Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon opened China and resigned the presidency. Born in 1913 to a Quaker family in California, he worked in his father's grocery, turned down Harvard because the family could not afford it, and went to Whittier College and then Duke law school. He entered Congress in 1946 and made his name on the House Un-American Activities Committee pursuing Alger Hiss, was elected to the Senate in 1950, and was Eisenhower's vice-president at thirty-nine. He lost the 1960 election to Kennedy by about 100,000 votes and the California governorship in 1962, told reporters they would not have him to kick around any more, and was elected president in 1968 on a platform of law and order and peace with honour. The foreign record is substantial. He went to Beijing in February 1972, ending twenty-two years of non-recognition and restructuring the Cold War triangle; he signed SALT I and the ABM Treaty with Brezhnev; and he negotiated an American withdrawal from Vietnam. He also extended that war — the secret bombing of Cambodia from 1969, the incursion of 1970, and the Christmas bombing of 1972. At home he created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the Clean Air Act, ended the draft, and took the dollar off gold. The Watergate break-in of June 1972 was minor; the cover-up was not. The taping system he had installed recorded him arranging it, and the Supreme Court ordered the tapes released. He resigned on 9 August 1974, was pardoned by Ford, and died in 1994.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1994 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, vice_president, senator
