Before I actually list the reasons Nixon was a good leader, I should address the elephant in the room, the aforementioned Watergate Scandal. Obviously, the Watergate Scandal and Nixon's actions during it were atrocious. But people often misinterpret Nixon's role in the affair. Contrary to popular belief, Nixon never ordered the break-in at the Watergate office complex. His reelection campaign did that. There's no evidence that he gave the orders and no one actually thought that was the case when the scandal took place. Nixon's role in the scandal was not one of conception, but suppression. Nixon was threatened with impeachment and pressured into resignation because he participated in efforts to stymie investigations into the Watergate Scandal and the original break-in. Of course, that's still a terrible thing to do. Obviously, though, it is nowhere near as bad as actually causing the break-in.
Watergate is not the only reason historians rate Nixon's presidency poorly, though. In 1971, Nixon tried to fire and demote all Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marking an incident known as the Nixon Jew Count. Two years later, in 1973, Nixon greenlighted a coup in Chile that replaced the socialist Salvador Allende with the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Throughout the early years of his presidency, Nixon also carried out brutal bombing attacks on Southeast Asia as part of the Vietnam War. Like the Watergate Scandal that has made Nixon so infamous, these actions are all untenable. However, if you conduct a full study of Nixon's presidency, you will see that ultimately, Nixon did more good than bad.
The last major sin of Nixon that I mentioned was his perpetration of barbaric bombing campaigns against Southeast Asia during the closing years of the Vietnam War. Ironically, this segways into one of Nixon's greatest achievements: Ending the Vietnam War. On January 27, 1973, just one week into his second term, Nixon's administration completed and signed the Paris Peace Accords, which began the US withdrawal from Vietnam. Because of this document, the Vietnam War came to a close on April 30, 1975, when the final American soldiers were sent home. But even before this, Nixon was taking actions to reduce the American presence in Southeast Asia.
Nixon moved into the White House with the painful knowledge that his country could not win the Vietnam War and that continued efforts at doing so were unsustainable. But at the same time, Nixon wanted to ensure a victory for capitalist South Vietnam. So, as one of his first actions in the presidency, Nixon launched a campaign known colloquially as "Vietnamization". Put simply, Vietnamization sought to train South Vietnamese troops to engage in the same strategies the American military had been using during its involvement in the conflict. In doing this, Nixon could remove American troops from Vietnam while continuing the fight against North Vietnamese forces. In terms of meeting its first goal - reducing US presence in Southeast Asia - Vietnamization was extremely successful, as the first American troops to be sent home from Vietnam left the country in early July 1969.
Outside of his approach to the Vietnam War, Nixon had several other significant accomplishments in foreign policy. In April of 1971, Zhuang Zedong, a Chinese professional ping-pong player, played a game with Glenn Cowan, an American ping-pong professional. After the game, Cowan gave Zhuang a T-shirt and Zhuang gave Cowan a picture of a Chinese mountain range. Following this incident, Nixon, who, alongside Mao Zedong, had been wanting to strengthen Chinese-American relations for a while, finally lifted the ban on trade with China in June of that year. A few months later, on February 21, 1972, Nixon became the first president since the CCP took control of Beijing in 1949 to visit China. In doing this, Nixon drastically reduced Cold War tensions.
Later that year, on May 26, 1972 - oddly, just 2 days before the first Watergate break-in on May 28, 1972 - Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, who had been leading the Soviet Union since October of 1964, signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This was a major arms limitation agreement that prohibited the US and Soviet Union from possessing more than 2 missile launchpads at any given moment. They could have one launchpad to protect their capital - Washington DC in the case of the US, Moscow in the case of the Soviet Union - and one to protect a storage facility containing other missiles. Clearly, this was a massive step in the right direction. That day, the threat of nuclear armageddon was drastically reduced.
Domestically, Nixon also did a lot of wonderful things. For example, he had two crucial, extremely impressive achievements in terms of civil rights. Upon entering office, Nixon was determined to finally enforce the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Brown V. Board of Education, which required the desegregation of American schools. To do this, he established a set of committees across southern communities. He then tasked these groups with figuring out how best to integrate schools in their particular areas. This strategy was extremely successful, and Nixon ended up playing a central role in ending the segregation of American education.
Similarly, in 1953, Congress passed a resolution called the House Concurrent Resolution 108. This policy required the gradual abolition of indigenous reservations. This vile decision nearly stripped Native Americans of whatever self-determination they had left. However, on July 8, 1970, Nixon repealed the House Concurrent Resolution 108, hence salvaging this vital aspect of indigenous society from extermination. Had Nixon not taken this bold action, an act of unspeakable evil against North America's original inhabitants would have taken place.
A little over a year later, on December 23, 1971, Nixon signed the National Cancer Act. This law founded and provided funding to a series of public research centers instructed to create treatments and cures for cancer. By signing this bill, Nixon launched the War on Cancer, a campaign to appropriate vital funds for and to assist in the development of medicine to mitigate and cure cancer. The War on Cancer has been extremely successful. Because of the War on Cancer, American carcinology has produced better screening technology, drugs that quell the growth of certain types of tumors, and even antidotes for a few forms of leukemia.
Throughout his presidency, Nixon also did a lot of good for the environmentalist cause. On December 2, 1970, Nixon famously established the Environmental Protection Agency. From here, Nixon signed a set of laws that helped reduce pollution. On October 21, 1973, Nixon also signed the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act, which prohibited the disposal of harmful chemicals into bodies of water. A few months later, Nixon then signed the vital Endangered Species Act, which permitted the federal government to intervene in private affairs in order to help save an animal at risk of extinction. Furthermore, Nixon signed the Noise Control Act of 1972, which banned the production of sounds that harm local ecosystems.
Finally, Nixon accomplished a lot in terms of economic policy, even in the face of immense challenges. Almost immediately after his tenure began in 1969, the country was hit with an early form of the stagflation crisis that would define the latter years of the 1970s: At the exact same time, prices were rising and unemployment was increasing. To address this, Nixon originally wanted to just restrict the rate and frequency at which the government produced money. Unfortunately, however, this strategy was unsuccessful. So, in 1970, Nixon made Arthur Burns, a prominent economist, the director of the Federal Reserve, desperately seeking his advice on the economic situation. Burns refused to assist Nixon unless he, Nixon, kept government spending under $200,000,000,000 a year. To appease Burns, Nixon tried to reduce spending by slashing the wages of government employees, sparking strikes across the country.
Desperate to resolve the worsening situation, Nixon, in early August 1971, met with a group of economic advisors - excluding Burns - at Camp David. Here, they coordinated a set of emergency measures known as the Nixon Shock. Unveiled on August 15, 1971, the Nixon Shock entailed:
- Lower taxes - This left people with more money to spend, hence giving companies more money with which to make products. This increases the number of those items on the market, driving their prices down.
- Price controls - Obviously, actively mandating products be sold for nothing more than a certain amount will keep prices down, even if in a forced and uncomfortable manner.
- Suspension of the gold standard - Nixon's advisors figured that it was good for a country to keep its gold to itself during an economic crisis, given the element's value. If the country continued to follow the gold standard, other countries that use the US dollar could demand American gold in exchange for those bank notes. In doing this, they would reduce the amount of gold present in the US.
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