Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–1994) was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 until 1974 and the only president to resign from the position. Since the 1950s, Richard Nixon had been a strong anti-communist. Though, by the time he became president in January 1969, Nixon's thinking had changed. In the increasingly serious atmosphere of the Cold War, Nixon wanted to bargain with the Soviet Union.
Nixon realized there was a growing split between the Russians and the Chinese, which he intended to use as a tool. In March 1969, a frontier dispute between China and the Soviet Union came close to a full-scale war. That conflict gave Nixon the chance to begin his China game, by performing a move toward the Chinese to increase his leverage against the Russians, and maintain relations with the Russians as leverage against the Chinese.
To accomplish this, he decided to visit China in 1972 and developed a strategic and diplomatic approach that signaled the culmination of the Nixon administration's resumption of peaceful relations between the United States and China after years of diplomatic isolation.