Nixon News & Notes
Richard Nixon, Hopeless Romantic
On Monday, August 17, 1942, in what would be the first of many partings over the next two years, Pat saw her husband off at Washington’s Union Station. Dick Nixon, then a 29-year-old lawyer for the government’s Office of Price Administration, endured a gloomy train ride to Rhode Island for two months of rigorous officer training at Quonset Point, the first week of which, Dick wrote Pat, “was the longest I’ve ever known.” He disliked studying naval science and ballistics and was no fan of the arduous physical training in the summer humidity. He found solace in his correspondence with his wife.
The Nixons’ wartime letters are extraordinary documents, offering vivid evidence of the couple’s strengthening bond and the evolution of their individual characters. Their separation allowed these emotionally straitened individuals, who had been married two years earlier, the space to discover and express their profound feeling for each other. Most of these letters were opened last January by the Nixon Foundation in commemoration of what would have been the late president’s 100th birthday; they are revealed here in their full context for the first time. And they show a surprisingly tender side of the man who would go on to become a president remembered for his pursuit of domestic enemies, real and imagined, for controversial foreign-policy decisions like the secret bombing of Cambodia and for harsh recorded remarks about people he disliked.
This was the side of Richard Milhous Nixon that only one other person—Pat Nixon—ever saw.
This was Dick Nixon in love.
When Elvis Presley called President Nixon while high
There’s no real way of talking about the man beneath ‘The King’ because, as many people who knew him personally will attest, for the last decade and a half of his life, he was lost in the persona of ‘The King’.
How the ‘Nixon Shock’ Remade the World Economy
In a new book, Yale SOM Dean Emeritus Jeffrey Garten explores a moment when the U.S. realized it needed to take a different role on the global stage in response to trade and economic challenges. Richard Nixon’s decision to delink the dollar from gold, announced without warning in August 1971, remade the global monetary system in an instant. We talked with Garten about the three days of drama leading up to the announcement and how it reverberates today.