11.1 Nixon, Détente, and Watergate

The years from Richard Nixon's 1968 election through his 1974 resignation sit at the junction of three stories this exam treats together: a Republican strategy that pulled much of the white South away from the New Deal presidential coalition, a diplomatic opening that recast the Cold War, and a constitutional crisis that tested whether a president could place himself beyond criminal process. You should be able to connect Southern strategy politics and New Federalism to the same White House that flew to Beijing, signed SALT I in Moscow, and then disintegrated under Watergate. Vietnamization and the Paris settlement belong to the preceding Vietnam chapter; here they matter only as background for Nixon's triangular diplomacy and for Congress's later attempt to reclaim war powers.

The 1968 Coalition and the Southern Strategy

Nixon won a plurality in 1968 against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace. Wallace's Deep South showing advertised a white backlash against civil-rights enforcement, urban unrest, and antiwar protest. Nixon's campaign answered with law and order, opposition to court-ordered school busing, and a pitch to the Silent Majority—voters he described as hard-working, patriotic, and tired of 1960s upheaval. Historians call the racialized, regionally targeted half of that pitch the Southern strategy: peel white Southern Democrats and suburban conservatives from the national Democratic Party without a frontal repeal of the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act.

The strategy did not convert every Southern courthouse overnight, but it did change presidential geography. In 1972 Nixon crushed George McGovern in a landslide that included the former Confederacy. Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) supplied a widely circulated map of Sunbelt and suburban realignment. On the Court, Nixon nominated Warren Burger as chief justice and later Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist—a more conservative bench than Earl Warren's, though not a rubber stamp. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) still allowed busing as a desegregation remedy; Milliken v. Bradley (1974) then limited cross-district metropolitan busing, a ruling suburban opponents of busing welcomed. Hold the party story and the Court story together: the GOP courted voters who wanted Washington off their school boards, while federal judges still defined what desegregation required.

A realistic item might give you a 1972 electoral map plus a quotation about "law and order" and ask what coalition Nixon was building. The best answer names white Southerners and suburban conservatives, not a return to Reconstruction military districts or an open alliance with Wallace as the Republican nominee (Wallace ran against both parties in 1968).

New Federalism and the Size of Washington

At home Nixon branded his domestic program New Federalism: shift some Great Society functions and dollars toward states and localities while keeping a strong presidency. The signature instrument was general revenue sharing under the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972, which sent federal money to governors and mayors with fewer categorical strings than Johnson-era grants. He also proposed a Family Assistance Plan that would have replaced much of existing welfare with a guaranteed income; Congress never enacted it. That failed plan is a useful reminder that Nixon was not a simple cut-the-budget ideologue of the later New Right.

New Federalism was not simple shrinkage. Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), expanded some regulatory capacity, and used impoundment—refusing to spend money Congress had appropriated—as a weapon against programs he disliked. Congress answered with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, part of the same post-Watergate rebalancing as the War Powers Resolution. For exam purposes, hold two ideas at once: Republican rhetoric of returning power to the states, and a still-powerful federal executive that Democrats and many Republicans soon concluded had gone too far.

Détente: China, 1972, and SALT I

Nixon and National Security Advisor (later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger practiced realpolitik: treat communist powers as states with interests, not as a single ideological bloc. The goal of détente was to lower the risk of superpower war, freeze parts of the nuclear arms race, and give Washington leverage while extracting the United States from Vietnam by playing Beijing and Moscow against each other. That last motive is the only Vietnam link you need here: diplomacy as a triangle, not a retelling of troop withdrawals.

Ping-pong diplomacy (1971) and Kissinger's secret July 1971 trip prepared Nixon's public visit to the People's Republic of China in February 1972—the first by a sitting U.S. president. The Shanghai Communiqué at the end of that visit recorded disagreement as well as agreement. The United States acknowledged that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintained there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China, and it affirmed interest in a peaceful settlement. Full diplomatic recognition waited until the Carter years; 1972 was the opening, not the embassy swap. Do not mark an option that says Nixon immediately tore up the relationship with Taipei and seated Beijing in the U.N. that same week—the U.N. seating of the PRC had already occurred in 1971, and official U.S. recognition came in 1979.

