Portsmouth Abbey School
Portsmouth Abbey School is a coeducational, Catholic Benedictine boarding and day school for students in grades 9-12. Founded in 1926 by the English Benedictine community, the School is located on a 525-acre campus along Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; the school and monastery are located on land owned by the Freeborn family beginning in the 1650s. The land was owned by the Anthony family, in 1778 it was the site of the Battle of Rhode Island during the American Revolution. In 1864 Amos Smith, a Providence financier, built what is now known as the Manor House and created a gentleman's farm on the site with the help of architect Richard Upjohn. After buying the Manor House and surrounding land in 1918, Dom Leonard Sargent of Boston, a convert from the Episcopal Church, founded Portsmouth Priory on October 18, 1918; the priory was founded as, remains, a house of the English Benedictine Congregation. It is one of only three American houses in the congregation, maintains a unique connection with sister schools in England, including Ampleforth College and Downside School.
The school was founded as Portsmouth Priory by John Hugh Diman, a Benedictine monk, a former Episcopalian. Portsmouth was not Diman's first school. In 1896, Diman founded Diman's School for Small Boys - St. George's School - in Middletown, Rhode Island. In 1912, aware that St. George's School catered to the sons of more affluent families and eager to provide educational opportunities to working-class students, Diman founded the Diman Vocational School in Fall River, MA. A conversion experience brought Diman to Catholicism and to the Benedictines who were just beginning a priory in Portsmouth. After joining the Order of Saint Benedict, Diman was again moved to found a school. In 1926, Diman founded the Portsmouth Priory School, which would be redesignated as Portsmouth Abbey School - indicating the increased size of its monastic community - in 1969. Portsmouth Priory offered a classical education to boys. Using the British "public" school model, the Priory School employed a form system, supplemented a student's education with co-curricular activities, such as athletics and the arts.
The same British system along with an updated and much expanded selection of co-curricular offerings are still at the core of a Portsmouth Abbey School education today. The school's campus is located on more than 525 acres on the shores of Narragansett Bay. Many of the buildings were designed by post-modern architect Pietro Belluschi, dean of the architecture and planning school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A parcel of the school's land is leased to The Aquidneck Club where the student golf team practices and holds its interscholastic golf matches. Today the school referred to as "the Abbey," has students from 17 nations and 26 states, its enrollment totals over 350 students, living in the school's eight residential Houses or commuting from nearby towns. Internet access is available in all House libraries; the average size for a class is 12 to 14 students, with a student-teacher ratio of 7 to 1. Activities and clubs include the Appalachia Service Project, The Beacon, The Raven, The Gregorian, Model United Nations, New England Math League, Future Problem Solvers, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, Community Service Projects, Debate Club, Red Key, Social Committee, Astronomy Club, Peer Tutors, Pro Deo Orchestra, Student Athletic Advisory Board, Teens Leading Children, Student Council.
The school has a fine arts center, a photography lab and darkroom, a digital art studio, an art gallery, a drama program, a music tech lab and instrumental offerings, private music lessons. The school has a radio station, WJHD 90.7 FM. In 2006, the school installed a Vestas V47-660 kW wind turbine, the first such project in Rhode Island, to provide forty percent of the school's electricity. Other green initiatives at Portsmouth Abbey School include the construction of two energy efficient faculty residences in September 2011, "unfolded" on campus by Blu Homes, a company building eco-friendly, prefabricated homes. In addition, one of Portsmouth Abbey School's girls' residential houses, St. Brigid's, the newest boys' residential house, St. Martin's, employ a number of conservation features, including recycled wood and low-VOC construction materials. Portsmouth Abbey School's security and maintenance departments operate two electric vehicles on campus, the School's dining services department has implemented a "tray-less" dining program, a composting program, a partnership with Newport Biodiesel.
