Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed or participated in as president, sparing him from future legal charges, called indictments. Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned from office in an earlier, unrelated scandal involving bribery, or promising favors to people in exchange for money. If that had happened, he would’ve faced a trial in the Senate that could have removed him from office. If he hadn’t, he likely would’ve been impeached-or officially charged with misconduct in office-by the House of Representatives. On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned from office. The tapes confirmed that Nixon had lied about his innocence in planning and covering up illegal activities. Eventually the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, forced Nixon to release secret tape recordings he had made of his White House conversations. (They hoped to find secrets there that would help Nixon, a member of the Republican Party, be re-elected later that year.) The burglars were caught, but the investigation didn’t move quickly enough to stop Nixon’s re-election in 1972.įor more than two years, Nixon and others tried to hide their involvement as newspaper reporters and members of Congress led investigations into the break-in. In 1972 members of Nixon’s administration hired men to steal files from Democratic Party offices at the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. But Nixon’s biggest scandal was still to come. They hired people to listen in on phone conversations, silenced helpers with money, spent federal campaign funds improperly, used government records illegally, and filed false tax reports. He and other staff members broke many laws in their efforts to discover embarrassing information about his opponents (a list of more than 40,000 names). citizens by using some of the same dirty tricks he was accused of doing as a member of Congress. Many people blamed Nixon for not getting the United States out of the war sooner, even though the war had been going on long before he became president. Many Americans were angry about the cost of a war the United States did not win: 58,000 U.S. ally and took control of South Vietnam, becoming one unified country, Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnam defeated the U.S. involvement, with fighting spreading to surrounding countries. In response to tense protests against the war across the United States, Nixon withdrew troops from the region, and the United States officially left the war in 1973. But this was more difficult than he thought it would be. Nixon entered the White House with a pledge to end the Vietnam War, a war between what was then the two separate countries of North and South Vietnam, in which the United States sided with South Vietnam. ( Read about the first moon landing.) PRESIDENTIAL SETBACKS astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. As part of a mission authorized by Nixon, U.S. president to visit that country while in office.ĭuring Nixon’s presidency, the United States was involved in what was known as the "space race," or a competition against the former Soviet Union, now Russia, to see who could land a person on the moon first. Internationally, he improved relations between the United States and China, becoming the first U.S. In the White House at last, Nixon focused on protecting the environment and reducing crime in the United States. Kennedy and the 1962 California governor’s race before finally being elected president in 1968. He lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Eisenhower’s vice president from 1953 to 1961. By then, his opponents were calling him "Tricky Dick" because of what they called the "dirty tricks" (he was accused of illegal campaign funding and spreading false rumors about his political opponents, among other things) he used to get elected. House of Representatives in 1946 and the U.S. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īfter the war ended, Nixon won seats in the U.S.
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