Nixon, Richard M. (1913–1994)

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NIXON, RICHARD M. (1913–1994)

Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-seventh President of the United States, was born in Yorba Linda, California. An alumnus of Whittier College and Duke University Law School, he practiced law in Whittier, California, from 1937 to 1942. After a brief stint in the enforcement of wartime price controls, he entered the Navy and served with it in the South Pacific. Upon his release from duty he was elected to the house of representatives from the Twelfth District of California. Shortly he gained national prominence as a member of the house committee on unamerican activities, and he played a decisive role in generating the perjury case against Alger Hiss. Nixon was elected to the senate from his home state in 1950, gaining new notoriety in denouncing the Democrats for having "lost" China to communism. In 1952 he was elected vice-president as the running mate of dwight d. eisenhower. Nixon had riveted national attention—once again—with an impassioned defense on radio and television of his acceptance of money from a political "slush" fund. As vice-president he drew international notice through his "kitchen debate" with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon was nominated for President by his party in 1960, but lost to the Democrats' john f. kennedy in a close election. Two years later Nixon ran for governor of California and lost. He reentered the private practice of law, this time in New York City. Maintaining and broadening his political contacts, he was again nominated for the presidency by the Republicans in 1968. His campaign theme was a pledge to heal the divisions in the nation that the Vietnam War had created and to bring the hostilities to an honorable conclusion. He won a plurality of the popular vote over the Democrats' hubert h. humphrey and George C. Wallace, candidate of the American Independence Party.

As President, Nixon took advantage of the dramatic expansion of the office that had been taking place since the time of franklin d. roosevelt, recognizing that the public had grown accustomed to regarding the Chief Executive as the undisputed architect of national policies. But Nixon stretched his authority with less restraint than his predecessors, undertaking steps violative of the law and of the Constitution itself. A full explanation for his actions may never be forthcoming. Possibly he felt keenly that his party's inability to capture or control Congress would continue to frustrate his desire to dismantle many New Deal and Great Society programs. He may also have been guided by inner compulsions of ambition and feelings of inadequacy he never articulated. Nixon, at any rate, interpreted by his own lights the constitutional prerogatives of his office, including an assumed right to ignore or modify the letter and intent of laws.

Nixon, for example, did not consider himself obligated to respect the law of 1972 requiring that executive agreements arrived at with foreign governments be reported to Congress within sixty days, cavalierly submitting them late. Moreover, he sometimes negotiated them at a lower diplomatic level and labeled them "arrangements." Under Nixon's stewardship, executive agreements were entered into on major matters and formal treaties almost invariably on minor matters—a reversal of the traditional relationship between the two forms of diplomatic undertakings.

Although a few Presidents had sometimes impounded funds appropriated by Congress, the step was generally taken in conformity with congressional intent or under the President's authority as commander-in-chief. Nixon broke fresh ground in his assertion of a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds. For him impoundment was a legitimate tool of the President to alter policy set by Congress—and he employed it on a scale hitherto unknown. While some of the funds he refused to release came out of military, space, and public works appropriations, vast amounts also came out of social and environmental programs. By 1973 Nixon's impoundments totaled about $18 billion, between seventeen and twenty percent of the funds he could claim to control. Nixon and his aides maintained that he was following patterns established by previous Presidents. The evidence is, however, that his predecessors did not aim to contravene the will of Congress, but merely postpone immediate expenditure. Nixon, on the other hand, used impoundment to terminate or curtail programs. He defended his actions on the ground that the executive power of the President included a constitutional right to be the people's defender against Congress's inability to hold down nondefense spending.

Nixon's boldness had the effect of giving the executive an item veto of appropriation bills—a remedy long sought by Presidents, and provided for in the confederate constitution, but consistently withheld from Presidents since first requested by President ulysses s. grant in 1873. Whatever the merit of the device, Nixon's insistence on exercising it in defiance of Congress was a usurpation of power.

although wiretapping without formal authorization had long been employed occasionally by Presidents, Nixon was the first Chief Executive who systematically resorted to its use. His practice of it grew out of a determination to keep under wraps the "secret" B-52 raids over Cambodia in 1969. Nixon was apparently fashioning a new conception of his office, metamorphosing it into a "plebiscitary presidency"—one in which the Chief Executive would assume widened power under the Constitution, relying on a reshaped Supreme Court to validate his actions. Nixon's expressed concern was that leaks of information about the "secret war" were putting national security in jeopardy. He ordered the tapping of telephones of members of the National Security Council staff and of several newspaper reporters. The taps were conducted without court order and in patent violation of Title III of the omnibus crime control and safe streets act of 1968. By countenancing not only illegal wiretapping but, shortly, burglary (in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who revealed the so-called Pentagon Papers), the hiring of agents provacateurs (to conduct "dirty tricks" in election campaigns), and the subverting of the Internal Revenue Service (to punish "enemies"), Nixon was substituting his personal sanction for established law.