Each office on campus maintains paper and plastic recycling bins, the Portsmouth Abbey School Alumni Bulletin, the School's bi-annual magazine, is printed on FSC-certified paper, a product group from well-managed forests and other controlled sources. In addition to The Aquidneck Club golf course next door available for use by the faculty and by the golf team, the school's athletic facilities include eight squash courts and a fitness center, a six-lane, all-weather track, a multi-sport synthetic turf field, six tennis courts, an indoor ice hockey rink, two gymnasiums, multiple outdoor playing fields. Portsmouth Ab
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is the head of the United States federal government's Environmental Protection Agency, is thus responsible for enforcing the nation's Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well as numerous other environmental statutes. The Administrator is nominated by the President of the United States and must be confirmed by a vote of the Senate; the office of Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 in legislation that created the agency. The EPA Administrator is customarily accorded Cabinet rank by the President and sits with the President, Vice President, the 15 Cabinet Secretaries. Since the late 1980s, there has been a movement to make the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency a Cabinet Secretary, thus making the EPA a 16th Cabinet department, dealing with environmental policy; the Administrator of the EPA is equivalent to the position of Minister of the Environment in other countries. President Trump's first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, resigned effective July 6, 2018, amid a series of scandals.
Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, started serving as acting administrator on July 9, 2018. Wheeler was confirmed as EPA Administrator on February 28, 2019. Note that Acting Administrators assume the office in the interim period between the resignation of a previous Administrator and the confirmation of his or her successor, including during the transition period between two presidential administrations, before the successor has been nominated and confirmed. Acting Administrators come from within the EPA and hold an office, subject to Senate confirmation before becoming the Acting Administrator. Linda Fisher and Stephen L. Johnson had served as Deputy Administrator when they became Acting Administrator. Marianne Lamont Horinko was an Assistant Administrator at the time, they are not subject to Senate confirmation to serve as the Acting Administrator, though to continue to serve as a full-fledged Administrator, they must be confirmed by the Senate. The line of succession for the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is as follows: Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency General Counsel Assistant Administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water Assistant Administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Chief Financial Officer Assistant Administrator for the Office of Research and Development Assistant Administrator for the Office of International and Tribal Affairs Assistant Administrator for the Office of Administration and Resources Management Assistant Administrator for the Office of Environmental Information Regional Administrator, Region 7 Principal Deputy General Counsel Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Deputy Regional Administrator, Region 2 Deputy Regional Administrator, Region 5 White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry Official website
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the U. S. government, responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice in the United States, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries. The department was formed in 1870 during the Ulysses S. Grant administration; the Department of Justice administers several federal law enforcement agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration. The department is responsible for investigating instances of financial fraud, representing the United States government in legal matters, running the federal prison system; the department is responsible for reviewing the conduct of local law enforcement as directed by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The department is headed by the United States Attorney General, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is a member of the Cabinet.
The current Attorney General is William Barr. The office of the Attorney General was established by the Judiciary Act of 1789 as a part-time job for one person, but grew with the bureaucracy. At one time, the Attorney General gave legal advice to the U. S. Congress as well as the President, but in 1819 the Attorney General began advising Congress alone to ensure a manageable workload; until March 3, 1853, the salary of the Attorney General was set by statute at less than the amount paid to other Cabinet members. Early Attorneys General supplemented their salaries by running private law practices arguing cases before the courts as attorneys for paying litigants. Following unsuccessful efforts to make Attorney General a full-time job, in 1869, the U. S. House Committee on the Judiciary, led by Congressman William Lawrence, conducted an inquiry into the creation of a "law department" headed by the Attorney General and composed of the various department solicitors and United States attorneys. On February 19, 1868, Lawrence introduced a bill in Congress to create the Department of Justice.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law on June 22, 1870. Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as Attorney General and Benjamin H. Bristow as America's first Solicitor General the same week that Congress created the Department of Justice; the Department's immediate function was to preserve civil rights. It set about fighting against domestic terrorist groups, using both violence and litigation to oppose the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Both Akerman and Bristow used the Department of Justice to vigorously prosecute Ku Klux Klan members in the early 1870s. In the first few years of Grant's first term in office there were 1000 indictments against Klan members with over 550 convictions from the Department of Justice. By 1871, there were 3000 indictments and 600 convictions with most only serving brief sentences while the ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York; the result was a dramatic decrease in violence in the South.
