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Nixon was offered a tuition grant to attend Harvard University, but his parents needed him to work in their store, so he remained in his hometown and attended Whittier College. At Whittier Nixon played for the basketball team and was a substitute on the football team. At Whittier he once again became a champion debater. In 1933, he became engaged to Ola Florence Welch, daughter of the Whittier police chief, but the young couple broke up in 1935.
After his graduation from Whittier in 1934, Nixon received a full scholarship to attend Duke University School of Law. Nixon was elected president of the Duke Bar Association and graduated third in his class in June 1937. After graduating from Duke, Nixon hoped to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but received no response to his letter of application. He returned to California and was admitted to the California state bar in 1937. He began practicing with the law firm Wingert and Bewley in Whittier, specializing in commercial litigation for local petroleum companies and other corporate matters, as well as wills. In 1938, he opened up his own branch of Wingert and Bewley in La Habra, California, and became a full partner in the firm the following year.
In January 1938, Nixon was a cast member in the Whittier Community Players production of The Dark Tower. He played opposite a high school teacher named Thelma "Pat" Ryan. In his memoir Nixon described it as "a case of love at first sight". Pat Ryan turned down Nixon's requests for a date several times before relenting. They dated for two years before she accepted his marriage proposal. They were married at a small ceremony on June 21, 1940 and spent their honeymoon in Mexico. They had two daughters, Tricia (born in 1946) and Julie (born in 1948).
In January 1942, the Nixons moved to Washington, D.C., where Nixon took a job at the Office of Price Administration. He was assigned to the tire rationing division, where he did not enjoy his job. Four months later, he applied to join the United States Navy and was accepted in August of 1942. He completed Officers Candidate School and was commissioned as an ensign in October 1942. His first post was as aide to the commander of the Naval Air Station Ottumwa in Iowa. He requested sea duty and was reassigned as the naval passenger control officer for the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, supporting the logistics of operations in the South West Pacific theater. He was Officer in Charge of the Combat Air Transport Command at Guadalcanal in the Solomons and later at Green Island (Nissan island) just north of Bougainville. His unit prepared manifests and flight plans for C-47 operations and supervised the loading and unloading of the cargo aircraft. On October 1, 1943, Nixon was promoted to lieutenant. He never saw combat while in the Navy.
When he returned to the US, Nixon was appointed the administrative officer of the Alameda Naval Air Station in California. In January 1945, he was transferred to the Bureau of Aeronautics office in Philadelphia and finally to Baltimore. In October 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant commander. He resigned his commission on New Year's Day 1946.
In 1945, Republican sought out Nixon to run as their candidate in California's 12th congressional district against Democratic Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Nixon and his wife returned to Whittier after he left the Navy, and began a year of intensive campaigning. In the campaign, Nixon suggested that Voorhis's endorsement by a group linked to communists meant that Voorhis could not be trusted. Nixon won the election, receiving 65,586 votes to Voorhis' 49,994.
In Congress, Nixon served on the Education and Labor Committee. He was part of the Herter Committee, which went to Europe to report on the need for U.S. foreign aid. Nixon was the youngest member of the committee, and the only Westerner. He first gained national attention in 1948 when his investigation, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), broke the Alger Hiss spy case. Whittaker Chambers had alleged that Hiss, a former State Department official, had been a Soviet spy. Hiss had sued Chambers for defamation and in the suit, Chambers produced documents corroborating his allegations. including microfilm copies that Chambers turned over to House investigators. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying under oath he had passed documents to Chambers. In 1948, Nixon was reelected to Congress.
In 1949, Nixon began to consider running for the United States Senate and he entered the race in November of that year. His opponent was Democratic Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas. In the campaign, Nixon highlighted Douglas's liberal voting record. Nixon won the election by almost twenty percentage points.
