Richard Nixon

The lemon grove failed in 1922 and the family moved to Whittier to run a grocery store. Arthur Nixon died in 1925, aged seven, after a short illness. Harold contracted tuberculosis, and for years Hannah Nixon kept a house in Arizona for him while Richard drove to the Los Angeles produce market at four in the morning and opened the store before school. Harold died in 1933. Nixon finished Whittier College the next year, turned down a tuition grant to Harvard because the family could not spare him, went to Duke law school on a scholarship he had to re-earn by grade every year, and graduated third in his class in 1937. New York's firms did not want him. Neither did the FBI.

Five and a half years, and then the only resignation. China. The end of the draft. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, Title IX, the first strategic arms treaty, the end of Bretton Woods, wage and price controls, a guaranteed income proposal that died in the Senate. Also a taping system, a burglary, a cover-up directed from the Oval Office, and August 9, 1974. BriefHistory lays the whole arc out, the achievements and the crimes in the same account. This page begins earlier and ends much later.

Ten weeks after he left office a clot in his left leg threw an embolism into his lungs. Surgeons clipped the vein on October 29, 1974, and six hours later he collapsed from internal bleeding and had to be transfused back. The physicians who examined him in November found him 15 pounds lighter, sleeping 12 hours a day, unable to concentrate, and reported to the court that he could not testify for six weeks. New York disbarred him in 1976. He was 63, out of the law, out of office and carrying legal bills he could not pay, so he sold the one asset left. David Frost gave him 600,000 dollars and a fifth of the profits, and 45 million Americans watched the first night in May 1977.

He spent the next 17 years writing his way back — nine books, trips to Beijing and Moscow, memoranda to Reagan and Bush and eventually to Clinton, and by the late 1980s a working title of elder statesman the networks used without irony. When he died of a stroke on April 22, 1994, at 81, every living president came to Yorba Linda, and Clinton asked from the pulpit that the day of judging Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close. It did not. The tapes kept opening, the last 340 hours in 2013, and every batch restarted the argument. He is the reason a president's papers now belong to the public.

Richard Nixon's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Six Crises book
  Written after two lost elections and before the comeback 1962
• Environmental Protection Agency company
  Created by executive reorganization rather than by statute 1970
• Title IX of the Education Amendments law
  Thirty-seven words that reorganized American schooling and sport 1972
• RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon book
  The first of nine books he wrote after leaving office 1978
• The Real War book
  The foreign-policy book that started the rehabilitation 1980
• Richard Nixon Presidential Library building
  Built privately in Yorba Linda — the National Archives took it over in 2007 1990

• January 9, 1913 aged 0 Born in Yorba Linda, California His father built the house from a kit. The lemon grove around it failed nine years later.
• 1933 aged ~20 His brother Harold dies of tuberculosis Arthur had died in 1925 at seven. Richard was 20 and had worked the family store through both illnesses.
• June 1937 aged 24 Graduates third in his class at Duke law school No New York firm hired him. The FBI turned him down on a budget cut.
• June 21, 1940 aged 27 Marries Pat Ryan He had met her at a Whittier community theater audition two years earlier.
• September 23, 1952 aged 39 The Checkers speech saves his place on the ticket
• January 20, 1969 aged 56 Takes the oath as the 37th president
• October 29, 1974 aged 61 Vein surgery for phlebitis, then a hemorrhage that nearly kills him He collapsed six hours after the operation and had to be transfused.
• May 4, 1977 aged 64 The first Frost interview airs to 45 million viewers Frost paid him 600,000 dollars and a fifth of the profits.
• April 22, 1994 aged 81 Dies at 81, four days after a stroke All five living presidents attended the funeral at Yorba Linda five days later.

• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. appointed
• Bob Woodward b. 1943
  Investigative reporter whose coverage of Watergate with Carl Bernstein led to President Nixon's resignation. investigated by
• Carl Bernstein b. 1944
  Investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. investigated by
• Katharine Graham 1917–2001
  Publisher who strengthened The Washington Post and backed its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. tried to break her newspaper
• William Rehnquist 1924–2005
  Chief justice who led the Court’s conservative shift toward federalism and limits on congressional power. appointed
• Elvis Presley 1935–1977
  The King of Rock and Roll whose music and style revolutionized American popular culture. met him at the White House in 1970
• Alger Hiss 1904–1996
  State Department official whose perjury conviction made Richard Nixon's career and split American opinion for decades. prosecuted