mother
c. Richard had four brothers, Harold, Donald, Edward, and Arthur
d. Nixon studied at Whittier College and graduated with a BA Degree and then went on a full scholarship to Duke University of Law and received a LLB Degree
5. Life Before the Presidency
Before becoming the 38th president of the United States, Richard Nixon began working with a law firm known as Wingert & Bewley in 1937, working on wills and commercial litigation. Prior to this he had applied to work for the F.B.I., and was actually hired but his interview was cancelled last minute due to budget cuts and Nixon did not learn of this mishap until several years later. Also, Richard Nixon was inducted into the Navy in August 1942, but left in 1946 to run against Jerry Voorhis for congressmen. He won this election receiving 65,586 votes to Jerry's 49,994 votes.He also was the vice president to president Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 until 1961.
6. Life and Accomplishments as President
Richard Nixon was elected presidents on January 20th, in 1969 with Gerald Ford as his vice president and Melvin R. Laird as his Secretary of Defense and William P. Rogers as Secretary of State. His ascension to the presidential seat came from a very public campaign that was prominently in front of news channel cameras. He believed in unifying partisan politicians and making conversations between both parties less heated by reducing rhetoric and learning from each other when "we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."
Nixon's first overseas travel trip as president was to Europe for eight days to discuss world affairs. The trip started in Brussels, and then to Bonn, Berlin, and finally Rome. However, he is most praised for his work in China, where Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger bypassed Cabinet officials and began talking to the Chinese communist party chairman Mao Zedong in historic meetings whose secrecy allowed them to prepare political climate in their countries for the contact. Nixon famously said "There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation."
After reopening American relations with China, he signed one of the first treaties limiting the nuclear arms race of the 60's. He also worked to end segregation in the south. However, even after calling the phone call from the white house to Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong during their moonwalk "the most historic phone call ever made from the white house, he did not keep funding to N.A.S.A. as high as it was in the early 60's and turned down proposals for a permanent moon base and a manned expedition to Mars.
Nixon ended the drafts for men to go into the Vietnam war in 1973, two years before the Vietnam War ended. He was also the only president to achieve a balanced national budget. He is also largely responsible for the development of the Environmental Protection Agency. He also introduced many anti-crime laws, and began the process of ending the Cold War.
Nixon fought to end foreign oil price gouging and instituted the Equal Opportunity Employment and Title IX which is a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972. The amendment states that "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance...". Nixon also approved a five year cooperative program between N.A.S.A. and the Soviet Space Program which culminated in the 1975 joint mission of an American Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecraft linking in space.
Nixon did a large amount of work in desegregating schools in the south. After his inauguration he put together a task force of both black and white workers to help determine how to desegregate schools in the south. Nixon also enforced court orders requiring the use of busing of children from outside local neighborhoods which appealed to both white children living in suburban areas and black children who may or may not have been living in more impoverished areas of the south. Nixon endorsed affirmative action to aid minorities and help the Equal Rights Amendment pass in 1972. He also appointed more females to administration positions than his predecessor Lyndon Johnson did.
With the title of "President" next to his name, Nixon advocated "New Federalism" which devolved power to the states and local elected officials. In 1971 Nixon pushed for health insurance reform to benefit poor families with dependent minors. He was also concerned with drug use amongst soldiers in the Vietnam War and pledged to cut sources of supply abroad and increase funds for education and rehabilitation facilities. He also called for more money towards sickle cell anemia research following its rising threat as a national epidemic.
7.
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE.
By JOHN HERBERS
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
Washington, Aug. 8 -- Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, announced tonight that he had given up his long and arduous fight to remain in office and would resign, effective at noon tomorrow.
At that hour, Gerald Rudolph Ford, whom Mr. Nixon nominated for Vice President last Oct. 12, will be sworn in as the 38th President, to serve out the 895 days remaining in Mr. Nixon's second term.
Less than two years after his landslide re-election victory, Mr. Nixon, in a conciliatory address on national television, said that he was leaving not with a sense of bitterness but with a hope that his departure would start a "process of healing that is so desperately needed in America."
