{"id":15161,"date":"2014-07-24T11:11:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T10:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15161"},"modified":"2014-07-30T11:29:19","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T10:29:19","slug":"american-presidents-2-richard-m-nixon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15161","title":{"rendered":"American presidents (2): Richard M Nixon"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summer, the City Lit<\/a> in central London is running a series of evening courses with a session on most of the various post-war US presidents. I missed the one on Kennedy but have joined the course this week with the session on Lyndon B Johnson, about whom I have done a blog posting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last night, I attended the session on Richard M Nixon who served as 37th president from 1969-1974. This time, the lecturer was Mark Shanahan. Like the lecturer on Johnson, essentially he spoke non-stop for over two a half hours (there was a ten-minute break), but again the speaker was very knowledgeable and very fluent. Also, this time, we had visual aids – a succession of text-heavy slides and four film clips – and he gave us handouts (a total of five).<\/p>\n

As with the Johnson session, the lecturer took us through a chronology of the politician and we were an hour and a half into the session before we reached the election that took Nixon to the White House as the Republican successor to the Democrat Johnson. What this chronology made clear was that the personal characteristics that ultimately doomed Nixon as president were there from the start.<\/p>\n

Although he was very bright and hardworking, he was a man who wanted to be part of the team but was actually a loner, he was insecure and paranoid, he fought dirty, and he kept a list of his enemies. So his first election campaign – for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1946 – was deployed a negative and dirty campaign; in the House, his exposure of Alger Hiss (who was later revealed to be a Soviet spy) was ruthless; and his defeat of the Democrat for the Senate seat in California in 1950 was a brutal exercise.<\/p>\n

Yet it was never certain, or even likely, that he would become president. After eight years as Vice-President under Eisenhower – who did not like him and did not give him responsibility – he lost both a presidential election (to John Kennedy) and a governorship election (in his home state of California) and had six wilderness years before he finally became president in 1969.<\/p>\n

His foreign achievements are well known: he opened up relations with Communist China and signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) \u00a0and he ‘ended’ the Vietnam war but it was far from the ‘peace with honour’ that he proclaimed.<\/p>\n

Our lecturer was keen that we should also appreciate Nixon’s domestic record: he promoted affirmative action and an Equal Opportunities Act, he established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act, and he even published a Family Assistance Plan, although this was rejected by Congress. On the other hand, his tenure saw a decline in manufacturing, rising inflation, rising unemployment and the US heading for recession.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, of course, he was guilty of the Watergate cover-up exposed by ‘Deep Throat’ (now known to be Mark Felt) and he became the only president in US history who has had to resign.<\/p>\n