Akerman gave credit to Grant and told a friend that no one was "better" or "stronger" than Grant when it came to prosecuting terrorists. George H. Williams, who succeeded Akerman in December 1871, continued to prosecute the Klan throughout 1872 until the spring of 1873 during Grant's second term in office. Williams placed a moratorium on Klan prosecutions because the Justice Department, inundated by cases involving the Klan, did not have the manpower to continue prosecutions; the "Act to Establish the Department of Justice" drastically increased the Attorney General's responsibilities to include the supervision of all United States Attorneys under the Department of the Interior, the prosecution of all federal crimes, the representation of the United States in all court actions, barring the use of private attorneys by the federal government. The law created the office of Solicitor General to supervise and conduct government litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. With the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the federal government took on some law enforcement responsibilities, the Department of Justice tasked with performing these.
In 1884, control of federal prisons was transferred to the new department, from the Department of Interior. New facilities were built, including the penitentiary at Leavenworth in 1895, a facility for women located in West Virginia, at Alderson was established in 1924. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order which gave the Department of Justice responsibility for the "functions of prosecuting in the courts of the United States claims and demands by, offsenses against, the Government of the United States, of defending claims and demands against the Government, of supervising the work of United States attorneys and clerks in connection therewith, now exercised by any agency or officer..." The U. S. Department of Justice building was completed in 1935 from a design by Milton Bennett Medary. Upon Medary's death in 1929, the other partners of his Philadelphia firm Zantzinger and Medary took over the project. On a lot bordered by Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues and Ninth and Tenth Streets, Northwest, it holds over 1,000,000 square feet of space.
The sculptor C. Paul Jennewein served as overall design consultant for the entire building, contributing more than 50 separate sculptural elements inside and outside. Various efforts, none successful, have been made to determine the original intended meaning of the Latin motto appearing on the Department of Justice s
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, which along with the United States House of Representatives—the lower chamber—comprises the legislature of the United States. The Senate chamber is located in the north wing of the Capitol, in Washington, D. C; the composition and powers of the Senate are established by Article One of the United States Constitution. The Senate is composed of senators; each state, regardless of its population size, is represented by two senators who serve staggered terms of six years. There being at present 50 states in the Union, there are presently 100 senators. From 1789 until 1913, senators were appointed by legislatures of the states; as the upper chamber of Congress, the Senate has several powers of advice and consent which are unique to it. These include the approval of treaties, the confirmation of Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, federal judges, flag officers, regulatory officials, other federal executive officials and other federal uniformed officers.
In addition to these, in cases wherein no candidate receives a majority of electors for Vice President, the duty falls to the Senate to elect one of the top two recipients of electors for that office. Furthermore, the Senate has the responsibility of conducting the trials of those impeached by the House; the Senate is considered both a more deliberative and more prestigious body than the House of Representatives due to its longer terms, smaller size, statewide constituencies, which led to a more collegial and less partisan atmosphere. The presiding officer of the Senate is the Vice President of the United States, President of the Senate. In the Vice President's absence, the President Pro Tempore, customarily the senior member of the party holding a majority of seats, presides over the Senate. In the early 20th century, the practice of majority and minority parties electing their floor leaders began, although they are not constitutional officers; the drafters of the Constitution created a bicameral Congress as a compromise between those who felt that each state, since it was sovereign, should be represented, those who felt the legislature must directly represent the people, as the House of Commons did in Great Britain.
This idea of having one chamber represent people while the other gives equal representation to states regardless of population, was known as the Connecticut Compromise. There was a desire to have two Houses that could act as an internal check on each other. One was intended to be a "People's House" directly elected by the people, with short terms obliging the representatives to remain close to their constituents; the other was intended to represent the states to such extent as they retained their sovereignty except for the powers expressly delegated to the national government. The Senate was thus not designed to serve the people of the United States equally; the Constitution provides that the approval of both chambers is necessary for the passage of legislation. First convened in 1789, the Senate of the United States was formed on the example of the ancient Roman Senate; the name is derived from Latin for council of elders. James Madison made the following comment about the Senate: In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure.
An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, to balance and check the other, they ought to be so constituted. The Senate, ought to be this body. Article Five of the Constitution stipulates that no constitutional amendment may be created to deprive a state of its equal suffrage in the Senate without that state's consent; the District of Columbia and all other territories are not entitled to representation allowed to vote in either House of the Congress. The District of Columbia elects two "shadow U. S. Senators", but they are officials of the D. C. City Government and not members of the U. S. Senate; the United States has had 50 states since 1959, thus the Senate has had 100 senators since 1959. The disparity between the most and least populous states has grown since the Connecticut Compromise, which granted each state two members of the Senate and at least one member of the House of Representatives, for a total minimum of three presidential electors, regardless of population.
