Nixon Now Podcast

On July 30, 1947, then Congressman Nixon was selected by Speaker of the House Joe Martin to to be one of the nineteen members of a select committee headed by Congressman Christian Herter to make a trip to Europe and prepare a report in connection with the post -war foreign aid plan that Secretary of State George Marshall unveiled at Harvard University in June of that year. “I learned a great deal from the Herter Committee trip,” Nixon later recalled. “I had taken a poll and found that 75 percent of my constituents in the 12th district [of California] were resolutely opposed to any foreign aid. This was the first time I had experienced the classical dilemma, so eloquently described by Edmund Burke, that is faced at one time or another by almost any elected official in a democracy: how much should his voters register his constituents’ opinions, and how much should they represent his own views and convictions? After what I had seen in and learned in Europe, I believed so strongly in the necessity of extending e