Nixon’s vice presidency was also noteworthy for his many well-publicized trips abroad, including a 1958 tour of Latin America—a trip that journalist Walter Lippmann termed a “diplomatic Pearl Harbor”—during which his car was stoned, slapped, and spat upon by anti-American protesters, and a 1959 visit to the Soviet Union, highlighted by an impromptu profanity-filled “kitchen debate” in Moscow with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.Nixon won the Republican nomination for president in 1968 by putting together a coalition that included Southern conservatives led by Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. As part of his campaign’s “Southern strategy,” Nixon garnered Southern support by promising to appoint “strict constructionists” to the federal judiciary, to name a Southerner to the Supreme Court, to oppose court-ordered busing, and to choose a vice presidential candidate acceptable to the South. With Maryland Gov.
