Richard+Nixon

=__Richard Nixon__=


 * Richard Milhous Nixon** (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994) was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. During his Presidency, Nixon succeeded in ending American fighting in Viet Nam and improving relations with the U.S.S.R. and China.



=__Biography__=

Nixon was born on January 19, 1913 to Francis “Frank” A. Nixon and Hannah Milhous Nixon in Yorba Linda, California. Nixon’s father was a rancher, but when his ranch failed, he moved the family to Whittier, California where he opened a service station and grocery store. Nixon grew up poor and was raised in a very conservative, Quaker household. Nixon had four brothers: Harold, Donald, Arthur, and Edward. (Harold died of tuberculosis at age 23 and Arthur died at age 7 of tubercular encephalitis.) Nixon was a high school debater and was undergraduate president at Whittier College in California, where he won a scholarship to attend Duke University Law School in North California. There, he graduated third in his class in 1937. However, after graduating, he could not find work on the East Coast. Nixon, therefore, moved back to Whittier where he worked as a small-town lawyer. Nixon met his wife, Thelma Catherine Patricia “Pat” Ryan, while the two played opposite one another in a community theater production. They were married on June 21, 1940 and had two children: Tricia (born in 1946) and Julie (born in 1948). During World War II, Nixon served as a Navy lieutenant commander in the Pacific. On leaving the service, he was elected to Congress from his California district. In 1950, he won a Senate seat. Two years later, General Eisenhower selected Nixon, age 39, to be his running mate. As Vice President, Nixon took on major duties in the Eisenhower Administration. Nominated for President by acclamation in 1960, he lost to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, he again won his party's nomination, and went on to defeat Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and third-party candidate George C. Wallace. His accomplishments while in office included revenue sharing, the end ofthe draft, new anticrime laws, and a broad environmental. As he had promised, he appointed Justices of conservative philosophy to the Supreme Court. One of the most dramatic events of his first term occurred in 1969, when American astronauts made the first moon landing. Some of his most acclaimed achievements came in his quest for world stability. During visits in 1972 to Beijing and Moscow, he reduced tensions with China and the U.S.S.R. His summit meetings with Russian leader Leonid I. Brezhnev produced a treaty to limit strategic nuclear weapons. In January 1973, he announced an accord with North Viet Nam to end American involvement in Indochina. In 1974, his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, negotiated disengagement agreements between Israel and its opponents, Egypt and Syria

=__Vietnam War__ =

Over 500,000 troops were stationed in Vietnam; Americans killed in action averaged 1200 a month. When Nixon took office, about 300 American soldiers were dying each week in Vietnam. Because of this, the war was not supported by the people of the United States and they held violent protests against it. The Johnson administration had agreed to suspend bombing in exchange for negotiations without preconditions, but this agreement never fully took force.

=__Vietnamization__=

After Richard Nixon became president, he promised the American public that he would reduce U.S. troop levels in Vietnam. He pursued a plan he called "Vietnamization", the idea that South Vietnamese would gradually become a greater combat role and ultimately eliminate the need for American ground forces. This which allowed the U.S. to gradually withdraw from the war, leaving the South Vietnamese army to fight the war independently. The withdrawal of U.S. troops began in July 1969. To bring a faster end to hostilities, President Nixon also expanded the war into other countries, such as Laos and Cambodia -- a move that created thousands of protests back in America. =__Paris Peace Accords__media type="youtube" key="lXYAg9mhlmM" height="315" width="420"=

On January 27, 1973, the peace talks in Paris finally succeeded in producing a cease-fire agreement. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, knowing they were leaving a weak South Vietnam who would not be able to withstand another major communist North Vietnam attack.

Created By: Blake Hawkins and Sarah Choi
Recources:

@http://faculty.smu.edu/dsimon/Change-Viet4.html

__ @http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=619 __

@http://history1900s.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/vietnamwar_2.htm

@http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/vietnamwar/a/VietnamViet.htm