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Content: Nixon-Ford and Inflation  
In the November 1968 election, Eisenhower's vice president,  Richard Nixon, defeated an anti-war candidate, George McGovern, and the Republicans again gained a few seats in the House and Senate. During the Johnson administration a problem with inflation had been brewing – to be inherited, like the war in Vietnam, by President Nixon when he took office in January. High Inflation had accompanied the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War and now the war in Vietnam. In its war in Vietnam the US had been following a policy of both guns and butter. Between November 1968 and May 1970 the Dow-Jones Industrial Average plunged  36 percent. By the end of  1970 unemployment was up to 6.6 percent. President Nixon believed in the same fiscal responsibility that Eisenhower had pursued during his administration. He supported the government's social programs left by the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations but  wanted them managed better. During the Nixon administration there was an increase in the printing of dollars, and dollars were being sent overseas  at a higher than usual rate to pay for the effort at preventing what was seen as a Communist takeover in Vietnam. What Americans had been unwilling to pay  to the government in the form of higher taxes, they were now paying   in the form a declining dollar.