The many lives of Richard Nixon

Winston Churchill once said of politics that it’s ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics — many times.’ Perhaps no one personified this dictum better than Richard Milhous Nixon.

From his election to Congress in 1946 to his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Nixon had been written off time and again. After each setback, though, ‘Tricky Dicky’ was incredibly formidable on the rebound. Even after Watergate, the disgraced former president transformed himself into a bestselling author and something of an international elder statesman. But it was Nixon’s remarkable recovery from two devastating defeats in the early 1960s that represents, according to Patrick Buchanan, ‘the greatest comeback in political history’.

In 1960 Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president narrowly lost the presidential election to John F. Kennedy. In 1962 he ran for governor of California, and lost again. His post-election press conference remains part of the Nixon legend.