Richard Millhaus Nixon is one of the least popular post-war American presidents.
I've never seen an article that highly appreciates Nixon, and it's a shame in America! Why is it so hated that I've even seen an article saying that?
Is the evaluation really valid?
Richard Nixon before becoming president
Richard Nixon was born in 1908 to a Quaker family in California. Nixon is extremely rare in this respect as many American presidents are from the east coast.
Another president born in the Quaker family is Herbert Hoover.
His father worked as a farmer, carpenter, and driver before running a grocery store, a gas station, and so on, and his family became very rich.
In high school, Nixon was so talented that he was invited by Harvard University as a scholarship student, but he went to Whittier College, a Quaker school because his brother was ill at the time and didn't want to leave his hometown. After graduating, he studied law at Duke University's Law School.
When Nixon graduated in 1937 with an honorable grade of third from the top, he acted as a lawyer, enlisted in the Navy during World War II, and eventually became a major.
After the war, he ran for the Republican Party and became a member of the California state, working with Joseph McCarthy, famous for McCarthyism, to crack down on the Communist Party.
Perhaps Nixon and some anti-communist forces in the United States were madly obsessed with it at this time, Nixon labeled everyone as a communist, and even against opponents who had nothing to do with communism. Because of the criticism, the Democratic Party gave it the nickname "Tricky Dick."
However, such an attitude was highly evaluated within the Republican Party of the conservative high net worth sympathizer, and in 1952 he became vice president of President Eisenhower.
In the 1960 presidential election following the end of Eisenhower's term, he was defeated by the young Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy by the narrowest margin in the U.S. presidential election, and when Kennedy was subsequently assassinated, the president became Lyndon Johnson. Due to the swamping of the Vietnam War, Johnson declared that he would not run for the presidential election, and finally became the president of the United States after reaching the presidential election in 1968.
The 37th President of the United States
Nixon, who became president, appointed Henry Kissinger as a special aide to foreign affairs and announced the Nixon Doctrine that he would refrain from military intervention in Far East Asia, and it seemed that he would withdraw from the Vietnam War, but in fact Invaded Cambodia, which is a neighboring country of Vietnam, and there was a great gap between what he was saying and what he was doing, such as bombing Laos.
After that, Nixon visited China in an electric shock to put pressure on Vietnam, and in 1972, he met with Brezhnev of the Soviet Union and signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Negotiations. Name.
In such a trend, Nixon withdraws from Vietnam, and the United States experiences a war that could not be won for the first time in history.
Even after the withdrawal of the US military, the turmoil in Southeast Asia continued and deepened the turmoil such as the Cambodian Civil War, the Laotian Civil War, and the Vietnam War in China.
In this way, Nixon showed a flashy movement regarding diplomacy, but the dollar began to fall due to financial difficulties caused by the prolonged Vietnam War, and Nixon responded by stopping the gold standard system. Get out. As a result, the dollar became a floating exchange rate system, and the Bretton Woods system based on the dollar collapsed, which is called the dollar shock or Nixon shock.
The only president in history who resigned during his term
There have been several presidents who have failed to complete his term. Some died of illness and some were assassinated. No American president has resigned during the period on his own initiative. Except for Richard Millhouse Nixon alone.
Perhaps Nixon has caused a Watergate scandal to eavesdrop on the Democratic Party headquarters, and Nixon's chief of staff and cabinet aide will be found guilty of trial and sentenced to imprisonment. In response, Nixon resigned from his presidency before the impeachment trial began.
Nixon lived a long time after that and died in 1993. He was 81 years old.
Personal evaluation of Nixon
Nixon's evaluation is really difficult. Although he has a lot of achievements, he has many missteps, and he will be the president of the United States who has a completely different evaluation depending on whether he is evaluated by the point addition method or the deduction method.
It is a mismanagement that he has expanded the Vietnam War, but his withdrawal would be a feat, and his first visit to China as President of the United States would still be a feat.
Although it is not well known in Japan, it is Nixon who established the Drug Enforcement Bureau and the US Environmental Protection Bureau, and it can be said that his ability to act is one of the best among the presidents of all time.
But the blemishes that caused Watergate, the worst political scandal in American history, will continue to be passed down as long as the United States continues.
Even with that one point, it seems that Nixon will not come to the top of the successive presidents of the United States.
Furthermore, the dollar shock, also known as the Nixon shock, has a great impact on the world economy, leading to the loss of American authority and causing a global recession along with the oil shock, which, for better or worse, triggered the end of the Cold War. became.
It's hard to say how to evaluate this, but at least it's hard to take a positive view of Nixon.