Today is the 102nd birthday of the 37th President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, born Jan. 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. He graduated from Whittier College in California and then attended law school at Duke University, from which he graduate in 1937. He served in the Navy in World War II, achieving the rank of lieutenant commander. During his wartime service in the Navy, he was famous for his great hamburgers, running what was called Nicks Hamburger Stand at stations he served in the Pacific. He was also quite a poker player, winning more than $10,000 during the war. Nixon was as good a poker player, if not better, than anyone we had ever seen, said a fellow sailor. I once saw him bluff a man out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces. Like his White House predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon is one of the most complex characters to ever serve in the Presidency. While nothing in his early political career predicted the humiliating disgrace that Nixon would experience much later by becoming the only man to resign from the Presidency, he was a man who seemed uncomfortable in public life, even after winning the White House. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1946 and the U.S. Senate in 1950. He served as the 36th Vice President of the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953-61, and was the Republican Partys Presidential nominee in 1960, losing an extremely close election to U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. After losing a 1962 bid to be Governor of California, Nixon made one of the greatest comebacks in American political history by being elected President in 1968 and winning re-election by a landslide in 1972. His main interest and what he is most remembered for, along with the Watergate Scandal, is foreign policy. In July 1971, he stunned the world by announcing he would visit Communist China. The Chinese were involved in a series of disputes with the Soviet Union, which bordered much of China. They were anxious to counter that by improving relations with the United States. In Feb. 1972, he visited China, where he met with its aging leader, Mao Tse-Tung and agreed to move forward on normalizing relations with the Chinese. The U.S. had severed relations with China in 1949 following the Communist takeover of that nation -- diplomatic relations were restored New Years Day 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, who hosted a state dinner honoring the Chinese leader, Deng Xio Peng. The Chinese insisted that Nixon be invited to the dinner, an indication of their high regard for him as well as their desire to continue the initiatives Nixon had launched with them during his Presidency. It was the disgraced Nixons first visit back to the White House after resigning from the Presidency some five years earlier. He lived another 15 years, dying of a massive stroke on Apr. 22, 1994 at the age of 81. https://youtube/watch?v=N5V9sP_nDCM
Posted on: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 03:18:34 +0000
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