In 1787, Virginia had ten times the population of Rhode Island, whereas today California has 70 times the population of Wyoming, based on the 1790 and 2000 censuses. This means some citizens are two orders of magnitude better represented in the Senate than those in other states. Seats in the House of Representatives are proportionate to the population of each state, reducing the disparity of representation. Before the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators were elected by the individual state legislatures. Problems with repeated vacant seats due to the inability of a legislature to elect senators, intrastate political struggles, bribery and intimidation had led to a growing movement to amend the Constitution to allow for the direct election of senators; the party composition of the Senate during the 116th Congress: Art
Anne Gorsuch Burford
Anne Irene McGill Gorsuch Burford known as Anne M. Gorsuch, was an American attorney and politician. Between 1981 and 1983, while known as Anne M. Gorsuch, she served under President Ronald Reagan as the first female Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, she was the mother of current Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch. Born Anne Irene McGill in Casper, she was one of seven children of Joseph John McGill II, a surgeon, Dorothy Jean, she grew up in Denver. During three consecutive summers, she took classes in Spanish at the National University of Mexico, she studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1961 at the age of 19. She attended the University of Colorado Law School where she received a Juris Doctor degree in 1964 at the age of 22. McGill participated in the undergraduate Honors Program and Mortar Board society, was an editor of the University of Colorado Law School's law review, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study criminal law for one year in Jaipur and she and her new husband David Gorsuch travelled there together.
Gorsuch was first employed as an attorney with a bank trust department as an assistant district attorney for Jefferson County, as deputy district attorney for the City of Denver, Colorado. Subsequently she was a corporate attorney for Mountain Bell Telephone. In 1975 she was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives, served in office for two two-year terms, she was voted Outstanding Freshman Legislator, but was considered by some to be a member of the "House Crazies," a group of "conservative lawmakers intent on permanently changing government."In 1980, Gorsuch served on President-elect Reagan's transition team as a member of his Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations. Shortly after Reagan was inaugurated, Gorsuch was nominated as administrator of the EPA; the nomination was unanimously confirmed by the Senate three months on May 5, 1981. Gorsuch based her administration of the EPA on the New Federalism approach of downsizing federal agencies by delegating their functions and services to the individual states.
She believed that the EPA was over-regulating business and that the agency was too large and not cost-effective. During her 22 months as agency head, she cut the budget of the EPA by 22%, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations, facilitated the spraying of restricted-use pesticides, she cut the total number of agency employees, hired staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Environmentalists contended that her policies were designed to placate polluters, accused her of trying to dismantle the agency. Thriftway Company, a small oil refinery in Farmington, New Mexico, asked Gorsuch for a meeting to discuss the regulations limiting lead content of gasoline, the program under Section 211 of the Clean Air Act designed to reduce the amount of lead in gasoline in annual phases, to receive relief from the standard. In December 1981, while EPA was developing revisions to those regulation at the request of the Reagan Administration, Gorsuch met with representatives from the company, who asked her to excuse Thriftway from compliance with the lead limits because "the company faced financial ruin if it could not obtain quick relief from the regulations".
Gorsuch did not commit herself in writing but she did tell them they could count on her promise as the word of the EPA Administrator that she would not enforce the regulations. In 1982, Congress charged that the EPA had mishandled the $1.6 billion toxic waste Superfund and demanded records from Gorsuch. Gorsuch refused and became the first agency director in U. S. history to be cited for contempt of Congress. The EPA turned the documents over to Congress several months after the White House abandoned its court claim that the documents could not be subpoenaed by Congress because they were covered by executive privilege. At that point, Gorsuch resigned her post, citing pressures caused by the media and the congressional investigation. Looking back at her tenure several years Gorsuch expressed pride in the downsizing done under her watch and frustration at the program backlogs and lack of staff management skills that she encountered while at the helm of the agency, she said there was a conflict between what she was required to do under a "set of commands from Congress," and what her own priorities were, although she felt that by the end of her administration, she had developed a way of resolving those conflicts.
