Richard Nixon summary

It was the summer of 1945, and victory for the Allies in World War II was assured. The United States needed to prepare for peace. Now, instead of ships and tanks, they needed lawyers to settle contracts.

Lieutenant Richard Nixon had trained in law, although his pre-Navy career was unimpressive. Newly returned from the Solomon Islands, he was sent to an aeronautics complex in Maryland to negotiate with some accountants.

The serious-minded man in his early thirties was taking over from Lieutenant John Renneburg, another Navy officer. They fell into conversation. Renneburg asked Nixon what he planned to do next.

Nixon wasn’t sure. He could stay in service if he wanted. A business career in the glitz of Manhattan was possible; he and his wife, Pat, loved the city. Or there was always his old law firm in his run-down hometown of Whittier, California.

But he’d also just received a letter – followed up by a telephone call late at night, when the long-distance rates were cheaper. A Whittier man called Herman Perry had invited him to run for Congress.

Renneburg was impressed by the ponderous young fellow. He urged Nixon to say yes. At the very least, he mused, Nixon might get some law clients out of it.

As you’ll hear in these blinks, he got a lot more than that.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• how Nixon became the youngest vice president in a century;
• why he lost the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy; and
• how he ended up on the path to Watergate.

Dick’s background was humble, but his ascent through college and the Navy made him a model Republican candidate. He impressed everyone with his serious, intelligent speeches about life as a veteran, and he preached a fairly centrist brand of liberalism. His appeal was broad.

But simply making a good impression wasn’t enough. He also had to make his opponent – the Democratic incumbent, Jerry Voorhis – look bad, even though Voorhis’s record was solid.

There was something in the air in those post-war years, Nixon realized: a growing fear of Communism. As it happened, Voorhis’s greatest achievement in Congress, back in 1940, had been the Voorhis Act – strict anti-Communist legislation. But that was ancient history, and Nixon – aided by the slippery Murray Chotiner, who became a mainstay of Nixon’s team – resolved to bring Voorhis down by associating him with Democrats on the far left.

Nixon selectively considered Voorhis’s voting record, making him appear to be an extremist when he wasn’t. He also made some damning allegations about Voorhis’s campaign financing; he implied that Voorhis was bankrolled by Communists – even while Nixon himself was indulging in questionable fundraising techniques. It was a campaign of nudges, winks, and half-truths, which particularly distressed Pat. But, Nixon said, “I had to win.” And stoking public fear was a winning tactic.

Awkward Dick Nixon from Whittier, who spent most of the campaign in just one suit, had discovered his ruthless streak.

And as a congressman, he carried that energy with him to Washington. Earnest and hard-working, he soon found himself chosen to join the Herter Committee – a team of US government representatives touring Europe to assess the damage done by war. He also befriended a young Massachusetts Democrat called John Kennedy. Despite their differing backgrounds – Kennedy came from money – they bonded on the midnight train to Washington.

Nixon was soon appointed to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Already rather notorious, HUAC’s goal was to weed out Communists from the US. Nixon made a big national impression through tenacious, fierce work on this committee.

A curious case thrust Nixon into the spotlight. The committee had interrogated Whittaker Chambers, an aging journalist and former Communist. In turn, Chambers had named a senior civil servant called Alger Hiss as an associate.

Hiss, however, denied all links to Chambers or Communism – rather convincingly. He had never even met Chambers, he assured the committee. And they all believed him – except Nixon. With remarkable tenacity for a first-term Congressman, Nixon became the lone voice pursuing Hiss. He became even more fired up when Hiss mocked Nixon’s education at Whittier College.

The Hiss case became a huge national scandal, as gripping as any spy novel – and it eventually turned out that Nixon was right. Hiss was indeed a Communist, and had been lying to the committee at every stage. He was sent to prison – not for spying, but for perjury.

As Nixon’s career skyrocketed, he was fond of reminding his aides that it was the cover-up, not the crime, that had tripped up Hiss.

The same, one day, would be true of Nixon as well.

The blockbuster Hiss case confirmed that anti-Communism was a winning formula. So in 1949, still barely established in Washington, Nixon launched a bid for the Senate, marching on the campaign trail to the same drum as before.

