1970 visit by Richard Nixon to the Lincoln Memorial

during protests in the student strike of 1970 the day before Nixon's visit to the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon had finished a press conference at 10 p.m. on May 8, in which he had been questioned about his decision to expand American operations in Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. Nixon then made 20 telephone calls to various people including Billy Graham and Thomas E. Dewey and the NBC reporter Nancy Dickerson. He then slept from 2:15 a.m. until around 4 a.m. Some students had recognised Nixon by now and, although surprised by his advent, walked up to him and shook his hand. Nixon said that the students "were not unfriendly" to him, but "seemed somewhat overawed". Nixon learnt that several of them attended Syracuse University, and spoke of the university's football team. Commenting later to journalists, the Syracuse University students felt that "most of what he was saying was absurd ... Here we had come from a university that's completely uptight, on strike, and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team." Nixon said that the man from Detroit had "the broadest smile that I saw on the entire visit". Nixon then left in the presidential limousine. Sanchez spoke of his pride in being a citizen of the United States and Nixon and some female cleaners who were present applauded. One of the women present, Carrie Moore, asked Nixon to sign her bible, which he did, and holding her hand told her that his mother "was a saint" and "you be a saint too". Nixon and his group, which now included White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and Nixon's Appointments Secretary Dwight Chapin, as well as Tkach, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and Sanchez, then ate a breakfast of corned beef hash and eggs at the Rib Room of the Mayflower Hotel. Nixon was determined to walk back the last half mile to the White House from the hotel, and aides tried to forcibly grab his arm. Eventually Nixon got into the car. ==Aftermath==

, Dwight Chapin, John D. Ehrlichman, and Nixon in the Oval Office in 1970. Haldeman and Chapin accompanied Nixon on his visit to the Lincoln Memorial. In 2011 the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum released a series of presidential dictabelt recordings, of which five featured Nixon dictating his recollections of his visit to the Lincoln Memorial in a memo to Haldeman. In the memo Nixon instructs his recollections to be shared "on a very limited basis" to close aides. Writer Tom McNichol described the memo as an attempt at damage control as early press reports of the visit had described an "exhausted and overwrought president engaging students in nonsensical banter". Nixon said that "Even when I'm tired, I do not talk about nonsensical things" and defended the dialogue as his attempt "to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander". Krogh felt that the impromptu visit was a "very significant and major effort to reach out". Nixon later expressed the view that those in the anti-war movement were the pawns of foreign communists. After the student protests, Nixon asked Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan. ==In popular culture==

Nixon's meeting with protesters was depicted in Oliver Stone's 1995 biopic, Nixon, in which Nixon is portrayed by Anthony Hopkins. ==See also==