In her retrospective, Gorsuch admitted that she and her staff "were so bogged down in the fight with Congress over the doctrine of executive privilege, that the agency itself seemed hardly to be functioning," but claimed that despite appearances the agency still functioned. Analysts have argued that she was given a difficult job by the Reagan Administration, but she was not provided the support she needed, leading to her early departure from her director position at the EPA. Gorsuch was promised another job by Reagan, in July 1984, he appointed her to a three-year term as chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, a move, criticized by environmental groups, she described the post as a "nothing-burger", both the House and the Senate passed non-binding resolutions calling on President Reagan to withdraw the appointment. Gorsuch chose not to accept the position. After leaving government service, she wrote a 1986 book about her experiences entitled Are You Tough Enough? She worked as a private attorney in Colorado until her death.
According to her son, Neil Gorsuch, she spent a signi
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Prior to his presidency, he was a Hollywood actor and union leader before serving as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975. Reagan was raised in a poor family in small towns of northern Illinois, he graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and worked as a sports announcer on several regional radio stations. After moving to California in 1937, he found work as an actor and starred in a few major productions. Reagan was twice elected President of the Screen Actors Guild—the labor union for actors—where he worked to root out Communist influence. In the 1950s, he was a motivational speaker at General Electric factories. Reagan had been a Democrat until 1962, when he became a conservative and switched to the Republican Party. In 1964, Reagan's speech, "A Time for Choosing", supported Barry Goldwater's foundering presidential campaign and earned him national attention as a new conservative spokesman.
Building a network of supporters, he was elected governor of California in 1966. As governor, Reagan raised taxes, turned a state budget deficit to a surplus, challenged the protesters at the University of California, ordered in National Guard troops during a period of protest movements in 1969, was re-elected in 1970, he twice ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1968 and 1976. Four years in 1980, he won the nomination and defeated incumbent president Jimmy Carter. At 69 years, 349 days of age at the time of his first inauguration, Reagan was the oldest person to have assumed office until Donald Trump in 2017. Reagan faced former vice president Walter Mondale when he ran for re-election in 1984, defeated him, winning the most electoral votes of any U. S. president, 525, or 97.6 percent of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. This was the second-most lopsided presidential election in modern U. S. history after Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 victory over Alfred M. Landon, in which he won 98.5 percent or 523 of the 531 electoral votes.
Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to spur economic growth, economic deregulation, reduction in government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, spurred the War on Drugs, fought public sector labor. Over his two terms, the economy saw a reduction of inflation from 12.5% to 4.4%, an average annual growth of real GDP of 3.4%. Reagan enacted cuts in domestic discretionary spending, cut taxes, increased military spending which contributed to increased federal outlays overall after adjustment for inflation. Foreign affairs dominated his second term, including ending the Cold War, the bombing of Libya, the Iran–Iraq War, the Iran–Contra affair. In June 1987, four years after he publicly described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", Reagan challenged Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!", during a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.
He transitioned Cold War policy from détente to rollback by escalating an arms race with the USSR while engaging in talks with Gorbachev. The talks culminated in the INF Treaty. Reagan began his presidency during the decline of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall fell just ten months after the end of his term. Germany reunified the following year, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed; when Reagan left office in 1989, he held an approval rating of 68 percent, matching those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, as the highest ratings for departing presidents in the modern era, he was the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to serve two full terms, after a succession of five prior presidents did not. Although he had planned an active post-presidency, Reagan disclosed in November 1994 that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease earlier that year. Afterward, his informal public appearances became more infrequent, he died at home on June 5, 2004. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, he is an icon among conservatives.
Evaluations of his presidency among historians and the general public place him among the upper tier of American presidents. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in an apartment on the second floor of a commercial building in Tampico, Illinois, he was the younger son of Jack Reagan. Jack was a salesman and storyteller whose grandparents were Irish Catholic emigrants from County Tipperary, while Nelle was of half English and half Scottish descent. Reagan's older brother, Neil Reagan, became an advertising executive. Reagan's father nicknamed his son "Dutch", due to his "fat little Dutchman"-like appearance and "Dutchboy" haircut. Reagan's family lived in several towns and cities in Illinois, including Monmouth and Chicago. In 1919, they returned to Tampico and lived above the H. C. Pitney Variety Store until settling in Dixon. After his election as president, Reagan resided in the upstairs White House private quarters, he would quip that he was "living above the store again". Ronald Reagan wrote that his mother "always expected to find the best in people and did".