His opponent was the Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Nixon and his team portrayed as a dangerous Communist sympathizer – just like Voorhis. The tactic was obvious, but effective, and the Machiavellian rising star gained both a Senate seat and the nickname “Tricky Dick.”

Pat was uneasy. She hadn’t taken to life in politics, and by now she had two little girls to take care of: Tricia and Julie. But they got a very good deal – suspiciously good, in fact – on a new house, and she hoped a stint in the Senate would mean time to recuperate from all that campaigning. It didn’t.

Tricky Dick was all ears when talk began about the 1952 presidential race. Senator Robert Taft, California governor Earl Warren, and beloved war hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower were competing for the Republican nomination. Nixon joined the general’s team, with an eye on the vice presidency.

On the Republican campaign trail, Eisenhower and Taft were initially well ahead – but the numerous delegates from California pledged to vote for Warren at the national convention. Still, Nixon sensed that many of them were hesitant. Catching the train to the convention with them, he deftly worked his way through the carriages and convinced the California delegates to switch to Eisenhower. This brazen sabotage, right under the disbelieving Warren’s nose, became known as the “great train robbery” – and led Eisenhower to appoint Nixon as his running mate.

During the presidential campaign, Nixon faced uncomfortably intense scrutiny. Headline after headline poured in about financial irregularities. Where was this young upstart’s money coming from? Amid rumors of slush funds and dodgy deals, Nixon started to look like a liability. Eisenhower considered dropping him.

But Dick had a trick up his sleeve: an unprecedented address on television. It would make history.

Speaking with deep earnestness, Nixon told the nation of his humble beginnings, his love for Pat, and his military service. He gave financial details about their house and their net worth.

“Pat doesn’t have a mink coat,” he told the people. “But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.”

There was more. He had received an unusual political gift, he said: a little spotted cocker spaniel, which his six-year-old Tricia had named Checkers. His kids loved that dog, he told the nation. And they were going to keep it.

It was fine and good, Nixon said, for men of wealth to run for high office – Adlai Stevenson, for instance, the Democratic candidate. But surely humbler men should be able to do the same.

The “Checkers speech” was maudlin, embarrassing – and spellbinding television. Nixon wasn’t just a brilliant manipulator behind closed doors; he could do it on camera, too.

He stayed on Eisenhower’s ticket. They won. In January 1953, seven years after entering Congress, Richard Nixon became vice president of the United States.

President Eisenhower wasn’t sure what to make of his gifted but green deputy, the youngest vice president in a century. In an effort to beef up the young man’s foreign policy expertise, Eisenhower sent Nixon on a long Asian and Middle Eastern tour. With Pat at his side, Nixon proved an able diplomat; he left a strong, serious impression everywhere he went. They returned home, exhausted, to find Nixon’s reputation skyrocketing.

Yet the couple felt uneasy. Pat had hated leaving her girls behind for two months, and Dick was tense, anxious – and on a cocktail of drugs to relieve those conditions and help him sleep. Even Checkers had gone and gotten pregnant. Dick didn’t much like the tenor of the times politically, either: Senator Joe McCarthy had picked up the anti-Communist banner with a zeal that even Nixon found distasteful. Early in 1954, Dick promised his wife he would soon be through with politics for good.

But when the president had a heart attack, Nixon had to step up.

Deputizing for Eisenhower, Nixon managed to find the energy he needed and did a solid, respectful job. Once recovered, the president was newly wary of Nixon and his obvious ambition, but the pair scored a landslide reelection in 1956. Nixon began his second term as vice president feeling like a new man.

Nixon’s reputation for shady machinations was undoubtedly deserved. But his ruthless pragmatism was not always in the service of dark forces. As the fifties went on, Nixon was a leading voice in the Civil Rights Movement. He became a trusted friend of Martin Luther King and worked hard to ensure the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. He was never ideologically extreme on progressive issues.

But votes always came first. When, as expected, he secured the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, he had to toe a delicate line on civil rights to avoid alienating white Southern voters. But his reticence cost him dearly. Late in the campaign, King was sentenced to four months’ hard labor for a minor parking violation. A phone call from the vice president could have seen him released in moments, but Nixon didn’t dare rock the boat. Nixon’s opponent, Senator Kennedy, intervened instead – and basked in a bump in the polls.

