Richard Milhous Nixon
Born January 9, 1913
Died April 22, 1994
Term: 1969-1974
1968 was a full year for the U.S. history books. Assassinations took the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The conflict in Vietnam took almost 16,000 young American lives. Nationwide protests against the engagement took their toll on President Johnson, who decided against running for the office again after the most trusted man in the country, newsman Walter Cronkite, came out against the war on a news broadcast. After a riotous week for the Democrats in Chicago, the Republicans nominated a two-time loser as their Presidential candidate.
Richard Milhous Nixon had lost the Presidential contest to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and had also lost the California gubernatorial bid to incumbent Pat Brown in 1962. He would not lose in 1968 or again in 1972. A couple of episodes of intrigue highlight both election years. An effort on the part of the Nixon campaign in October of 1968 sought to sabotage Vietnam peace talks which would have helped Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. A break-in at the Democratic offices in the Watergate complex in 1972 brought about an major investigation that led to Nixon's resignation in August of 1974. Nixon's direct involvement in either event will probably never be fully verified.
Though those two scandals were not part of the news cycle in the summer of '68, my faith in the notion of the United States' moral high ground had been shaken. I had just entered my teen years, and all I knew of national events was what I saw on the evening news or read in the San Francisco Chronicle, but I was being shaken into the realization that right and wrong was never a simple black and white deal. What the public was being told were justifiably 'right' decisions were almost always shaded with grey half-truths that seemed to benefit corporate America and the military industrial complex that President Ike had warned us of less than a decade earlier.
Coupled with a personal family tragedy that summer of '68 (my father had killed a boy who turned his bicycle out into the road in front of Papa's pickup), I was entering high school in a reflective, and pretty much upset, state of mind. Life was not always going to be rosy, and the decisions our country's leaders made were not always going to be morally justifiable.
Enough of that. Here are a few Nixon tidbits:
-He was the only U.S. President to be born and raised in California (as of this writing).
-He credited his appearance on the new TV comedy show 'Laugh-In' with his win in the '68 election. Television had not been kind to him in 1960, when the Presidential debates with JFK highlighted a sweaty, unshaven Nixon opposite a very photogenic opponent.
-His trip to China opened relations with a country that had not previously been recognized as a legitimate government.
-He was a pretty good pianist.
-Oh, and he liked to bowl and had a lane installed in the basement of the White House during his time in office.
Peace to all, and don't go in front of the cameras unprepared.
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