What can you say about Richard Nixon? Perhaps President Eisenhower should answer.
Nixon served in the Pacific during the war and then came home to win elections to the House and Senate. At 39 he was the vice presidential candidate on Dwight Eisenhower's ticket. After two terms in the second slot he ran for office, met John Kennedy in the first televised presidential debate.
Nixon chose Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as his running mate in the 1960 election. Lodge had been the lone Republican elected to the Senate in 1936, left to fight the war and came back to win again in the Senate. Eisenhower named him ambassador to the United Nations, setting up a power-packed Nixon/Lodge versus Kennedy/Johnson ballot. But because of the poor showing in that debate, and perhaps a few things Lodge said that might have hurt Nixon in the South, they lost the 1960 campaign.
He ran for governor in California, lost and famously told the press "They won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore."
But he couldn't stay away. Nixon returned in the 1968 race against a Democratic party in flux and tragedy. Nixon beat Democrat Hubert Humphrey (and independent George Wallace) by the narrowest of margins with Spiro Agnew as his vice president.
It was that first Nixon term where the Watergate scandal began. Things moved slowly at first, but over time they couldn't be ignored and evidence from the cover-up ultimately forced Nixon out of office.
Lodge, meanwhile, was the subject of a few grassroots election campaigns in 1964and 1968, hence that lone button. He served as an ambassador well into the 1970s and died in 1985. Nixon died in 1994.
The Nixon Presidential Library.
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