There were other issues in 1960. Eisenhower seemed reluctant to endorse his deputy, and Kennedy, who wiped the floor with the dour Nixon in a series of televised debates, was charismatic and in tune with the progressive times ahead. Nixon did well to keep the vote as close as it was.

But defeat was defeat, and so began Nixon’s wilderness years. He returned to California, complaining angrily about election fraud, and cut an unhappy, bitter figure during a half-hearted campaign for California governor in 1962. Supreme Court justice Earl Warren, the former governor whose presidential bid Nixon had thwarted a decade earlier, laughed heartily when Nixon lost.

Unsure of what to do with himself, Nixon moved to New York in 1963 and found some work in the business world. An assignment for Pepsi-Cola let him travel through Europe and Asia. In Finland one day, he decided to take a detour to Moscow. He knocked on the door of former president Khrushchev, an old foe from his glory days, but Khrushchev was out.

Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 helped turn Nixon’s mind back to politics. He was starting to believe the country needed him after all. “I know the fucking Commie mind,” he told a friend. “But they don’t know mine.”

The dark side of the ’60s grew. The conflict in Vietnam escalated wildly under President Lyndon Johnson. By 1967, a hundred American soldiers were dying each week. Nixon had no especially cogent views on how to resolve the crisis, but he had enough foreign policy experience that his criticisms of Johnson cut deep. It soon became clear that Nixon would run for president as the candidate for peace.

There was one key thing about running as a peace candidate: there had to be a war. So when some promising signs emerged about a possible power-sharing arrangement between North and South Vietnam, Nixon decided to step in behind the scenes. He hired several people, including the Chinese-American Anna Chennault, to subtly persuade South Vietnamese President Thieu to resist making a deal; the terms would allegedly be better under a Nixon government the following year.

Nixon always denied having interfered in this way, but the evidence is there. Of all his political acts, were any as brazen as illegally thwarting a peace deal in Vietnam in order to win an election?

Yet win the election he did. The 1968 vote was a strange one – a three-way race, with Nixon against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and the independent George Wallace. It rounded off a sinister, troubled year that was marked by the assassinations of both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, whose death sparked huge riots.

By that time, Nixon had become more than just the peace candidate. He was the candidate for stability both abroad and at home. He was the confident face of what he called the “silent majority” of “forgotten Americans”– the pre-’60s generation of middle America, horrified by the excesses and troubles they saw around them. Nixon, still stuffed with sleeping pills and anxiety meds, was the voice of calm.

It was a cold winter’s day when President Nixon first entered the White House in January 1969 – but he was ecstatic. His time had finally come. To put it mildly, though, he had a job on his hands. Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger soon realized the depth of trouble they were dealing with in Vietnam. They attempted what Nixon termed the “Madman Theory” – if the North Vietnamese believed he was completely unhinged, maybe they’d give in. It didn’t work.

One trial run of the Madman Theory was the 1969 bombing of Cambodia – a neutral country the North Vietnamese were using for shelter. This intervention helped the Communist Khmer Rouge seize power in Cambodia, which they did with devastating brutality.

One of the new president’s idols was the man with whom he had occupied the White House a decade earlier: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon sought to emulate Eisenhower’s decisiveness and centrism. But there were distinct differences between the two men.

For one thing, the beaming former general was easy and relaxed in the company of others. Nixon, on the other hand, detested his newly packed schedule of social engagements. Eisenhower was calm in a crisis and adept at seeking compromises; Nixon would always fan the flames. And last, but by no means least, Eisenhower was a secure and confident member of the establishment – while Nixon, the grocer’s son, had a chip on his shoulder a mile high.

What did Nixon want to do with his newfound power as president? As his aides gradually realized, nothing in particular. Nixon was a pragmatist all the way down: he had no real ideology at all.

“Neither fish nor fowl,” was how advisor Pat Buchanan put it. On the most divisive social issues, like gun control or gay rights, Nixon wouldn’t take a stance. “On abortion – get the hell off it,” he said. He certainly had his personal views; there are recordings of him in foul-mouthed tirades against Jews, African Americans, and Ivy Leaguers. But politically, he was infinitely flexible – not wedded to any stance that might cost him votes.

Nothing summed it up like civil rights. Nixon oversaw huge strides in desegregation in schools: the pragmatic, progressive, lawful thing to do. Yet he actively avoided taking credit for this, because he wanted to retain the Southern vote.

