Vintage 1960s Richard Nixon Tricky Dick 🗳️ Campaign Button

Who Made This Nixon Campaign Button? 🗳️ "nixon" Official Campaign Button, Feeley & Wheeler, New York

Size: 3/4" ~ Little to no wear.

Here's a Vintage 1960s Richard Nixon Pin, affectionately known as Tricky Dick. It's a little 3/4-inch button with a glossy black face, a thin navy ring and just one word, nixon, in bold red lowercase letters. Simple and sharp. The back is open metal with a straight steel pin across it.

The fun part is on the rim. Curling around the white edge in tiny blue type it reads FEELEY & WHEELER, 370 LEXINGTON AVE., N.Y.C. 10017, OFFICIAL NIXON BUTTON, with a little blue globe emblem at the start. Feeley & Wheeler, Inc. was a New York advertising agency at 370 Lexington Avenue, and it turns up in 1968 and 1969 in the ad credits of Electronics magazine and as the press contact in the 1968 Fashion Calendar. That ZIP code tells you something too: ZIP codes didn't exist until July 1, 1963, and Nixon's next run for the White House after that was his 1968 comeback.

🎩 Where "Tricky Dick" Came From

The nickname goes back to Nixon's 1950 race for the U.S. Senate in California against Helen Gahagan Douglas. In the Democratic primary, Nixon sent out flyers that didn't mention his party, and Los Angeles Daily News publisher Manchester Boddy, who was also running, hit back in his paper, accusing Nixon of passing himself off as a Democrat. A big ad in the same issue from the "Veterans Democratic Committee" warned voters that Nixon was really a Republican and called him "Tricky Dick" for the first time. That same campaign also gave Douglas her nickname, "the Pink Lady." Nixon won the seat, and the name stuck.

🇺🇸 The Man on the Button

Richard Milhous Nixon was born on January 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, California, in a house his father built on the family's lemon ranch. He went from Congress to the Senate to vice president under Eisenhower, lost the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy, lost the 1962 race for governor of California, and announced he was done with politics. Then he came back and won the presidency in 1968, beating Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and became the 37th president in 1969. His presidency saw the reduction of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China, the Apollo 11 Moon landing, and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency and OSHA. On August 9, 1974, facing almost certain impeachment over Watergate, he resigned, the only U.S. president ever to do so.

It's a sharp little piece for a political button collection, a history buff, or anybody who remembers the 1968 campaign.