ExclusiveRichard Nixon: Beyond Watergate

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannan. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans Within the last few decades, there have been many momentous occasions in U.S. history, and many of these have involved the presidency itself. Today we're going to talk about the only president in U.S. history to resign, and how the end of his term perhaps is not the only thing worth remembering about his time in the White House. When something ends badly, it's easy to just remember that ending. Kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth. But in the case of one U.S. president, that was not the only thing which was noteworthy about his presidency. Richard M. Nixon was the first president to come from California. He was the 37th president of the United States, and his one-and-a-half term as the president was just the end of a very long and successful political career. He came from humble beginnings in Southern California as the son of Quakers. They had a ranch which they lost when he was a young boy, so he grew up in a good deal of poverty with a lot of hard work for him and his siblings, but he described his childhood as a happy one since he didn't really realize that they were poor. It was marked by a general sense of calm alongside the hard work. Several of his brothers were in poor health because tuberculosis seemed to run in the family, so that left a lot of the work for helping the family up to Richard. As a young boy, he worked in his father's grocery store stocking the produce department, sometimes getting up as early as 4 a.m. to drive to Los Angeles to get the produce before he would go to high school and eventually college. He did very well in school, studying hard and enjoying whatever sports they would allow him to play because they were concerned that he too might have tuberculosis. He graduated third of his class from high school and then he proceeded to go to Whittier College in his local area of Whittier, California, which was a Quaker school. He did very well there too, also graduating third. He had the potential to go to Harvard to study law because he got a scholarship, but he couldn't leave the family because his mother was in another state with one of his brothers who was very sickly, so he had to stick around and help the other relatives. Instead, he ended up going to Duke Law School a few years later and from there he eventually graduated with his law degree in 1937. This law degree would be the beginning of an important legal practice for him, which he set up right in his native area of Southern California and in later years he proudly claimed that he was the only modern U.S. president to actually practice law. When he was in Whittier as a young lawyer, he was involved with the local playhouse, the Whittier Players, and while performing in a play there he met a young lady named Pat Ryan. He was instantly smitten with her and apparently it took him a while to persuade her to even go on a date with him, but on that first date he asked her to marry him. She thought that was ridiculous and he had to court her very persistently for a few years before she eventually agreed to marry him. They got married in 1940. Not long after that, World War II began and the Nixons relocated to Washington D.C. Although he later claimed that this move to Washington was in response to Pearl Harbor and wanting to help the war effort, they had apparently been planning to move to D.C. for the latter half of the year of 1941 since they both felt that sticking around in Whittier would stifle his political potential. He quickly got a job in the growing war administration working on rationing, but that didn't prove active enough for him just dealing with the rationing of rubber tires, so he soon applied to join the Navy. He became a lieutenant and eventually applied for sea duty overseas. He received two different recognitions for his meritorious service, both organizing troops overseas in the South Pacific and back home after the combat was beginning to settle down as he did the legal work settling up contracts for former military men. After the war, he was able to use that military prestige to springboard into a political career. In 1946, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives representing California and he was able to oust the long-standing Democrat who had been representing that district. After two terms in the House of Representatives, he served a term in the U.S. Senate, rising in prominence as he showed himself to be an able leader. By the 1950 election for the U.S. Senate, he already had gained his nickname, Tricky Dick, because there were rumors that he was using some rather unscrupulous means to gain votes, to perhaps slightly mismanage legally, but again, somewhat unscrupulously, certain Republican Party funds for his campaigning, and that he would go out of his way to really attack the character of some of his opponents, anything to win. But he always felt that it was justified because he would really try to serve the people once he had entered public office. Because of his growing prominence and strength shown as a leader in the both houses of Congress, Dwight Eisenhower named him as his vice presidential candidate in the 1952 election. During the 1952 campaign, Nixon began to stir up some controversy for the very thing which would eventually get him in serious trouble two decades later when he was president, and that was the mismanagement of funds for campaign purposes, and mainly that he had accepted and kept many gifts being given as political bribes. He gave a speech which has famously been known as the Checkers speech. In it, he described himself as a common unpretentious man with an unpretentious wife who didn't have a mink coat. She had a respectable Republican cloth coat. Now, why is it called the Checkers speech? Well, he admitted that there was one political gift that he had kept. It was a cocker spaniel puppy which his daughter had loved very greatly, and they named Checkers. This speech endeared him to the people and got him back in good standing, and it's considered one of the highlights of his political career and quite a masterstroke of