He and his vice president Spiro Agnew gave a legendary piano performance at a dinner in 1970, which lampooned their own slipperiness on race. Nixon began with a classic American song, but Agnew kept on interrupting him with the Confederate anthem “Dixie.”

Sense of humor aside, the president was deeply troubled. It was insecurity that motivated him, compelling him to work ever harder – and devote ever less time to Pat and his family.

He was shaken by some events as well, like the shooting of several student protesters at Kent State University in May 1970. One night, with the disturbing images from Kent State lodged in his head, Nixon arose at 4:00 a.m. and took his valet out to the Lincoln Memorial. They met some protesters there, and the sleep-deprived president attempted to placate them – with little success. His wandering continued right through to breakfast, when a distressed team of aides persuaded him to take a car back home.

Sleeping pills and other meds continued to influence Nixon’s moods – and he couldn’t handle his alcohol, either. Three drinks were enough to send his paranoia through the roof. You can hear the ice cubes tinkling in the White House tapes. You can hear him slurring his words, too.

Concerned with keeping a record of all his decisions, he secretly installed a tape-recording system in the White House in 1971. Before long, it had caught him ordering surveillance or sabotage of everyone from political rivals to journalists and Jews.

Temperatures rose steadily during Nixon’s first term. As he started looking ahead to the 1972 election, he realized he needed some big wins. And – troubled, paranoid, and devoid of ideological conviction though he was – he got them.

Vietnam was dragging on; there was no end in sight. But something even bigger lay to the north: Communist China. Isolated from the West for years, the thawing of US–Chinese relations would be a spectacular hit with the public. Nixon knew it.

The timing was good. Both sides made some tentative approaches. In spring 1971, the US table tennis team visited the country to a warm reception. Before long, Henry Kissinger was landing in Beijing, trying to hide his face under a pair of dark sunglasses and a hat. He had lied to the press and said he was in a Pakistani hotel with food poisoning. In fact, he was setting up Nixon’s historic visit to the Chinese capital.

Nixon was the right man – the only man – for the job. Having made his name as a staunch anti-Communist, even the American right would trust him by Chairman Mao’s side. The visit, in February 1972, was a huge success. He and Pat marveled at the pandas and visited the Ming tombs. Nixon walked the Great Wall and remarked that it was, indeed, a “great wall.” The American press – and the people they reported to back home – looked on, amazed.

Nixon called it “the week that changed the world.” He was as right about that as he was about the wall.

But the thawing of relations with China had come at a cost. In March 1971, a conflict had erupted in the Dominion of Pakistan. West Pakistan was violently targeting the Bengali population of East Pakistan, which would soon become the independent nation of Bangladesh. Millions fled into India, and 200,000 people died in six months. The US sent some aid to the refugees but resolutely refused to condemn the Pakistani government, which was supposed to be governing both East and West. Nixon needed their support in order to get to China.

The end of Nixon’s first term in office was almost unimaginably busy. As well as pulling off the China visit, Nixon’s administration made an incredibly major intervention in the US economy. It took the country’s money supply off the gold standard – without knowing exactly what would happen next. Despite lacking a clear plan, Nixon made a rousing, confident speech, and the stock market soared. What would happen in the longer term? That wasn’t the question; the administration just needed to make it past the vote.

Nixon would indeed sweep the 1972 election, taking almost every state. But, after victory, he was even more on edge than usual. He carped about his opponent, George McGovern, and shared a snide word with Kissinger about the media. Something was on his mind – two things, actually.

One was Vietnam. The other was Watergate.

Back in June 1971, almost a year before the China trip, the seeds for Nixon’s downfall had been sown.

Sunday, June 13 began well; the president’s daughter Tricia had gotten married at the White House the previous day. Nixon was delighted with the New York Times’ flattering description of his daughter. The Washington Post, however, was not so fulsome. Nixon called his press secretary and impulsively banned the paper from the White House. He was prone to such fits of rage.

Nixon had a lot of irons in the fire. Preliminary talks with China were starting up, peace negotiations in Vietnam were going surprisingly well, and he was secretly negotiating a treaty with the Soviets, too. But the next crisis came out of nowhere.

