WATERGATE PAPER

Watergate Paper

Watergate Paper

Introduction

Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-84) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party (Herbers, 1972), he previously served as vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nixon defeated his Democrat opponent Hubert Humphrey in a narrow vote by mobilizing a coalition of southern social conservatives organized by Strom Thurmond. In 1946, Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives from California. Four years later, he was elected to the Senate. During this time, Nixon was making head-waves as a major combatant against communism, especially regarding accusations of various government officials having communist ties. The anti-communist frenzy began following the war and intensified in 1950 due to the speeches of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who made wild accusations that the State Department had over 200 communist supporters in its ranks. While McCarthy would become infamous for this red scare, Nixon also played a significant part. In 1974 Nixon became the only U.S. president to resign from office.

Administration

In office, Nixon's administration was widely (Lyons, 1972), and somewhat unfairly, believed to be primarily motivated by foreign affairs and to have little interest in domestic policies. Nixon inherited the American involvement in Indochina and this ended during his administration. Another notable event occurred when he visited Chairman Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, in Beijing.

Nixon's environmental legacy is remarkable, and perhaps unmatched by any later presidential administration. Most of these policies were forced on Nixon's administration by an environmentally active Congress and a growing environmental movement, but his presidency presided over some of the strongest and longest lasting reforms of federal legislation regarding environmental issues. While he was reluctant to sign some environmental legislation, many experts suggest that, for a conservative Republican administration in the midst of domestic and international crises, the political costs appeared to outweigh the benefits.

Most notably, in 1970 Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the first coordinated federal agency to manage the mounting crises of the period. Consumer and environmental groups had been lobbying for years on behalf of many different environmental and health issues and this had resulted in a mishmash of laws at several levels of government. The complexity added to legal costs and also provided loopholes and inconsistencies that could be exploited.

The EPA was established to harmonize these different laws and regulations and to determine a suitable method of policing them. ...