A week after Richard Nixon was sworn in for his second term, he signed the final peace agreement to end the Vietnam War.
“As we meet here today, we stand on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world,” he said during his inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1973. “The central question before us is: How shall we use that peace?”
Nixon told the nation about his vision for a new role in America’s foreign relations: The US would not isolate itself from world affairs, but it would no longer be the only nation defending freedom.
“The time has passed when America will make every other nation’s conflict our own, or make every other nation’s future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs,” he said.
There was work to be done at home, Nixon said, to bridge the divisions that came about during the Vietnam War and to reduce the role of the federal government.
“That is why today I offer no promise of a purely governmental solution for every problem,” he said. “We have lived too long with that false promise. In trusting too much in government, we have asked of it more than it can deliver. This leads only to inflated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to a disappointment and frustration that erode confidence both in what government can do and in what people can do.”
Almost halfway into his second term, amid the fallout of the Watergate scandal, Nixon became the first president to resign.
