Richard Nixon

For most Americans, the name Richard Nixon conjures up disturbing images of deceptive politicians, corrupt political activity, and plots to rig elections. Nixon is infamous to practically all Americans for his role in the Watergate Scandal. The Watergate Scandal centered around a 1972 break-in at a DNC-owned office in the Watergate Complex. The burglars who conducted this break-in were hired by Nixon's reelection campaign to take photos of the documents located in the office and to bug the phones there as well. From there, Nixon's reelection staff could read through those documents and spy on phone calls exchanged by DNC officials in order to gather incriminating information to use against the Democrats and their nominee (who eventually was selected to be George McGovern). Nixon's attempt at suppressing investigations into this event was inevitably revealed, resulting in Nixon becoming the first and only American president to resign. For this reason, Nixon is a hated president who nearly all Americans dislike. But Watergate is the beginning and end of lamen knowledge regarding the Nixon Administration. In reality, he did numerous things that are equally as bad as Watergate, which is why he ranks so low here.

Before I discuss all of Nixon's flaws, I should describe Nixon's positives, which are actually far more numerous than most realize. For instance, Nixon pushed for a lot of environmentalist policies, albeit solely due to public pressure. Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, reduced pollution, and signed the Endangered Species Act and Noise Control Act of 1972. The former permits the federal government to intervene in private affairs to help save endangered species and the latter prohibits the production of sounds that disrupt local ecosystems. He also launched the War on Cancer, a campaign to establish and fund centers looking into cures for cancer. Ever since its inception in 1971, the War on Cancer has resulted in better screening, drugs that quell the growth of tumors, and even cures for a few forms of leukemia. Prior to his presidency, Washington DC was directly governed by Congress and the president. Nixon reversed this, signing a law called the DC Home Rule Act that gave self-determination to the capital.

After previous presidents had failed to enforce Brown v. Board of Education - the case where the Supreme Court banned segregation in public schools - Nixon succeeded in that pursuit by establishing dozens of committees across southern communities. These committees were then tasked with figuring out how best to integrate the schools within their area. Further, Nixon repealed a terrible law known as House Concurrent Resolution 108. Passed in August of 1953, this policy called for the gradual abolition of indigenous reservations. In July 1970, Nixon terminated this policy and, in the process, preserved what was left of Native American sovereignty. This was arguably his greatest accomplishment.

Regarding economic policy, Nixon founded the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and attempted to expand food stamp programs. Soon after Nixon entered office, severe inflation began. At first, Nixon tried to fight this by quelling currency production. By doing this, Nixon would reduce the amount of money in the economy and so make money more valuable, causing corporations to demand less money in exchange for products. This did not work and Nixon admitted that. He appointed Arthur Burns as director of the Federal Reserve and asked for new suggestions. Burns refused to do this unless Nixon kept federal spending below $200,000,000,000 a year. To meet these goals, Nixon slashed the salaries of government employees. In all fairness, this was very spineless on Nixon's part. The fact that Burns was demanding Nixon take an unrelated action regarding revenue before he'd alleviate the pains of average Americans should have caused him to be fired. But instead, Nixon kowtowed to Burns, which is pathetic.

However, when Nixon's reduction in government salaries sparked riots and strikes amongst federal employees, he again admitted his failure. On August 15, 1971, Nixon returned from a meeting with other economic advisors at Camp David and announced a new plan to address inflation: Known as the Nixon Shock, the plan was composed of 3 prongs. The first prong was price controls, which obviously help inflation by capping prices. The second prong lowered taxes, which increases individual spending power and so helps boost economic activity. The third prong was the suspension of the gold standard, a decision that has never been rescinded and that is still in effect. Repealing the gold standard alone was a great idea. The gold standard creates dangerous deflation. As I explained in my article on William McKinley, moderate inflation can cause people to buy everything they need then and there before prices increase further. Thus, there is enough spending to improve the economy and maybe even end a recession.

Nixon's actual reason for suspending the gold standard in the short term was quite interesting: At Camp David, his advisors explained that gold, being as valuable as it is, must be kept in the US during times of poverty and economic hardship. So, the gold standard must be suspended in order to make sure that countries using the US dollar can't demand American gold in exchange for American dollars. That would reduce the amount of gold in the United States, eliminating an important economic resource and amplifying financial troubles. This unveils another reason I rank Nixon as poorly as I do: In the long term, suspending the gold standard was good. In the short term, however, it created severe inflation and economic troubles in nations reliant on the US dollar. This actually contributed to the tensions between America and the Middle East that caused the Oil Shock. After the US supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC (already upset with Nixon due to his monetary policies) stopped shipping oil to the US for 5 months, helping to shock the stagflation crisis of the 1970s.

