Richard Nixon Signed Card.

Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994), the thirty-seventh President of the United States, remains one of the most complex and consequential figures in modern American political history — a man of formidable intellect and strategic vision whose presidency produced genuine achievements of the first order alongside one of the most catastrophic failures of political judgment the office has ever witnessed. Born in Yorba Linda, California, and educated at Whittier College and Duke University School of Law, Nixon served as a Naval officer in the Pacific, rose through the House and Senate on the strength of his aggressive anti-communist credentials, and served two terms as Eisenhower's Vice President before losing narrowly to Kennedy in 1960 and engineering one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history with his election to the presidency in 1968. His foreign policy record was substantial — the opening of China, détente with the Soviet Union, the withdrawal from Vietnam, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency among his lasting contributions — but everything was ultimately consumed by Watergate, the cover-up of a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters that led to his resignation on August 9, 1974, the only presidential resignation in American history. Pardoned by Gerald Ford, Nixon spent his final two decades writing prolifically on foreign policy and partially rehabilitating his public standing. He died in April 1994 at the age of eighty-one, and his funeral was attended by all five living former presidents — a gesture of institutional respect for a man whose gifts and flaws were each, in their different ways, outsized.