Spending a semester cataloging hundreds of photos related to the Richard M. Nixon presidency, Melissa Samarin ‘11 found that each of these historical images was a piece to the larger puzzle illustrating his administration.
"They say ‘a picture holds a thousand words’ and I've literary handled hundreds of these [images] so I feel I have a very complete history of Nixon's presidency by now."
Samarin, the 2010-11 Nixon Fellow, worked as an intern at the Nixon Presidential Library in the fall just as the library received boxes upon boxes of new material from Washington, D.C. that needed to be sorted, filed, and put away.
Fortunately for Samarin, her cataloging allowed her to add visual images to research she had been conducting on Nixon’s legacy on human rights in the former Soviet Union.
Samarin points to photos of Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger meeting with then-Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev in both Washington, D.C. and Moscow. According to Samarin, these historical meetings between the White House and the Kremlin, where various nuclear arms and mutual collaboration agreements were signed, were a predecessor to the Helinski Accord – a wide-ranging series of agreements of on economic, political, and human rights issues signed in 1975.
“There is an actual correlation between Nixon's foreign policy and human rights negotiations during the Cold War," explains Samarin, who spent more than a year researching this topic.
"It was because of his détente policy and foreign policy [in general] that this chain reaction of positive relations followed. This in turn enabled a series of negotiations to happen, and essentially allowed for human rights to be put on the radar of the international agenda during the Cold War."
Published in the fall 2011 issue of The Rock
