Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. He served from 1969 until 1974. He was the only president to resign from the office, following the Watergate scandal. He suffered a debilitating stroke on April 18, 1994, and died four days later at age 81.
About Richard Nixon in brief
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States. He served from 1969 until 1974. He was the only president to resign from the office, following the Watergate scandal. Nixon was born into a poor family in a small town in Southern California. He graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937 and returned to California to practice law. Nixon’s upbringing was marked by evangelical Quaker observances of the time such as refraining from alcohol, dancing, and swearing. Through his mother, Nixon was a descendant of the early English settler Thomas Cornell, who was also an ancestor of Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University, as well as of Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates. He suffered a debilitating stroke on April 18, 1994, and died four days later at age 81. The Nixon family moved to Whittier, California, in 1922, and the family opened a grocery store and gas station. His younger brother Arthur died in 1925 at the age of seven after a short illness. Richard’s parents believed that he was the president of his eighth-grade class, where he was believed to have been the first president of that class. His father converted from Methodism to the Quaker faith. His mother was a Quaker, and he was named after Richard the Lionheart, a medieval British king who ruled in medieval or legendary Britain. He and his wife Pat moved to Washington in 1942 to work for the federal government. Nixon served on active duty in the Navy Reserve during World War II.
His pursuit of the Hiss Case established his reputation as a leading anti-Communist which elevated him to national prominence. In 1950, he was elected to the Senate, and subsequently served for eight years as the vice president. He unsuccessfully ran for president in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, he ran for the presidency again and was elected, defeating Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace in a close election. In his second term, Nixon ordered an airlift to resupply Israeli losses in the Yom Kippur War, a war which led to the oil crisis at home. He imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and began the War on Cancer. He also presided over the Apollo 11 moon landing, which signaled the end of the Space Race. Nixon ended American involvement in Vietnam in 1973, ending the military draft that same year, and gained the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union the same year. In 1974, facing almost certain impeachment and removal from office, he became the first U.S. president to step down. In 20 years of retirement, Nixon wrote his memoirs and nine other books and undertook many foreign trips, rehabilitating his image into that of an elder statesman and leading expert on foreign affairs. He died in 1994, aged 81, and was buried in Yorba Linda, California. His son, Richard Jr., is a former congressman from California.
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