Richard Milhous Nixon

President Richard Nixion, 37th President (January 20, 1969 - August 9, 1974), was born of quaker parentage in Yorba Linda, California, on January 9, 1913. When he was nine years old, the Nixon family moved to Whittier, California, were his father ran a comnination grocery store and gas station. After graduating from Whittier College (1934) and Duke University Law School (1937), he practiced law in Whittier and worked briefly as an attorney for the office of Price Administration in Washington D.C United states entry inot world War II, he served (1942-46) as a naval officer.

Nixon's political career began in 1946, when a group of California Republicans urged him to run for congress, He won a hard-fought contest (during which he accused his opponent, a New Deal Democrat, of being soft on Communism) and was reelected in 1948. In the house of Representatives, he contributed importantly to the development of the Marchall Plan and the Taft-Hartley act. He gained national prominence in 1948-49 by pressing an investigation by the house Un-american Activites Committee into charges that Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, had passed government information to russian agents in the 1930s. In 1950, a federal district court convinced Hiss of perjury.

In 1960 Nixon was defeated by John F. Kennedy in a close race for the Presidency. The campaign witnessed the first televised debate between Presidential candidates. Turning to authorship, nixon published (1962) Six Crises, a personal account of major interludes in his career. that year he also ran unsuccessfully against incumbent Edmund (Pat) Brown for governor of California.

He entered a crowded field of contestants for the 1968 Republican Presidential nomination, excekked in the primaries, and by forestalling defection of Southern delegates to his rival, governor Ronald reagan of California, won a first-ballot nomination. his selection of Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland as a running mate and the firm adherence of southern delegates, led by Strom Thurmond of south Carolina, to his momination, prompted discussion that nixon was pursuing a "Southern strategy."

Nixon was engrossed, during his first term, in the Indo-China war. He sought a negotiated settlement, but despite both private and public talks in Paris, the war continued to drag on. In August, 1972, the american ground combat role ended in Vietnam as the last combat infantry unit was returned to the U.S. To replace the departing forces, the Prseident depended on a policy of "Vietnamization" and american warplanes based throughouSoutheast Asia.