He spoke of regret for any "injuries" done "in the course of the events that led to this decision." He acknowledged that some of his judgments had been wrong.
The 61-year old Mr. Nixon, appearing calm and resigned to his fate as a victim of the Watergate scandal, became the first President in the history of the Republic to resign from office. Only 10 months earlier Spiro Agnew resigned the Vice-Presidency.
Speaks of Pain at Yielding Post
Mr. Nixon, speaking from the Oval Office, where his successor will be sworn in tomorrow, may well have delivered his most effective speech since the Watergate scandals began to swamp his Administration in early 1973.
In tone and content, the 15-minute address was in sharp contrast to his frequently combative language of the past, especially his first "farewell" appearance- that of 1962, when he announced he was retiring from politics after losing the California governorship race and declared that the news media would not have "Nixon to kick around" anymore.
Yet he spoke tonight of how painful it was for him to give up the office.
"I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so," he said.
Puts 'Interests of America First'
"I have never been a quitter," he said. "To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body." But he said that he had decided to put "the interests of America first."
Conceding that he did not have the votes in Congress to escape impeachment in the House and conviction in the Senate, Mr. Nixon said, "To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home."
"Therefore," he continued, "I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office."
Then he turned again to his sorrow at leaving. Although he did not mention it in his speech, Mr. Nixon had looked forward to being President when the United States celebrates its 200th anniversary in 1976.
"I feel a great sadness," he said.
Mr. Nixon expressed confidence in Mr. Ford to assume the office, "to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us."
"By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America," he said. "I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that events that if some of my judgments were wrong -- and some were wrong -- they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interests of the nation."
Further, he said he was leaving "with no bitterness" toward those who had opposed him.
"So let us all now join together in affirming that common commitment and in helping our new President succeed for the benefit of all Americans," he said.
As he has many times in the past, Mr. Nixon listed what he considered his most notable accomplishments of his five and half years in office -- his initiatives in foreign policy, which he said had gone a long way toward establishing a basis for world peace.
Theodore Roosevelt Is Quoted
And, at the end, he expressed his own philosophy -- that to succeed is to be involved in struggle. In this he quoted Theodore Roosevelt about the value of being "the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood" and who "spends himself in a worthy cause."
After spending himself in a long political career, Mr. Nixon is scheduled to fly to his home in San Clemente, Calif., and retirement tomorrow while Mr. Ford is being sworn in the Oval Office.
A White House spokesman said tonight that Mr. and Mrs. Nixon and their family would bid farewell to Cabinet members and staff personnel at 9:30 A. M. tomorrow in the East Room. Then they will board a helicopter at 10 A. M. for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base, where they will emplane on the Spirit of '76, a jet aircraft, for their flight to San Clemente.
Ronald L. Ziegler, the Presidential adviser and press secretary, also said that Mr. Nixon's letter of resignation would be delivered to the office of Secretary of State, Kissinger in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House by noon tomorrow.
Mr. Nixon's announcement came only two days after he told his Cabinet that he would not resign but would let the constitutional impeachment process run its course, even though it was evident he would be removed from office after a trial by the Senate.
In the next 48 hours the pressures for him to resign and turn the reins of the Government over to Mr. Ford became overwhelming.
His chances of being acquitted were almost hopeless. Senator Barry, Goldwater, the Arizona conservative who was the Republican Presidential candidate in 1964, told him that he had no more than 15 votes in the Senate, far short of the 34 he needed to be sure of escaping conviction. Members of his own staff, including Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., the White House chief of staff, strongly recommended that he step down in the national interest.
In the end only a small minority of his former supporters were urging him to stay and pledging to give him their support. It was his friends, not his legions of enemies, that brought the crucial pressures for resignation.
Seventeen months of almost constant disclosures of Watergate and related scandals brought a steady attrition of support, in the country and in Congress, for what many authorities believed was the most powerful Presidency in the history of our nation.