In May 1972 Nixon went to Moscow and signed SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) with Leonid Brezhnev. Two instruments mattered: the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which tightly limited nationwide missile-defense systems, and an Interim Agreement freezing numbers of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers for five years. SALT I did not abolish nuclear weapons; it capped specified offensive launchers and constrained defenses so that neither side would race as freely. That distinction is a classic trap: do not confuse a 1972 freeze-and-limit package with later Reagan-Gorbachev reductions such as the INF Treaty (1987).

Triangular diplomacy assumed the United States could still project power. Secret bombing and the 1970 Cambodian incursion—covered with Vietnam—fed a congressional revolt against an imperial presidency. On November 7, 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Nixon's veto. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. armed forces into hostilities and, absent congressional authorization, to terminate the use of force after 60 days (with a further withdrawal window commonly taught as 30 days). Whether the resolution truly binds later presidents is contested in practice; the exam fact is the 1973 statutory attempt to check undeclared combat after Southeast Asia.

Pentagon Papers, Plumbers, and the Road to Watergate

In June 1971 the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a classified Defense Department history of Vietnam decision-making leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971) the Supreme Court rejected prior restraint. The White House response was extra-legal: a Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed the Plumbers, tasked with plugging leaks. In September 1971 Plumbers operatives burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding. That operation is the bridge from Vietnam secrecy to the 1972 campaign's dirty tricks. If an item mentions "plumbers" and a psychiatrist's office, the context is leak-plugging after the Papers, not the later DNC break-in itself.

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington. They were tied to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, often mocked as CREEP). Nixon won re-election anyway. The cover-up—hush money, an attempt to use the CIA to blunt the FBI, and lies to investigators—became the crime that destroyed him. Journalists at the Washington Post and, later, Senate hearings kept the story alive when the White House called it a third-rate burglary.

Saturday Night Massacre, U.S. v. Nixon, Resignation

Senate hearings under Senator Sam Ervin in 1973, and White House counsel John Dean's testimony, exposed a wider abuse of power, including an enemies list and misuse of federal agencies. Aide Alexander Butterfield revealed a secret Oval Office taping system. When Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed tapes, Nixon ordered him fired on October 20, 1973—the Saturday Night Massacre. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than comply; Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused and left; Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out the dismissal. The bloodletting produced a political firestorm, a new special prosecutor (Leon Jaworski), and impeachment talk. Do not confuse that night with Spiro Agnew's resignation (October 10, 1973, over a Maryland bribery scandal) or with the Supreme Court tapes decision the following summer. Gerald Ford became vice president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment after Agnew, which is why Ford—not an elected vice president—succeeded Nixon.

Nixon claimed executive privilege. In United States v. Nixon (July 24, 1974) the Supreme Court held—unanimously among the eight participating justices; Rehnquist recused because of prior Justice Department service—that privilege is real for some confidential communications but is not absolute: it cannot quash a subpoena for evidence needed in a criminal trial. The tapes, including the June 23, 1972 smoking gun conversation directing a CIA block of the FBI inquiry, made conviction in a Senate impeachment trial likely. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Peter Rodino, had already approved articles on obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. After Republican leaders told him the Senate votes were gone, Nixon announced his resignation on August 8 and left office at noon on August 9, 1974—the only U.S. president to resign. Ford took the oath the same day. The pardon of Nixon is the opening beat of the next section; the constitutional holding you need here is the tapes case, not Ford's later mercy.

A typical legal-history item quotes "executive privilege" and asks what the Court did. The correct move is: privilege exists, but it yields to a demonstrated need for evidence in a criminal proceeding. An option that grants the president total immunity from subpoenas until he leaves office is the trap.