campaigning. Eisenhower and Nixon were elected for two terms. After that, Nixon wanted to follow in the common presidential tradition of the vice president then becoming the next president, and he nearly made it, but he was narrowly beat by Kennedy in the 1960 election. Thus, Nixon decided to return to California and in 1962 run for governor of the state. He lost this as well, and by this point he was beginning to feel that the press were rather against him, so at a press conference he said that this was the last time the press would be able to kick Nixon around, and he and his wife left for New York where he set up a private law practice. This retirement from politics didn't last long, though, because in 1967 he announced his intention to run for the president again in 1968, which he did, and this time he won. He beat out former vice president Hubert Humphrey and won the election. Now, Nixon had established himself as fiscally conservative, but very open to some of the more civil rights-based public community and social ideas. He had shown himself to be a strong anti-communist as early as the 1940s when he was in Congress, and he was closely aligned with Senator McCarthy and his House of Un-American Activities Committee. Upon gaining the presidency, Nixon vowed to end the very unpopular Vietnam War and to continue to improve the relations of the United States with other nations while also stopping the spread of communism. Ending the Vietnam War did not prove as easy as he had thought, but he did make it a for which he gained a significant amount of public approval. Everyone was glad that the deadly and costly war, which was not very well regarded by the American people, was over. Meanwhile, he began to work on strengthening the relationships with two powerful communist nations, Communist China and the Soviet Union. He visited both nations as president, making him the first sitting president to visit Communist China. He was thus able to establish a much friendlier relationship with that nation and even with the Soviet Union, so that was seen as a very positive thing for the United States. He also worked on some treaties which would stop the use of some of the deadlier missiles. It was while he was president that the first man landed on the moon, and there are photographs of him speaking on the phone with the astronauts who thus landed. Thus, he was able to officially mark the end of the space race as we had achieved the goal set by Kennedy back in the early 60s of reaching the moon before the year 1970. Back on this planet, he was concerned with issues in the United States, and two of the big issues which came up during his presidency were the formation of the EPA, the Environmental Protective Agency, the Increased Equal Rights Act, which was for more rights for women as well as for different races, and the passage of Roe versus Wade. Looking back at all these issues, it's interesting to see how a strong Republican like Nixon was on the side of certain issues which today's Republicans would consider definite Democrat territory, topics which are not things that the Republican Party necessarily supports anymore. But in the early 1970s and the late 60s, of course, there were the issues of gas rationing, and people were very concerned about the environment in a way that they really hadn't been before, and Nixon was concerned about all of these issues. He was regarded quite favorably in his first term, and thus in the year 1972, he ran for re-election. Because of his success in ending the Vietnam War and the general public positivity toward him, he was re-elected in a landslide in the 1972 election. Little did the American people know that trouble was brewing for him. Investigations had already begun as early as 1972 into certain activities that the campaign behind Nixon were using to gain information on the opposing team, the Democratic National Convention. Now apparently, Nixon and his team had been using methods such as bugging people's offices, recording telephone conversations and planting microphones in the Oval Office, and using unscrupulous means to try to dig up dirt on his list of enemies and opponents, which apparently amounted to around 40,000 people. We all know the name of the scandal which eventually broke in 1973 as the Watergate scandal, and the term has become used so commonly that people now will just tack the word gate onto other words to refer to different scandals, because it was such a disgraceful situation that began to rot. And the name Watergate is referring to the Watergate building in Washington, D.C., which is where the Democratic Convention was being held. And apparently in 1972, certain employees of the Nixon administration broke in to try to steal certain documents and just gain facts and anything that could be used against the Democrats so that Nixon could win again. They were caught in this burglary attempt. And again, this happened in 1972, even before the election. But the investigation was not underway enough, nor had the scandal broken publicly enough for it to hurt Nixon's chances for re-election. He won very successfully. Whether or not he used any of the information that he had gained through unscrupulous means is not known. Now initially, Nixon insisted that he knew nothing about any sort of burglary or any of these unscrupulous activities. Similar to what happened back in the 1920s with President Warren G. Harding and his team with the Teapot Dome scandal doing unscrupulous things. But whereas it never was definitely ascertained whether Harding was responsible for or aware of the shady dealings in his day, it eventually began to be all too clear that Nixon knew exactly what was going on and that he himself had also lied in some of his public response to reports and asking for him to release certain tapes and documentation of conversations. A few times he released just the transcripts, but eventually it was insisted that he released the entire audio tapes. When certain parts were missing, that just made him look more and more guilty. His administration already was facing some scandal because his vice president resigned in 1973 because he had been found guilty of mismanaging funds. Now this had nothing to do with