© Bob NcNeely/ White House Photograph Office
President Bill Clinton meets with former President Richard Nixon in the residence of the White House on March 8, 1993.
A month before he died in April 1994, former President Richard Nixon wrote a letter to then-President Bill Clinton offering what Clinton later called "wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia." The contents of that letter have now been declassified by the Clinton presidential library and appear prophetic.
In the seven-page letter, dated March 21, 1994, and discussed by history professor Luke Nichter in the
Wall Street Journal, Nixon gave a blunt assessment of the political situation in Russia, predicting accurately that relations between Moscow and Kyiv would deteriorate and that someone like Putin could come to power. Nixon, 81 at the time, wrote the letter after he returned from a two-week trip to Russia and Ukraine.
While the former president is infamous for departing the White House amid scandal in 1974, his legacy includes being the architect of détente with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In 1972, Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit Moscow, where he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Nixon spent the years following his presidency taking foreign trips on behalf of the United States and offering counsel based on decades of experience to guide U.S. policy in the post-Cold War era.
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