However, a Presidential statement of last Monday and three transcripts of Presidential conversations that Mr. Nixon chose to make public ultimately precipitated the crush of events of the last week.
In that statement, Mr. Nixon admitted, as the transcript showed, that, on June 23, 1972, he ordered a halt to the investigation of the break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex here six days earlier by persons in the employ of agents of Mr. Nixon's re-election campaign. He also admitted that he had kept the evidence from both his attorneys and the House Judiciary Committee, which had recommended that the House impeach him on three general charges.
Then came the avalanche. Republicans, Southern Democrats and others who had defended Mr. Nixon said that these actions constituted the evidence needed to support the article of impeachment approved by the House Judiciary Committee charging obstruction of justice. And it gave new support to other charges that Mr. Nixon had widely abused his office by bringing undue Presidential pressures to bear on sensitive Government agencies.
As the pressures mounted and Mr. Nixon held publicly to his resolve not to resign, the capital was thrown into a turmoil. A number of Senators anxious for a resignation began publicly predicting one.
At the White House yesterday, Mr. Nixon met in his White House offices with Mrs. Nixon and his two daughters, Mrs. David Eisenhower and Mrs. Edward F. Cox, and with his close aides. Members of his staff, acting independently of the Congressmen, sent him memorandums he had requested as to their recommendations. Most called for resignation rather than taking the country through a painful impeachment debate and vote in the House and a trial in the Senate.
Last night, Raymond K. Price and other speech writers were ordered to prepare a resignation statement for use tonight. Secretary of State Kissinger met with the President late in the evening and Mr. Nixon told him that he would resign in the national interest.
At 11 A.M. today, as crowds for the third day gathered along Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House, President Nixon summoned Mr. Ford to his Oval Office and officially informed him that he would submit his resignation tomorrow to the Secretary of State, as provided by Federal law, and that Mr. Ford would become President.
Shortly after noon, Mr. Ziegler, the President's confidant and press secretary, his face saddened and weary, appeared in the crowded White House press room and announced that the President would go on national radio and television tonight to address the American people. As with most previous such announcements, he did not say what the President would talk about.
But by that time, other Presidential aides were confirming that Mr. Nixon planned to resign, and the tensions that had been building for days subsided.
At 7:30 P.M. Mr. Nixon met in his office in the Executive Office Building with a bipartisan Congressional leadership group -- James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi, President pro tem of the Senate; Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, the Senate majority leader, Hugh Scott, Republican of Pennsylvania, the Senate minority floor leader, Carl Albert, Democrat of Oklahoma, the Speaker of the House, and John J. Rhodes, Republican of Arizona, the minority leader. The meeting was to give them formal notice of his resignation.
Among the White House staff today there was a sadness but there were no tears, according to those there. Mr. Nixon, who was described as wretched and gray yesterday while wrestling with his decision, was described today as relaxed. To some, he appeared relieved.
He ordered Mr. Price to begin drafting the resignation speech yesterday, even before he made his decision to resign, aides said. Five drafts of it were written before it was turned over to Mr. Nixon to make his own changes.
It was exactly six years ago last night that Mr. Nixon was nominated on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention to be the party's nominee for President, a note of irony that did not escape members of the President's staff.
That evening marked the beginning of an ascension to power that was to put the Nixon mark on an important segment of history. After a first term marked by innovations in foreign policy and a return of resources to the state and local governments in domestic policy, Mr. Nixon in 1972, won re-election with 60.7 per cent of the vote.
In early 1973, as he ended American military involvement in the Vietnam war and as he moved to strengthen the powers of his office in a multitude of ways, his popularity rating in the Gallup Poll registered 68 per cent. But as the Watergate disclosures broke his rating dropped quickly and was below 30 per cent before the end of the year.
Mr. Nixon made a number of counterattacks to win back his lost popularity. He campaigned from time to time across the country as if he was running for office. He disclosed information about his taxes and property. He hired a succession of lawyers to defend him in the courts and in Congress.
He made television and radio appearances. He ordered his subordinates to step up their activities to show that the Government's business was moving ahead. He made foreign trips to show he was still a world leader.