In assuming this prerogative, Nixon believed he was exercising what he regarded as inherent power to maintain national and domestic security. This claim of "inherent power," sometimes also set forth by previous Presidents, has never been recognized as valid by the courts. In United States v. United States District Court (1972) the Supreme Court by an 8–0 vote ruled unconstitutional the Nixon administration's practice of engaging in domestic electronic surveillance without a judicial warrant.

Nixon's assertion of an executive privilege to reject a subpoena became the issue in the case of united states v. nixon (1974). The suit revolved around Nixon's refusal to surrender tapes containing information relevant to the prosecution of some of his close aides for offenses that included obstruction of justice by "covering up" the administration's involvement in the watergate break-in. In its unanimous decision requiring the President to turn over the tapes, the Supreme Court recognized that a President is entitled to confidentiality of communication—needful for "protection of the public interest in candid, objective, and even blunt or harsh opinion in presidential decisionmaking." But, the Court concluded, "when the ground for asserting privilege as to subpoenaed material sought for use in a criminal trial is based only on the generalized interest in confidentiality, it cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice. The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated, specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial."

Nixon toyed with the idea of disobeying the decision, but decided to comply, surrendering the tapes covered in the decision. Indeed, he published their contents, thus providing the House Judiciary Committee with the "smoking gun"—the now famous words in which the President counseled inducing the Central Intelligence Agency to limit the FBI's investigation of the Watergate burglary.

Nixon's use of the pocket veto was also remarkable. As intended by the Framers of the Constitution it may be used at the end of a session of Congress when a President who does not sign a bill cannot return it to Congress because it stands adjourned. Nixon unhesitatingly used pocket vetoes when Congress was merely in brief recess. In Kennedy v. Simpson (1973) a district court overturned as misused Nixon's pocket veto of the Family Practice of Medicine Bill, which had been opposed by only three members of Congress.

Nixon's transgressions of the law and the Constitution contributed to the passage of two major pieces of legislation. One was the congressional budget and impoundment control act of 1974, which detailed the arrangements under which Congress may monitor the deferral by a President of appropriated funds. The second law, responding to the deployment of troops in Asia, first by President lyndon b. johnson and then by Nixon, was the War Powers Resolution of 1973, severely restricting the ability of a President to use military force outside the United States without congressional authorization. Nixon and all succeeding Presidents have denounced this law as an unconstitutional abridgment of the power of the President to direct the armed forces.

Nixon made two nominations to the Supreme Court that failed of confirmation. In 1969 he submitted the name of Judge Clement F. Haynsworth of South Carolina, a designation that met implacable opposition from civil rights groups and labor unions. Early the following year Nixon sent forward the name of Judge G. Harrold Carswell of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida. Denounced as a racist in many quarters, although he had renounced his older views on race, Carswell was also opposed as lacking the superior qualifications required for a seat on the highest court.

In addition to placing harry a. blackmun of Minnesota, lewis f. powell, jr. , of Virginia, and william h. rehnquist of Arizona on the Supreme Court, Nixon also appointed the fourteenth Chief Justice, Judge warren e. burger of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, whose conservative speeches and advocacy of judicial restraint appealed to the President. Nixon had been especially impressed by an address that Burger delivered in 1967 on the subject of "law and order," from which Nixon had borrowed during the 1968 campaign for the Presidency. He was mindful, too, of the support Burger had given him during his critical time in the 1952 campaign.

Nixon was the first Chief Executive to resign the Presidency—a consequence of the Watergate affair that convulsed the nation from 1972 to 1974. The reasons for the burglary—carried out by Nixon's political aides at the headquarters of the Democratic party—have never been adduced. From the start of the investigation the administration tried to cover up its connection to the crime. In the long drawnout effort to get at the truth, the focus of the quest became the President himself: what did he know and when did he know it? The evidence lay in the recordings of conversations in his office that Nixon was revealed to have been making for years. The President turned over the critical tapes just as the House of Representatives seemed on the verge of voting to impeach him. He surrendered his office on August 9, 1974. The following month, his successor, gerald r. ford, issued the former President a "full, free, and absolute" pardon for any crimes he may have committed.

Henry F. Graff
(1986)