Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. He was a Republican, and he held the presidency from 1969 to 1974. Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office, because of the Watergate scandal.

As U.S. president, Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed an affirmative action program in federal employment, expanded but then ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and established direct relations with the People’s Republic of China. He also resigned from the presidency in 1974.

During the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon and his administration were discovered to have been involved in a burglary attempt at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972. After a heavily publicized investigation and televised hearings, Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to turn over tapes from the Oval Office that eventually implicated him in the cover-up. The scandal resulted in Nixon’s resignation in 1974.  

Richard Nixon, arguably, tried to prolong the Vietnam War during the 1968 presidential campaign in an effort to win the presidency. Once he became president, he sought to establish enough stability in the region for the South Vietnamese government to take over. The result was an expanded U.S. military presence and increased military activity in neutral Cambodia. After hasty attempts of “Vietnamization”—the process of training and arming South Vietnamese troops for fighting alone after U.S. forces would pull out—all U.S. troops were evacuated by March 29, 1973.

Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon as U.S. president after Nixon resigned. He was Nixon’s second vice president. President Ford’s earliest acts included offering amnesty for those who had evaded the draft or deserted during the Vietnam War and pardoning Nixon for “all offenses against the United States.” This pardon made him massively unpopular.