Richard Nixon (1913-94)

US president. Born on 9 January 1913 in Yorba Linda, California, Richard Milhous Nixon studied at Whittier College and Duke University before serving in the US navy during World War II. A lawyer by training, he began his political career as a Republican in 1946 by skilfully articulating anti-Communist ideas and a negative campaigning style.

Elected to the US House of Representatives, he came to prominence through the House Un-American Activities Committee as the prosecutor of Alger Hiss, a US State Department official accused of being a Soviet spy. The 36-year-old Nixon was elected to the Senate in 1950. His aggressive campaign against his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas (whom he mocked as the 'Pink Lady'), earned him the nickname 'Tricky Dicky'.

Nixon was Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in the 1952 presidential election. He came close to being disgraced when it was revealed that he had been accepting private money to supplement his congressional salary. He successfully defended himself in a speech that effectively used the new medium of television, memorably referring to his wife Pat's 'cloth coat' and his daughters' puppy Checkers.

In 1960, he narrowly lost the presidential election to John F Kennedy. When, two years later, he was defeated in the California governorship elections, he announced his retirement from politics in a bitter speech: 'You won't have Nixon to kick around any more.' However, he returned in 1968, following Lyndon B Johnson's withdrawal from the presidential race.

Elected president, he devalued the dollar and ordered the saturation bombing of north Vietnam but then was forced – reluctantly – to end the Vietnam War with the ceasefire of 1973. Although an outspoken anti-Communist, Nixon also started a new series of disarmament talks with the Soviet Union and recognised the People's Republic of China, to which he famously travelled in 1972. However, he did sabotage Salvador Allende's Marxist regime in Chile.

Re-elected in a landslide in 1972, he fell from power when the Washington Post newspaper revealed his involvement in the Watergate scandal, a criminal conspiracy to undermine his Democrat opponents. Increasingly paranoid and corrupt, he became in 1974 the only president to resign from office under threat of impeachment by Congress.

In the last two decades of his life, however, he became a controversial pundit and consultant, earning millions of dollars for his memoirs and lectures. He died on 18 April 1994.

Who's who contents

Top