She attended the Disciples of Christ church and was active, influential, within it.
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was an American politician who served as the 37th president of the United States from 1969 to 1974. He had served as the 36th vice president of the United States from 1953 to 1961, prior to that as both a U. S. representative and senator from California. Nixon was born in California. After completing his undergraduate studies at Whittier College, he graduated from Duke University School of Law in 1937 and returned to California to practice law, he and his wife Pat moved to Washington in 1942 to work for the federal government. He subsequently served on active duty in the U. S. Navy Reserve during World War II. Nixon was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1950, his pursuit of the Hiss Case established his reputation as a leading anti-communist and elevated him to national prominence. He was the running mate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican Party presidential nominee in the 1952 election. Nixon served for eight years as Vice President, becoming the second-youngest vice president in history at age 40.
He waged an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1960, narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy, lost a race for governor of California to Pat Brown in 1962. In 1968, he ran for the presidency again and was elected, defeating incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon ended American involvement in the war in Vietnam in 1973 and brought the American POWs home, ended the military draft. Nixon's visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations and he initiated détente and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union the same year, his administration transferred power from Washington D. C. to the states. He imposed wage and price controls for ninety days, enforced desegregation of Southern schools, established the Environmental Protection Agency and began the War on Cancer. Nixon presided over the Apollo 11 moon landing, which signaled the end of the moon race, he was reelected in one of the largest electoral landslides in U. S. history in 1972 when he defeated George McGovern.
In his second term, Nixon ordered an airlift to resupply Israeli losses in the Yom Kippur War, resulting in the restart of the Middle East peace process and an oil crisis at home. The Nixon administration supported a coup in Chile that ousted the government of Salvador Allende and propelled Augusto Pinochet to power. By late 1973, the Watergate scandal escalated. On August 9, 1974, he resigned in the face of certain impeachment and removal from office—the only time a U. S. president has done so. After his resignation, he was issued a controversial pardon by Gerald Ford. In 20 years of retirement, Nixon wrote nine books and undertook many foreign trips, helping to rehabilitate his image into that of an elder statesman, he suffered a debilitating stroke on April 18, 1994 and died four days at the age of 81. Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California, in a house, built by his father, his parents were Francis A. Nixon, his mother was a Quaker, his father converted from Methodism to the Quaker faith.
Nixon was a descendant of the early American settler, Thomas Cornell, an ancestor of Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University, as well as of Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates. Nixon's upbringing was marked by evangelical Quaker observances of the time, such as refraining from alcohol and swearing. Nixon had four brothers: Harold, Donald and Edward. Four of the five Nixon boys were named after kings who had ruled in legendary Britain. Nixon's early life was marked by hardship, he quoted a saying of Eisenhower to describe his boyhood: "We were poor, but the glory of it was we didn't know it"; the Nixon family ranch failed in 1922, the family moved to Whittier, California. In an area with many Quakers, Frank Nixon opened a grocery gas station. Richard's younger brother. At the age of twelve, a spot was found on Richard's lung, with a family history of tuberculosis, he was forbidden to play sports; the spot was found to be scar tissue from an early bout of pneumonia. Young Richard attended East Whittier Elementary School, where he was president of his eighth-grade class.
His parents believed that attending Whittier High School had caused Richard's older brother Harold to live a dissolute lifestyle before he fell ill of tuberculosis, so they sent Richard to the larger Fullerton Union High School. He had to ride a school bus for an hour each way during his freshman year, he received excellent grades, he lived with an aunt in Fullerton during the week. He played junior varsity football, missed a practice though he was used in games, he had greater success as a debater, winning a number of championships and taking his only formal tutelage in public speaking from Fullerton's Head of English, H. Lynn Sheller. Nixon remembered Sheller's words, "Remember, speaking is conversation... don't shout at people. Talk to them. Converse with them." Nixon stated. At the start of his junior year beginning in September 1928, Richard's parents permitted him to transfer to Whittier High School. At Whittier High, Nixon suffered his first electoral defeat, for student body president, he rose at 4 a.m. to drive the family truck into Los Angeles and purchase vegetables at the market.
He drove to the store to wash and display them, befo
.jpg)
