NIXON'S RESIGNATION

Nixon's Resignation

Nixon's Resignation

Introduction

Richard Nixon was perhaps the most polarizing political figure in the United States in the 20th century. Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving in that capacity from January 1969 until his resignation following his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Nixon came to national prominence as a young congressman from California in the 1940s during his investigation of Alger Hiss of the U.S. State Department. At the State Department, Hiss rose to the secretary general of the international assembly that created the United Nations. Hiss was ultimately convicted of perjury for testifying he had not stolen State Department documents. Nixon was elected a U.S. Senator from California in 1951 and was tapped by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 to run as his vice president on the Republican ticket. Early in that campaign, Nixon became the focus of stories that accused him of having access to a campaign slush fund, but Nixon appeared on the new medium of television and argued his case effectively to the American people, leading Eisenhower to keep him on the ticket.

Discussion

Nixon's political career was closely covered with the three national newsweeklies. Tindall (1996) writes of their societal function: Freed of the unrelenting tyranny of the daily deadline, the news magazines engaged in a pseudo-historicity, reconstituting the world week by week on terms understandable and acceptable to readers who, nuances of ideology aside, resembled each other more than they differed. Although Lentz was writing about the newsweeklies in the 1960s, their function remains the same today. Lentz also contends that the newsweeklies direct their content to the middle class.

As mentioned earlier, former President Nixon gave up his Secret Service protection. In addition, his library did not qualify as a presidential library under the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955. The Act “authorized the National Archives to accept and then administer any privately constructed structure housing presidential papers” ((Tindall 1996, p. 577). Nixon's lawsuits fought the National Archives until his death over control of the papers of his administration (Ambrose, 1991). Many of these documents were unreleased during Nixon's lifetime because of privacy or national security reasons (Hoff, 1994). Even though, Richard Nixon, because of his resignation from the presidency, remains unique among presidents, parallels exist between Nixon and other presidents who left office as failures, either perceived or real.

There was also a ...