President Richard Nixon was greatly disliked by the general population, despite his great contributions to the American People.

Nixon had an excellent domestic policy, for he was the first president to desegregate the schools in the south, something many earlier presidents were unable to do. He started the  Environmental Protection Agency and  helped create more National Parks than any other president.

Nixon even started the federally-funded War on Cancer. In addition to all that, he signed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration act (OSHA) in 1971, which helped improve working conditions for workers and employees.

Nixon contributed to American Foreign policy like no other 20th century U.S. president. He was the first to go to Moscow and was able to negotiate the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, with Nikita Kruschev, which helped break the ice between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

He also approved of the 5-year collaboration between NASA and the Soviet Space Program to further improve relations.

He was also the first president to travel to Egypt, Israel, and Syria and meet with their presidents to help establish peace in the region. Nixon was the one who started the process of Vietnamization, which helped end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and replaced our troops with Southern Vietnamese ones.

The process of Vietnamization helped save the lives of millions of U.S. troops and helped decrease U.S. spending abroad, which eventually signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam. Not only that, but Nixon was able to allow the U.S. to have closer relations to China, who was for the most part isolated and helped establish peace and harmony between the two countries, despite their cultural, political, and economic differences. With his foreign policy, Nixon was able to bring peace to millions.

The media played a role in the overwhelming dislike of Nixon. The strong dislike by the media and negative reports of him helped influence the public to believe the same.

They will make that man’s mistakes appear larger than they truly are, and his vast contributions to society seem insignificant and worth nothing.

Every president has flaws. The fact journalists hated Nixon simply made it worse for him. Harry S. Truman was the only president in history to land an atomic bomb on another nation and killed millions of innocent Japanese. John F. Kennedy got the U.S. into the Vietnam War and almost got his country into a Third World War with his foreign policy.

Nixon was of course a politician, and these were and are things politicians do, but what made him stand out is that he was actually caught, unlike many other politicians. The Watergate Scandal did not include hurting any innocent people, but rather spying on other politicians and these politicians were able to change people’s view of the man after the scandal was publicized.

Despite his flaws, he was able to contribute to the American People. He was a genius at foreign policy and has given this country many things many of us take fore granted today. The least we can do is help improve his legacy and people’s perspective on his contributions to the American people.