Richard Nixon

Primary and secondary education

Nixon attended East Whittier Elementary School, where he was president of his eighth-grade class. His older brother Harold had attended Whittier High School, which his parents thought resulted in a dissolute lifestyle. They decided to send Nixon to the larger Fullerton Union High School. Though he had to ride a school bus an hour each way during his freshman year, he attained excellent grades. Later, he lived with an aunt in Fullerton during the week. He played junior varsity football and seldom missed practice, though he rarely was used in games. He had greater success as a debater, winning several championships and taking his only formal tutelage in public speaking from Fullerton's Head of English, H. Lynn Sheller. Nixon later mused on Sheller's words, "Remember, speaking is conversation...don't shout at people. Talk to them. Converse with them." Nixon said he tried to use a conversational tone as much as possible.

At the start of his junior year in September 1928, Nixon's parents permitted him to transfer to Whittier High School. At Whittier, Nixon lost a bid for student body president—his first electoral defeat. He often rose at 4 a.m. to drive the family truck to Los Angeles to purchase vegetables and then drove to the store to wash and display them before going to school. Harold was diagnosed with tuberculosis the previous year; when their mother took him to Arizona, hoping to improve his health, the demands on Nixon increased, causing him to give up football. Nevertheless, Nixon graduated from Whittier High third in his class of 207.

College and law school

Nixon was offered a tuition grant to attend Harvard University, but with Harold's continued illness requiring his mother's care until he died in 1933, Richard was needed at the store. He remained in his hometown and enrolled at Whittier College in September 1930. His expenses were met by his maternal grandfather. Nixon played for the basketball team; he also tried out for football, and though he lacked the size to play, he remained on the team as a substitute and was noted for his enthusiasm. Instead of fraternities and sororities, Whittier had literary societies. Nixon was snubbed by the only one for men, the Franklins, many of whom were from prominent families, unlike Nixon. He responded by helping to found a new society, the Orthogonian Society. In addition to the society, his studies, and work at the store, Nixon engaged in several extracurricular activities; he was a champion debater and hard worker. In 1933, he was engaged to Ola Florence Welch, daughter of the Whittier police chief, but they broke up in 1935.

After graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Whittier in 1934, Nixon was accepted at the new Duke University School of Law, which offered scholarships to top students, including Nixon. It paid high salaries to its professors, many of whom had national or international reputations. The number of scholarships was greatly reduced for second- and third-year students, creating intense competition. Nixon kept his scholarship, was elected president of the Duke Bar Association, inducted into the Order of the Coif, and graduated third in his class with a Bachelor of Laws degree in June 1937.

Watergate

The term Watergate has come to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration. Those activities included "dirty tricks", such as bugging the offices of political opponents, and the harassment of activist groups and political figures. The activities were brought to light after five men were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. The Washington Post picked up on the story; reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward relied on an informant known as "Deep Throat"—later revealed to be Mark Felt, associate director at the FBI—to link the men to the Nixon administration. Nixon downplayed the scandal as mere politics, calling news articles biased and misleading. A series of revelations made it clear that the Committee to Re-elect President Nixon, and later the White House, were involved in attempts to sabotage the Democrats. Senior aides such as White House Counsel John Dean faced prosecution; in total 48 officials were convicted of wrongdoing.

In July 1973, White House aide Alexander Butterfield testified under oath to Congress that Nixon had a secret taping system and recorded his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office. These tapes were subpoenaed by Watergate Special Counsel Archibald Cox; Nixon provided transcripts of the conversations but not the actual tapes, citing executive privilege. With the White House and Cox at loggerheads, Nixon had Cox fired in October in the "Saturday Night Massacre"; he was replaced by Leon Jaworski. In November, Nixon's lawyers revealed that a tape of conversations held in the White House on June 20, 1972, had an 18+1⁄2 minute gap. Rose Mary Woods, the President's personal secretary, claimed responsibility for the gap, saying that she had accidentally wiped the section while transcribing the tape, but her story was widely mocked. The gap, while not conclusive proof of wrongdoing by the President, cast doubt on Nixon's statement that he had been unaware of the cover-up.

Though Nixon lost much popular support, even from his own party, he rejected accusations of wrongdoing and vowed to stay in office. He admitted he had made mistakes but insisted he had no prior knowledge of the burglary, did not break any laws, and did not learn of the cover-up until early 1973. On October 10, 1973, Vice President Agnew resigned for reasons unrelated to Watergate: he was convicted on charges of bribery, tax evasion, and money laundering during his tenure as governor of Maryland. Believing his first choice, John Connally, would not be confirmed by Congress, Nixon chose Gerald Ford, Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, to replace Agnew. One researcher suggests Nixon effectively disengaged from his own administration after Ford was sworn in as vice president on December 6, 1973.

On November 17, 1973, during a televised question-and-answer session with 400 Associated Press managing editors, Nixon said, "People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."

The legal battle over the tapes continued through early 1974, and in April, Nixon announced the release of 1,200 pages of transcripts of White House conversations between himself and his aides. The House Judiciary Committee opened impeachment hearings against the President on May 9, 1974, which were televised on the major TV networks. These hearings culminated in votes for impeachment. On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the full tapes, not just selected transcripts, must be released.

The scandal grew to involve a slew of additional allegations against the President, ranging from the improper use of government agencies to accepting gifts in office and his personal finances and taxes; Nixon repeatedly stated his willingness to pay any outstanding taxes due, and later paid $465,000 (equivalent to $3 million in 2025) in back taxes in 1974.

Even with support diminished by the continuing series of revelations, Nixon hoped to fight the charges. But one of the new tapes, recorded soon after the break-in, demonstrated that Nixon had been told of the White House connection to the Watergate burglaries soon after they took place, and had approved plans to thwart the investigation. In a statement accompanying the release of what became known as the "Smoking Gun Tape" on August 5, 1974, Nixon accepted blame for misleading the country about when he had been told of White House involvement, stating that he had had a lapse of memory. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, Senator Barry Goldwater, and House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes met with Nixon soon after. Rhodes told Nixon he faced certain impeachment in the House. Scott and Goldwater told the president that he had, at most, only 15 votes in his favor in the Senate, far fewer than the 34 needed to avoid removal from office.

Resignation

On August 8, 1974, facing a loss of political support and it being increasingly certain that he would be impeached and removed from office, Nixon addressed the nation on television, announcing that he would resign the presidency the following day, on August 9. His resignation speech was delivered from the Oval Office and was carried live on radio and television. Nixon said he was resigning for the good of the country and asked the nation to support the new president, Gerald Ford. Nixon went on to review the accomplishments of his presidency, especially in foreign policy. In defending his presidency, Nixon quoted "Citizenship in a Republic", a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt:

Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly".

Nixon's speech received generally favorable initial responses from network commentators, with only Roger Mudd of CBS News criticizing it for failing to admit wrongdoing. Conrad Black, a Nixon biographer, labeled the resignation speech "a masterpiece", saying, "What was intended to be an unprecedented humiliation for any American president, Nixon converted into a virtual parliamentary acknowledgement of almost blameless insufficiency of legislative support to continue. He left while devoting half his address to a recitation of his accomplishments in office."