Public Biography
Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, has been contributing a fortnightly column on executive power, domestic security, and what he terms “the ongoing rehabilitation of the historical record” to The New York Time5 since 2022. He is 64 years old.
Nixon served as the 37th President of the United States until his resignation, when he became the first and, to date, only president to leave office under those circumstances. The resignation followed the revelation that he had participated in efforts to obstruct a federal investigation into a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington — an event Nixon has described, in seventeen separate columns for this publication, as “a third-rate burglary that was handled, in hindsight, imperfectly.” He has never used the word “Watergate” in print without the qualifier “so-called.” The resignation occurred recently enough that Nixon still encounters, on a weekly basis, people who were directly involved in the events in question and have not moderated their views. He finds this energizing.
Since leaving office, Nixon has maintained a compound in San Clemente, California, from which he writes, records, and monitors. He is the author of six books, including R.N.: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, The Real War, No More Vietnams, The Unfinished Business of Watergate: A Reappraisal, The List: Enemies, Corrected and Expanded, and They Were Wrong About Me: A Documentary History. The last two were published through a private imprint Nixon established after several mainstream publishers declined the manuscripts on grounds he has described as “political.”
His column, “Executive Privilege,” appears every other Tuesday. It concerns itself primarily with the constitutional prerogatives of the executive branch, the inadequacy of the press, the vindication that history either has or shortly will deliver, and the corrected assessment of specific individuals whose names appear, with footnotes, in each installment. The column is read closely in Washington, though few officials will say so on the record. A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described it as “required reading, in the sense that you need to know if your name is in it.”
Nixon has continued recording. The original White House taping system, installed in 1971 and ultimately his undoing, was, he has explained in interviews, merely the first version of a system he has been refining ever since. The current apparatus, housed in a temperature-controlled facility beneath the San Clemente compound and maintained by a staff of four, contains recordings of every conversation Nixon has had since January 20, 1969, including those that took place after his death was prematurely, and incorrectly, reported on April 22, 1994. Nixon has stated that the reports of his death were “inaccurate,” a position his office has declined to elaborate upon and which the Social Security Administration has accepted without further inquiry.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1974 by Gerald Ford, an honor Nixon has described as “adequate” and which he has repeatedly offered to return “pending a full accounting of the pardon.”