- this article explains how Richard Nixon resigned and why.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0808.html
The Wall Street Journal Article
by Lewis E. Lehrman
On the afternoon of Friday, Aug. 13, 1971, high-ranking White House and Treasury Department officials gathered secretly in President Richard Nixon's lodge at Camp David. Treasury Secretary John Connally, on the job for just seven months, was seated to Nixon's right. During that momentous afternoon, however, newcomer Connally was front and center, put there by a solicitous president. Nixon, gossiped his staff, was smitten by the big, self-confident Texan whom the president had charged with bringing order into his administration's bumbling economic policies.
In the past, Nixon had expressed economic views that tended toward "conservative" platitudes about free enterprise and free markets. But the president loved histrionic gestures that grabbed the public's attention. He and Connally were determined to present a comprehensive package of dramatic measures to deal with the nation's huge balance of payments deficit, its anemic economic growth, and inflation.
Dramatic indeed: They decided to break up the postwar Bretton Woods monetary system, to devalue the dollar, to raise tariffs, and to impose the first peacetime wage and price controls in American history. And they were going to do it on the weekend—heralding this astonishing news with a Nixon speech before the markets opened on Monday.
The cast of characters gathered at Camp David was impressive. It included future Treasury Secretary George Shultz, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, and future Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, then undersecretary for monetary affairs at Treasury. At the meeting that afternoon Nixon reminded everyone of the importance of secrecy. They were forbidden even to tell their wives where they were. Then Nixon let Connally take over the meeting.
The most dramatic Connally initiative was to "close the gold window," whereby foreign nations had been able to exchange U.S. dollars for U.S. gold—an exchange guaranteed under the monetary system set up under American leadership at Bretton Woods, N.H., in July 1944. Recently the markets had panicked. Great Britain had tried to redeem $3 billion for American gold. So large were the official dollar debts in the hands of foreign authorities that America's gold stock would be insufficient to meet the swelling official demand for American gold at the convertibility price of $35 per ounce.
On Thursday, Connally had rushed to Washington from a Texas vacation. He and Nixon hurriedly decided to act unilaterally, not only to suspend convertibility of the dollar to gold, but also to impose wage and price controls. Nixon's speechwriter William Safire attended the conference in order to prepare the president's speech to the nation. In his book "Before the Fall," Safire recalled being told on the way to Camp David that closing the gold window was a possibility. Despite the many international ramifications of what the administration would do, no officials from the State Department or the National Security Council were invited to Camp David. The president had little patience or understanding of the disputes among his economic team members. He found wearisome the mumbo-jumbo from Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns. But the president had determined he would have a unified economic team and a unified economic policy, no matter what the consequences. So the White House dutifully leaked stories designed to undermine and humiliate Burns, as Connally waited in the wings with his "New Economic Policy."
At Camp David, Connally argued: "It's clear that we have to move in the international field, to close the gold window, not change the price of gold, and encourage the dollar to float." Burns timidly objected but was easily flattered by the president. By the evening of Aug. 15, Burns was on board with terminating the last vestige of dollar convertibility to gold, depreciating the dollar on the foreign exchanges, imposing higher tariffs, and ultimately ordering price and wage controls.
Nixon and Safire put together a speech to be televised Sunday night. It had taken only a few hours during that August 1971 weekend for Nixon to decide to sever the nation's last tenuous link to the historic American gold standard, a monetary standard that had been the constitutional bedrock (Article I, Sections 8 and 10) of the American dollar and of America's economic prosperity for much of the previous two centuries.
At least one Camp David participant, Paul Volcker, regretted what transpired that weekend. The "Nixon Shock" was followed by a decade of one of the worst inflations of American history and the most stagnant economy since the Great Depression. The price of gold rose to $800 from $35.
The purchasing power of a dollar saved in 1971 under Nixon has today fallen to 18 pennies (see the nearby graph). Nixon's new economic policy sowed chaos for a decade. The nation and the world reaped the whirlwind.
