![]() ![]() He owed his extraordinary political climb from freshman congressman to Vice President in six years almost entirely to his aggressive anticommunism. More persuasively, Stephen Ambrose, a biographer of both Nixon and Eisenhower, argues that the President wanted his Vice President to be "publicly associated with something other than Red-baiting."Ĭhanging Nixon’s image would be a challenge. At the time, he declared instead that the President intended to show Asian leaders that the new administration took their concerns more seriously than had Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state. Decades later, Nixon implausibly asserted that Eisenhower sent Nixon instead of going himself because the President knew little about the region. Just 40 years old, Nixon had been Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President for only a few months when, at a National Security Council meeting in March 1953, Eisenhower asked him to take a major trip through Asia later that year. Those trips, however, might not have happened without his first, successful tour of Asia and the Middle East in 1953–a story told in the records at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. ![]() It began in large measure with his world travels as Vice President, including infamous trips to Latin America in 1958 (where he faced violent pro–Communist mobs) and the Soviet Union in 1959 (where he dueled with Nikita Khrushchev). The library was also a relic of the creation of Nixon’s reputation as an expert in foreign affairs, the cornerstone of his campaigns for the White House and his defenders’ view of his administration. Nevertheless, the humble building was a monument to Richard Nixon. It held only a few thousand books and employed just one librarian, and its patrons were mostly schoolchildren, farmers, and shopkeepers. (Richard Nixon Library)Įxcept for its name, there was little remarkable about the modest library that stood in the neighborhood of Yuen Long on the outskirts of Hong Kong from 1954 until 1977. Local Jaycees named the neighborhood library after the U.S. Chinese students and others pose before the Nixon Library in Yuen Long, Hong Kong, in 1957. ![]()
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