When he finally started work that Sunday, Nixon learned that the Times had leaked some highly sensitive official documents chronicling the development of the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers, as they became known, revealed years’ worth of short-sighted, poorly reasoned decision-making.

Politically speaking, this might not have been much of a problem for Nixon: it was his Democratic predecessors, Kennedy and Johnson, who came off worse. But the more he thought about it, the more concerned he got about the implications of letting a leak like this go unchallenged. What kind of a precedent did it set? What else might leak? The president worked himself into a paranoid frenzy. He was never one to dodge a fight.

The resulting war with the press proved deeply embarrassing, with the Supreme Court ruling Nixon’s attempted press suppression unconstitutional. But, with things spiraling out of control, the commander-in-chief decided to fight fire with fire. It was time to tear up the rulebook.

As Nixon’s paranoia soared, he lost all interest in the legality of his tactics. He established the Special Investigations Unit and appointed an eccentric band of mavericks to engage in underhanded tactics. It was very clear to all involved that the unit was to do whatever it took to bring down Nixon’s enemies.

Nixon was not the first president to condone such behavior. Spying, suppression, and covert operations overseas had all taken place under his predecessors. But the blank check for illegality he wrote his team was a whole new level. And he had not exactly appointed the most skilled people to carry things out.

The 1972 break-in at the Watergate office complex, where the Democratic party was based, was so badly organized it was laughable. The intruders planned to bug the Democratic offices, photograph documents there, and then nip over to Capitol Hill and bug George McGovern’s office, too. But they left a huge trail of evidence around them – and were swiftly intercepted by the police.

The president didn’t know about the break-in: on the White House tapes, he sounds like he had no idea at all. He could have plausibly denied all knowledge and blamed it on some rogue operatives. But this was Richard Nixon, and he chose to double down.

As with Alger Hiss all those years ago, it was the cover-up – not the crime – that would prove so costly.

On June 23, 1972 – six days after the bungled break-in – Nixon and his team had the conversation that became the Watergate scandal’s smoking gun. The FBI was investigating the burglars’ finances, and it would surely soon emerge how well-connected they were. So Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, suggested they tell the FBI to back off.

“All right, fine,” was Nixon’s response. “Right. Fine.”

The cover-up only got more intense. Officials were lying under oath; hush money payments mounted up. A source known as Deep Throat kept leaking damaging details to the Washington Post.

Yet Nixon survived. In fact, in the run-up to his reelection, he flourished. The China trip, as well as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known as SALT – an impressive step forward in negotiations with Russia – had changed the story. Vietnam was admittedly harder; bombing “the living bejeezus” out of the North, as Nixon put it, yielded poor results. But with the election on the horizon, he pulled out a final trick.

American troops gradually began to withdraw from Vietnam. Those in power knew that this would mean the Communist North would quickly recapture the South. Effectively, it meant defeat for the US. But the pending return of the troops gave it a positive spin. “Peace is at hand,” Kissinger told the country.

Nixon did spectacularly well in the 1972 election, but the sense of dread he felt was understandable. Vietnam was far from truly fixed, and Watergate was about to come roaring back.

Incriminating evidence was everywhere – not least on the White House tapes that Nixon himself had recorded. The dizzying frenzy of Watergate was eventually distilled down to a simple battle over whether those tapes should be disclosed as evidence. Nixon lost, and the writing was on the wall.

He didn’t leave office without a last burst of melodrama. His final farewell to his White House staff was a bizarre and sentimental rant in which he communicated a little of his loneliness and sadness. “My mother was a saint,” he added.

In August 1974, Dick and Pat Nixon flew off in the presidential helicopter, with Dick flashing a final V for victory.

He was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford; the crooked Spiro Agnew had toppled in yet another scandal the year before. Ford issued Nixon a presidential pardon.

Nixon did not take his defeat gracefully at first. But furious attempts to clear his name led nowhere. He calmed down over the years, wrote a few books, and even made some forays back into foreign affairs. He had achieved elder-statesman status by 1989, when he was called upon to talk to China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Pat died in 1993, leaving Dick distraught. She was buried in Yorba Linda, California, where Dick had been born. He railed against the Clintons for not attending the funeral. He died himself a year later, aged 81.

Words he spoke at his first inauguration form his epitaph: “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”