President Richard Nixon (Republican 37th):
- Vice-President of Eisenhower
- Lost 1960 election to JFK
- Was the only person to be elected twice to both the Presidency and the Vice Presidency
- Only President to resign from office (he was about to be impeached)
- Nixon was very paranoid and thought that everyone was out to get him
- Nixon's Presidential Accomplishments:
- Vietnam Conflict dominated much of his presidency and war became very unpopular
- Promised to end the war---"Peace with honor"
- Expanded the war to Cambodia and Laos-bombing Ho Chi Minh Trail
- Started pulling troops out of Vietnam as promised
- The Nixon Doctrine--"Vietnamization" of the war which was pulling our troops out and let the Vietnamese fight their own war
- Paris Peace Accords signed in 1973 stopped the fighting and got the US out of the war
- Environmental Decade:
- Nixon was the first president to actually do a lot to help the environment
- Passed a lot of acts to clean up the environment and established a lot of governmental agencies
- Declared war on drugs in 1971
- Started Supplementary Security Income which provided money to low-income people who are either 65 years or older, blind, or disabled
- Saw large scale integration of schools in the south
- Supported affirmative action
- Signed Title IX (1972) which prohibited gender discrimination in all federally funded schools
- Equal Employment Opportunity Act enforces law against workplace discrimination based on an individual's race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, perceived intelligence, disablity, or sexual orientation
- Abortion was legalized durign Nixon's presidency in the Roe v. Wade case in 1973
- US astronauts landed on the moon in 1969
- Nixon approved the development of NASA's Space Shuttle program
- In 1972, President Nixon traveled to China where the president was to have direct talks with Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai
- This ease relations with the US and China as we agreed to recognize them
- Nixon visited the Soviet Union and went to Moscow in 1972
- There he signed the SALT I which limited nuclear weapons
- Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was also signed which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missiles
- This led to a new era of "peaceful co-existence" and detente with the USSR
Watergate Scandal:
- Five men were caught breaking into Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. on June 17, 1972 to find dirt on the Democratic party
- They wanted to find embarassing information about the Democrats to hopefully foil their chances of winning the next presidential election
- Two Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, investigated the story
- The men were caught with hundred dollar bills in their pockets and were trying to bug the phones
- Woodward and Bernstein relied on an FBI informant known as "Deep Throat" to link the men to the Nixon White House---said "follow the money"
- Ended up being Mark Felt who was high up in the CIA
- Woodward and Bernstein traced the money and caught them
- Nixon was not involved at first but found out the next day
- Then he tried to cover it up saying they were only trying to prevent him from getting re-elected
- FBI eventually confirmed that Nixon aides had attempted to sabotage the Democrats--many began resigning and faced prosecution
- Because Nixon tried to cover it up, he was breaking the law and should have been impeached but he resigned first
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