his time as vice president. This was back when he was in Maryland politics. But once he was gone, Nixon replaced him with Gerald Ford. This would be a very important appointment because before long, Ford would have to step in as president. This last portion of his time in office, the whole scandal, is sadly all the most people remember about Nixon. In a way, some of the most momentous and important things he did were when he was vice president. He truly can be given credit for reshaping that role and really being the first modern vice president. Before that, really, the vice president whom the first holder of that position, John Adams, said was the most frustratingly unimportant role ever conceived by the mind of man, the vice president would just preside over the senate and that basically was all he was appointed to do in the constitution. Eventually, the vice president took on the role of taking over for the president when he was rendered incapable of being president anymore, usually through death. But Nixon took on other activities of his own. He began being in charge of different committees and going on his own tours, being a very active politician and representative of the people in his own right. This was very helpful to Eisenhower. In so doing, he showed how much the role could do and how important the position could be. There were a few occasions when President Eisenhower was ill and unable to fulfill the role of being president. During those times, Nixon very ably filled in and was able to keep the rest of the cabinet from trying to take over. But at the same time, he didn't try to take too much power himself. He merely filled in for Eisenhower, which both Eisenhower and other commentators respected greatly. Throughout his political career, he traveled a lot, both abroad and at home, and he really tried to speak directly to the people. He said that he learned this from the only public speaking course he ever took, which was in high school, in which his teacher said, don't yell at people, just talk to them, make it a conversation. So he always tried to have a conversational tone in his speeches. As his popularity grew less and less with the growing scandal, there became a lot of things which were easy to sort of mock about him. His typical stance, the sort of sullen scowl he always seemed to have, the way he would sort of shake his jaw, and his pat phrase, let me make myself perfectly clear. The more he said it, the more people felt like they just couldn't trust anything he said as he continually changed his story. When it came down to it, he really had felt that he wasn't doing anything particularly dishonest. He was simply using the presidential power. He even was quoted as saying, it's not illegal if the president does it. He felt that the president, I guess, should just have a little more power than he did and that he wasn't breaking the law. He was just using whatever means necessary to get things done. But by 1974, it became very clear that the public was no longer with him and that growing evidence would soon lead to his disgrace and eventual impeachment. Not wishing to be humiliated through an impeachment, he decided to resign first, which he announced on August 8th, 1974. He made his farewell speech on August 9th with his wife, boarding a plane and leaving Washington, D.C., leaving Gerald Ford with the presidency, the only time that a vice president took over because the president simply resigned. A year later, within his first year, the new president, Ford, pardoned his predecessor, which made it impossible for any further legal action to be taken against Nixon. Some people weren't too pleased with his action on Ford's part, but I suppose that Ford wanted to recognize all the good things which Nixon had done before the scandal. And I suppose, perhaps, Ford was acknowledging the fact that he was not tried and found guilty. He simply resigned before that could be done. And as 17th president Andrew Johnson showed, it takes a lot to throw out a president. He was one vote short of being officially removed from office. After leaving the White House, Nixon spent his remaining days trying to rebuild his shattered reputation. He wrote nine autobiographies and memoirs. He traveled the world with his wife and he continued to seek to relate to foreign diplomats and build goodwill for America. By the time of his death, he had been successful enough to be regarded as a somewhat respected elder statesman. A lot of the quotes from Nixon, interestingly, are on defeat, continuing to fight, and many of them come from the memoirs he later wrote. One of his more famous quotes is, defeat does not finish a man, quitting does. A man is not finished when he's defeated, he's finished when he quits. He also said, I can take it, the tougher it gets, the cooler I get. Referring to how you can appreciate good things if you come from hard times, he said, only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is Speaking about honesty, he said, honesty may not be the best policy, but it's worth trying once in a while. Speaking about how certain leaders can be controversial, including himself, he said, if an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything. When he was being investigated, the word crook was frequently used about him, so he is quoted as saying on television, people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook, I earned everything I've got. During his farewell speech before leaving the White House, Nixon famously said, remember, always give your best, never get discouraged, never be petty, always remember others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself. As the only U.S. president to resign, and thus the only president to leave prematurely without having died, Nixon is really mainly remembered for the end of his presidency, but I think before judging Nixon too harshly, we should look deeper at his whole life and some of the good things he did as president, as vice president, as congressman, as a lawyer, and perhaps look at his autobiographies to get more of the personal opinion of what really happened and why he did what he did. Thank you for watching, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.