Foreign policy held most of Nixon's successes. Although it caused the Oil Shock, I still consider Nixon's aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War to be positive. The Oil Shock was likely made inevitable by the damage Nixon had already done to OPEC and Middle Eastern economies. The support for Israel was simply the last straw. And since Egypt was the aggressor in that war, having attacked Israel on October 6, 1973, without provocation, it was silly and irrational for OPEC to be that upset with Nixon. During the Yom Kippur War, Nixon initiated Operation Nickel Grass. As the name implies, the Yom Kippur War began with a surprise Egyptian attack on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Since it was Yom Kippur, most Israeli soldiers were off duty, giving Egypt a major advantage. Through Operation Nickel Grass, Nixon resupplied the Israeli military after the original losses and ensured Jerusalem's victory.

On April 10, 1971, an American ping-pong player named Glenn Cowan visited China while participating in a few matches that took place in Japan. While in China, he played against a Chinese ping-pong player named Zhaung Zedong. After the game ended, Cowan gave Zhaung a T-shirt with a peace sign on it and a Beetle's lyric declaring, "Let it be". In exchange, Zhaung gifted Cowan a picture of a Chinese mountain range. Nixon, who felt that America's isolationist approach toward China was neglectful and immoral, was deeply moved by this, as was Mao Zedong (who wanted to strengthen Chinese-American relations in order to ebb Soviet influence following the Sino-Soviet Split). So, on June 15, 1971, Nixon terminated America's decades-old ban on trade with China. From February 21, to 28, 1972, Nixon met with Mao in Beijing, further decreasing Cold War tensions.

Just over a week into his tenure, on January 28, 1969, Nixon launched Vietnamization. Nixon realized that there was no way for America to actually win the Vietnam War or defeat North Vietnam. However, he also knew that if he surrendered, he would lose and humiliate America. So, through Vietnamization, Nixon began teaching South Vietnamese troops to fight North Vietnam in the same way America had been doing since 1965. At the same time that he did this, he withdrew American troops. That way, the war could continue without an obvious American loss or any major American sacrifices. This was a great project, as it paved the way for the reduction of US influence in Vietnam. Ultimately, Nixon ended the Vietnam War by signing the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973. Nixon also signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty on May 26, 1972. Under this agreement, the Soviet Union and the United States were both prohibited from holding more than two ICBM launch pads. One could exist to protect the capital and one could exist to protect a facility storing other missiles in the possession of the country.

While the positives of Nixon's presidency are numerous, I think they are outweighed by the negatives. For instance, while he deserves credit for ending the Vietnam War and for Vietnamization, Nixon also deserves criticism for how brutal his bombing campaigns became prior to the Paris Peace Accords. In July of 1971, Nixon also attempted to expel and demote Jews working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1973, Nixon also supported and participated in a coup that dismantled the presidency of the popular, democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. In the place of Allende stood Augusto Pinochet, who brutally suppressed criticism and ruled Chile with an iron fist until 2006, 12 years after Nixon's death in 1994.

Nixon also seemed to have very little respect for the First Amendment. During the Vietnam War, a Pentagon employee named Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers. Initially commissioned by Lyndon B. Johnson's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, The Pentagon Papers was an enormous study of the history of US involvement in Vietnam. Kept a secret for years, it revealed how Johnson and other officials had lied about the reality of the war, its past, and how likely the odds of a US victory were. When Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers, Nixon sued news agencies such as The New York Times for discussing the document and its contents. This behavior even culminated in a major Supreme Court case known as The New York Times vs. United States, where the boundaries of executive privilege (the ability of the president to withhold information from the public for the sake of national security) were, at least in part, defined.

In late 1970, Nixon established the Committee to Reelect the President as a way of boosting his chance of winning a second term in 1972. Largely with Nixon's knowledge, the CRP did absolutely abhorrent things. It accepted illegal donations from corporations and kept the identity of the donors and the existence of their donations a secret contained by an extremely tight lid. In fact, the list wasn't released until 2009, an astonishing 37 years after the 1972 election. The CRP even broke into an office owned by Ellsberg's therapist, hoping to find embarrassing information regarding Ellsberg and his mental health, which then could be used to discredit his criticisms. Most shockingly, the CRP tried to have a journalist named Jack Anderson killed for exposing the fact that Nixon had, in total violation of international law, sold weapons to the Pakistani military. But much of this wasn't revealed until years after the first crime of the CRP was exposed: Watergate.

Richard Nixon was definitely an accomplished man who did great things with the presidency. He protected the environment, preserved indigenous sovereignty, enforced school desegregation, reduced Cold War tensions, established OSHA. and launched the War on Cancer, among other things. However, he ultimately was not a good president, even with these positives in mind. Nixon had very little respect for the democratic principles that this country was founded on. He tried to suppress vital information about the Vietnam War at the same time that he continued and expanded upon the brutal atrocities committed against the people of North Vietnam. He spied on the personal lives and hoped to end the biological lives of political opponents and whistleblowers. While he may have reduced inflation at home, he worsened it abroad and failed to prevent the true stagflation crisis that harmed Americans throughout the rest of the 1970s. And most famously (but perhaps least egregiously), he tried to prevent investigations into his reelection campaign trying to bug a Democratic Party office.