-this article explains Nixon's national address stating America's economic condition at the time.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904007304576494073418802358
Washington Post Article
"One year of Watergate is enough," President Nixon declared in his State of the Union address in January 1974. But the embattled president could not put the issue behind him. Special prosecutor Jaworski and the Senate Watergate Committee continued to demand that the White House turn over tapes and transcripts. As public support for Nixon waned, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives began to consider the ultimate sanction for a president--impeachment.
Nixon cast himself as a defender of the presidency. He insisted that he had made mistakes but broke no laws. He said he had no prior knowledge of the burglary and did not know about the cover-up until early 1973. To release the tapes, he said, would harm future chief executives. The pressure on Nixon mounted in March 1974, when the special prosecutor indicted former Attorney General John Mitchell, former aides Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and four other staffers for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in connection with the Watergate burglary. While the grand jury wanted to indict Nixon himself, Jaworski declined to do so doubting the constitutionality of indicting a sitting president.To mollify his critics, Nixon announced in April 1974 the release of 1,200 pages of transcripts of conversations between him and his aides. The conversations, "candid beyond any papers ever made public by a President," in the words of The Post stoked more outrage. Even Nixon's most loyal conservative supporters voiced dismay about profanity-laced discussions in the White House around how to raise blackmail money and avoid perjury.
Nixon's legal defense began to crumble in May when a federal court ruled in favor of Jaworksi's subpoena for the White House tapes. Nixon's lawyers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. His political position faltered in June, amid reports that all 21 Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee were prepared to vote for impeachment. On July 24, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the White House to hand over the tapes to the special prosecutor. Two days later the Judicary Committee approved one article of impeachment to be voted on by the entire House.
When Nixon released the tapes a week later, a June 23, 1972, conversation showed that Nixon had, contrary to repeated claims of innocence, played a leading role in the cover-up from the very start. Dubbed "the smoking gun" tape, this recording eliminated what little remained of Nixon's support. Even his closest aides told him he had to resign or face the almost certain prospect of impeachment.
On August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation. "By taking this action," he said in a subdued yet dramatic television address from the Oval Office, "I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America." In a rare admission of error, Nixon said: "I deeply regret any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision." In a final speech to the White House staff, a teary-eyed Nixon told his audience, "Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."
-This article explains Nixon's involvement in the Watergate scandal in which he used agents to harass his political opponents http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/part3.html
8. Nixon's Domestic Policies
Nixon's most important stances on domestic polices were towards issues that he felt were hitting America hard at the time of his presidency. He tackled the economy which was suffering from war costs by helping to end the Vietnam and Cold wars. He encouraged environmental awareness and helped start the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon also desegregated southern schools and enforced equality in the south. Even though he poured less money into N.A.S.A., than previous presidents, he still continued space explorations by approving expeditions with the Soviet Union's space program.
9. Foreign Policy Accomplishments
Nixon used his people skills to keep relations between the U.S. and other countries as peaceful as possible. With the advice of his public speaking teacher in mind ("Remember, speaking is conversation ... don't shout at people. Talk to them. Converse with them."), he improved relations with China's communist party, helped to end the Vietnam War, and aided in ending the Cold War involving the Soviet Union, which led to better relations and a joint space mission program between the Soviets and the United States of America. He wished to avoid combat assistance from allies when possible and gave assistance to countries like Israel for them to defend themselves from potential threats. He was also the first U.S. president to visit Israel.
10. Conclusion
In conclusion, president Nixon was to me both weak and strong. He was strong enough to keep the country afloat economically, to improve relations with foreign countries, and bring down crude oil prices. Also he was also weak in resorting to less than honest acts of trickery while in his presidency, using his power to harassing political opponents, and trying to destroy evidence of his wrong doings by burning record tapes containing proof of his actions. However, all of the following cowardly actions led to the very courageous action of his resignation, which served as a testament not to his sin, but to his final acknowledgement of his sins, actions which he in the end knew were wrong, leading him to conclude that the presidential seat was a position he was no longer worthy of.
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