Richard Nixon

C

Vice President

Much of Nixon’s time as vice president was spent in representing the president before Congress and on trips abroad as a goodwill ambassador. On these tours Nixon was occasionally the target of anti-U.S. feelings. During a tour of South America in May 1958, for example, the cars carrying Nixon and his escort were assaulted by stone-throwing Venezuelans near the Caracas airport.

Nixon’s most dramatic confrontation abroad took place when he visited the USSR in July 1959 to open a U.S. exhibition in Moscow. Nixon escorted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev through a model U.S. kitchen. In front of the television cameras, Khrushchev then found himself in a debate with Nixon over the relative merits of the United States and Communist systems. Parts of what became known as the “kitchen debate” were later broadcast on television in both the USSR and the United States. On the final day of his visit, Nixon made an unprecedented address on Soviet television.

D

Election of 1960

As President Eisenhower neared the end of his second term, his vice president emerged as his logical successor, and the president endorsed Nixon in March. Nixon received an impressive vote in party primaries, and at the Republican National Convention, held in Chicago in July, he received all but ten of the delegates’ votes on the first ballot. Nixon chose as his running mate the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. An unusual feature of the campaign was a series of four televised face-to-face discussions between Nixon and his Democratic opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy was widely regarded as the winner of the debates, which helped him win the election.

Even with the debates, the popular vote in November was extremely close. Both candidates received more than 34 million votes, and Kennedy beat Nixon by only 112,803. Because of the way the popular vote was distributed, however, the vote in the electoral college was 303 for Kennedy to 220 for Nixon.

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IV

Road to the Presidency

A

California Campaign of 1962

After losing the presidential election, Nixon returned to California, and in 1962 became the Republican candidate for governor, opposing the Democratic incumbent, Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown. Again the campaign was bitter, and Nixon argued that Democrats were not sufficiently concerned about the threat that Communism posed around the world and at home. He also asserted that California did not enforce its laws strictly enough. This time the strategy did not work; Brown won easily. At first Nixon refused to acknowledge Brown’s victory. When he did so at a televised news conference, he used the opportunity to attack the press, who he felt had treated him unfairly in the campaign. Most political observers believed that Nixon’s political career was ended.

B

Election of 1968

After his defeat, Nixon moved to New York City, where he joined a large law firm. He remained in close touch with national Republican leaders and campaigned for Republican candidates in the 1964 and 1966 elections. By February 1, 1968, he had sufficiently recovered his political standing to announce his candidacy for president.

In seeking the nomination in 1968, Nixon had certain handicaps to overcome. For one thing, he had not won an election on his own since 1950. Moreover, he had no state in which to base his candidacy: His former state, California, had rejected him in 1962, and his current state, New York, was the home ground of another possible candidate, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. In addition, Nixon could count on few Republican governors for support, and they would lead the delegations from their states at the Republican National Convention.

On the other hand, Nixon did have wide support in Congress and with other politicians whom he had helped in their campaigns. In addition, he seemed to occupy a middle position in policies and ideas between the conservative wing of the party, then led by Governor Ronald W. Reagan of California, and the Northeastern liberal wing, which preferred Governor Rockefeller. Polls indicated clearly that Nixon was the favorite of regular party members.

With their backing Nixon easily won the nomination on the first ballot at the convention held in Miami Beach, Florida, in August. For his running mate he chose Spiro T. Agnew, the governor of Maryland.

His Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, had to contend with serious divisions within his party and was on the defensive because Nixon placed particular stress on the unsuccessful war in Vietnam and the growing antiwar protests at home. The election was complicated by a third party headed by former Alabama governor George C. Wallace. Nixon and Humphrey each gained about 43 percent of the popular vote, but the distribution of Nixon’s nearly 32 million votes gave him a clear majority in the electoral college.

V

President of the United States

A

Vietnam War

The most important issue Nixon faced when he became president was the Vietnam War. The war had begun in 1959 when Communist-led guerrillas in South Vietnam, backed by the Communist government of North Vietnam, launched an attempt to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. The struggle widened into a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and ultimately into a limited international conflict in which the burden of the war fell mainly on civilians. The United States first sent military advisers to South Vietnam in the 1950s. After a report in 1964 that the North Vietnamese had attacked U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin, Congress had authorized President Lyndon Johnson to increase U.S. military involvement. The Johnson administration authorized the bombing of North Vietnam, and the first U.S. combat troops arrived in South Vietnam in 1965. By 1968 there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops there. Antiwar sentiment developed at home, and demonstrations against the war became a daily occurrence, particularly on university campuses.

Nixon had campaigned against the war, saying that he would bring U.S. soldiers back home. The protests, however, did not decrease with Nixon’s election, even though he began withdrawing U.S. combat troops from South Vietnam, in accordance with a policy announced in 1969 while he was in Guam on an Asian tour. Called the Guam, or Nixon, doctrine, the policy stated that the United States would continue to help Asian nations combat Communism but would no longer commit U.S. troops to land wars in Asia. Nixon announced that 25,000 U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by August 1969. Another cut of 65,000 troops was ordered by the end of the year. Nixon’s program, known as Vietnamization of the war, emphasized the responsibilities of the South Vietnamese in the war.

However, Nixon expanded the Vietnam War. In April 1970 he authorized the invasion of Cambodia to pursue North Vietnamese troops there. The authorization was met with protest demonstrations around the country.

In 1971 the United States assisted a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. The air war was also intensified as U.S. bombing missions were increased over Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Through the later months of 1971, American withdrawal from Vietnam continued, but with little apparent effect. Casualty figures in 1971 reflected the intensification of South Vietnam’s own fighting efforts against the Communists. While U.S. deaths in Vietnam declined dramatically to 1380, compared to 4221 in 1970, the South Vietnamese forces, on the other hand, suffered about 21,500 dead, some in Cambodia and Laos but the majority in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese claimed the enemy death toll to be 97,000.

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