In the Senate, Nixon took a prominent position in opposing communism, frequently speaking out against the threat. He maintained friendly relations with fellow anti-communist, controversial Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, but was careful to keep some distance between himself and McCarthy. Nixon also criticized President Harry S. Truman's handling of the Korean War. He supported statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, voted in favor of civil rights for minorities, and supported federal disaster relief for India and Yugoslavia.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower was nominated for president by the Republicans in 1952. He had no strong preference for a vice presidential candidate, and Republican party officials recommended Nixon. Nixon's youth (he was 39 at the time), his stance against communism, and his political base in California were all seen as positives. On the campaign trail, Eisenhower spoke to his plans for the country, leaving the negative campaigning to his running mate.
In mid-September, the Republican ticket faced a media crisis. It was reported that Nixon had a political fund, maintained by his backers, which reimbursed him for political expenses. Such a fund was not illegal, but it exposed Nixon to allegations of possible conflict of interest. Pressure built on Eisenhower to dump Nixon from the ticket. To counter this, Nixon went on television to deliver an address to the nation on September 23, 1952, known as the Checkers speech. It was heard by about 60 million people, the largest television audience up to that point. Nixon defended himself, stating that the fund was not secret, nor had donors received special favors. He described himself as a man of modest means. He said that his wife had no mink coat. Instead she wore a "respectable Republican cloth coat". Nixon admitted to one gift which he had received, but which he would not give back: "a little cocker spaniel dog ... sent all the way from Texas. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers." The speech was a huge success. It prompted a huge public outpouring of support for Nixon and Eisenhower decided to retain him on the ticket.
Eisenhower and Nixon won the election in 1952 and as President, Eisenhower gave Nixon considerable responsibilities during his term as vice president. Nixon attended Cabinet and National Security Council meetings and chaired them when Eisenhower was absent. He was sent on a 1953 tour of the Far East.
Despite intense campaigning by Nixon, who reprised his strong attacks on the Democrats, the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress in the 1954 elections. On September 24, 1955, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack; his condition was initially believed to be life-threatening. Eisenhower was unable to perform his duties for six weeks. The 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution had not yet been proposed, and the Vice President had no formal power to act. Nixon acted in Eisenhower's stead during this period, presiding over Cabinet meetings.
Despite his loyalty, in 1955 Eisenhower proposed that Nixon not run for reelection in order to give him administrative experience before a 1960 presidential run and instead become a Cabinet officer in a second Eisenhower administration. Nixon declined the offer. When Eisenhower announced his reelection bid in February 1956, he hedged on the choice of his running mate, stating that it was improper to address that question until he had been renominated. In late April, Eisenhower announced that Nixon would again be his running mate. Eisenhower and Nixon were reelected by a comfortable margin in the November 1956 election.
In the spring of 1957, Nixon undertook another major foreign trip, this time to Africa. On his return, he helped shepherd the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress. The bill was weakened in the Senate, and civil rights leaders were divided over whether Eisenhower should sign it. Nixon advised the President to sign the bill, which he did. Eisenhower suffered a mild stroke in November 1957, and Nixon gave a press conference, assuring the nation that the Cabinet was functioning well during Eisenhower's brief illness.
On April 27, 1958, Richard and Pat Nixon embarked on a goodwill tour of South America. The trip was uneventful until the Nixons reached Lima, Peru, where their motorcade was met with student demonstrations. Nixon tried to get out of his car to speak to the crowd, but was forced back into the car by a volley of thrown objects. At his hotel, Nixon faced another mob, and one demonstrator spat on him. In Caracas, Venezuela, Nixon and his wife were spat on by anti-American demonstrators and their limousine was attacked by an angry crowd. Nixon gained praise for his courage.
In July 1959, President Eisenhower sent Nixon to the Soviet Union for the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow. On July 24, while touring the exhibits with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the two stopped at a model of an American kitchen and engaged in a spirited impromptu exchange about the merits of capitalism versus communism that became known as the "Kitchen Debate".
