The visit of former U.S. vice president Richard Nixon to Hiroshima on April 11, 1964 took place during a time of adversity for him.
In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower was named the Republican presidential candidate and selected Nixon, who was then only 39, as his running mate. They held office until 1960 when Nixon ran for president against John Kennedy and lost. Following a failed bid in the California gubernatorial election two years later, Nixon announced his retirement from political life. Nixon’s visit to Hiroshima was made in his capacity as head of a U.S. drinking water company to visit facilities and promote the company’s products and had no particular political significance. Considering the glory he basked in during the Eisenhower administration when he visited 55 countries as a representative of “hawkish” America, Nixon’s visit to Japan then must have been carefree.
Nixon’s tenure as vice president was not without ties to nuclear weapons or Hiroshima. In 1952, the year he was elected vice president, the U.S. and Soviet monopoly on nuclear weapons ended when the United Kingdom conducted its first nuclear test. Then on October 31 of that year the U.S. carried out the first test of a hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. In 1953 the Soviet Union followed with a test of its own. The enormous growth in size of nuclear weapons and the fruitless nuclear race eventually led to an unfathomable morass. On March 1, 1954 the Daigo Fukuryu Maru [a Japanese fishing boat] was covered in “ashes of death” (nuclear fallout) in the test of a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, and in September the ship’s radioman, Aikichi Kuboyama, died.
In response to protests from throughout Japan against tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs by the U.S., in reply to a letter from the Hiroshima Gensuikin to Eisenhower in May 1954 calling for a ban on nuclear testing, the president said, “The U.S. government believes that the planned tests of atomic and hydrogen bombs are absolutely essential for the nation’s self-defense and to ensure a free world.” A special report issued in October further betrayed the hopes of the people of Japan stating that, “There will not be a halt to hydrogen bomb tests until there is a reliable international control mechanism.” Needless to say, trusty Nixon was behind Eisenhower’s consistent policy of nuclear superiority.
On the day of his arrival in Hiroshima, Nixon was all smiles and said that until then Hiroshima had been just the name of a city to him but that he would now have vivid memories of having met local citizens. He added that Hiroshima is the city that has closed one era and brought the promise of peace. In the 1964 presidential election campaign, Nixon mystified the press corps when he wisecracked, “I don’t want to come to Hiroshima and talk about political problems, but if they want me to serve as honorary mayor I’ll accept.” He later laid flowers at the memorial cenotaph and offered a silent prayer for 2 minutes. It was already dark, and there were no plans for Nixon to visit the Peace Memorial Museum.
Nixon’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, which marked his miraculous political comeback, took place four and a half years after his visit to Hiroshima. After his inauguration as president in January 1969 he restarted limited bombing of North Vietnam and expanded the theater of the Vietnam War to Cambodia. In order to achieve an “honorable withdrawal” from Vietnam, as Eisenhower had in the Korean War, Nixon threatened the use of nuclear weapons to bring North Vietnam to the negotiating table for a ceasefire. After summits with the heads of China and the Soviet Union, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide in 1972 but was forced to resign in August 1974 following the Watergate scandal. Saigon fell eight months later.