The only US president to resign also created the Environmental Protection Agency
Richard Nixon is remembered above all for Watergate and for resigning in August 1974. His record is stranger than that single scandal. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency, lowered the voting age to 18, ended the draft, opened relations with China and took the dollar off gold.
Nixon was born on 9 January 1913 in Yorba Linda, California, in a house his father built on the family's lemon ranch. His parents were Quakers, and four of the five sons were named after British kings; Richard's namesake was Richard the Lionheart. The ranch failed in 1922, and the family ran a grocery and petrol station in Whittier. As a teenager he rose at 4 a.m. to drive to Los Angeles for vegetables before school. Two brothers died young, and caring for the sick Harold kept him from taking up a tuition grant to Harvard. He went to Whittier College instead, then won a scholarship to Duke's law school and graduated third in his class in 1937.
He entered Congress in 1946, made his name as an anti-communist in the Alger Hiss case, reached the Senate in 1950 and served eight years as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president. After narrowly losing the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy and then the 1962 California governor's race, he announced he was retiring, only to win the presidency in 1968.
His first term mixed hard-line war policy with sweeping domestic change. He escalated bombing in Cambodia while seeking talks with North Vietnam, then ended American combat in Vietnam and the draft in 1973. His 1972 visit to China led to diplomatic relations, and he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. At home he created the EPA, signed the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts, imposed 90 days of wage and price controls, and in 1971 ended the direct conversion of dollars into gold. He won a landslide re-election against George McGovern in 1972.
Watergate began with a break-in at Democratic Party offices ordered by administration officials, and Nixon knew of the cover-up. Facing near-certain impeachment, he resigned on 9 August 1974 and was pardoned by Gerald Ford. In nearly 20 years of retirement he wrote nine books and recast himself as a foreign-policy elder statesman before dying in April 1994.
Source: Richard Nixon