In 1960, Nixon launched his campaign for President of the United States. He won the nomination easily and chose former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. as his running mate. His Democratic opponent was John F. Kennedy, and the race was very clos. Nixon campaigned on his experience, while Kennedy called for change and claimed the Eisenhower–Nixon administration had allowed the Soviet Union to overtake the U.S. in ballistic missiles. The candidates participated in four televised presidential debates. In the first of these debates, Nixon appeared pale, with a five o'clock shadow, in contrast to the photogenic Kennedy. Nixon's performance in the debate was perceived to be sub-standard in the visual medium of television, buth many people listening on the radio thought that Nixon had won. Nixon lost the election narrowly, with Kennedy ahead by only 120,000 votes (0.2 percent) in the popular vote.
At the end of his term of office as vice president in January 1961, Nixon and his family returned to California, where he practiced law and wrote a bestselling book, entitled Six Crises, which included coverage of the Hiss case, Eisenhower's heart attack, and the Fund Crisis, (the Checkers speech.)
Local and national Republican leaders encouraged Nixon to challenge incumbent Pat Brown for Governor of California in the 1962 election and Nixon did so. During the campaign, Nixon was accused of using the office as a stepping-stone for another presidential run. He lost to Brown by more than five percentage points, and the defeat was widely believed to be the end of his political career. In an impromptu speech the morning after the election, Nixon blamed the media for loss and he told them "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference".
The Nixon family traveled to Europe in 1963, where Nixon gave press conferences and met with leaders of the countries he visited. He and his family moved to New York City, where Nixon became a senior partner in the law firm Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Nixon had promised during his California campaign, that he would not run for president in 1964. In 1964, he supported Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination for president. Although he thought Goldwater unlikely to win, Nixon campaigned for him loyally.
After Goldwater's defeat, Nixon worked to rebuild the Republican Party and to to regain seats lost in the Johnson landslide. He received credit for helping the Republicans make major gains in the midterm election in 1966.
At the end of 1967, Nixon decided to run for president a second time. He believed that the Democrats were vulnerable over the issue of the Vietnam War. The withdrawal of President Johnson as a candidate supported this conclusion. Nixon's main opposition was Michigan Governor George Romney. He secured the nomination on the first ballot and selected Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate.
Nixon's Democratic opponent in the election was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was nominated at a convention marked by violent protests. Humphrey was an unsatisfactory replacement for the candidate most Democrats really wanted, Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in June of 1968. Nixon portrayed himself as someone possessed of significant foreign policy experience at a time when the nation sorely needed it. He appealed to what he later called the "silent majority" of Americans who disliked the anti-war demonstrators and protesters. He waged a prominent television advertising campaign, and he stressed that the crime rate was too high. Nixon promised "peace with honor" in the Vietnam War but did not release specifics of how he hoped to end the war.
Johnson's negotiators hoped to reach a truce in Vietnam prior to the election. Nixon received information about the talks from Henry Kissinger, then a consultant to U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman, and his campaign was in regular contact with Anna Chennault in Saigon. She advised South Vietnamese president Thieu not to go to Paris to join the talks, suggesting that Nixon would give him a better deal if elected. Lyndon Johnson was aware of this and was enraged by what he considered an attempt by Nixon to undermine U.S. foreign policy. On October 31, with no agreement, Johnson announced a unilateral halt to the bombing, and that peace negotiations would start in Paris on November 6, the day after Election Day. Johnson telephoned Nixon, who denied any involvement. Johnson felt he could not publicly mention Chennault's involvement, because his knowledge had been obtained by wiretapping.
In a three-way race between Nixon, Humphrey, and independent candidate former Alabama Governor George Wallace, Nixon defeated Humphrey by nearly 500,000 votes (seven-tenths of a percentage point), with 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace. In his victory speech, Nixon pledged that his administration would try to bring the divided nation together. In talking to the press after Humphrey conceded defeat, Nixon said: "I have received a very gracious message from the Vice President, congratulating me for winning the election. I congratulated him for his gallant and courageous fight against great odds. I also told him that I know exactly how he felt. I know how it feels to lose a close one."