Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, campaigning for office and using a hand gesture meant to signal victory in the Vietnam War. Nixon served in the White House from 1969 until his resignation in 1974.

Following Richard Nixon's defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, the former U.S. vice president appeared before nearly 100 reporters at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

“You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” said Nixon, effectively confirming the end of his political career.

For the next year, the Duke University School of Law graduate and his family bounced around Europe before eventually moving to Manhattan, where Nixon became a name partner at Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander.

The time that Nixon spent at the Wall Street firm, which added his name to its shingle, has largely been overlooked by historians. But a new book, “Nixon in New York: How Wall Street Helped Richard Nixon Win the White House,” by legal journalist Victor Li explores Nixon's “wilderness years” as a white-shoe lawyer and how the high-powered firm allowed him to craft a formidable campaign that would land him in the White House six years later.

“I've always been interested in Richard Nixon,” said Li, an attorney who works as an assistant managing editor with the ABA Journal in Chicago. “I think he's a real tragic figure in American history, and I mean that in a Greek tragic sense. [He's] someone who really had the world in the palm of their hand and then blew it.”

The idea to tackle Nixon's time in Big Law came during his three years as a reporter at The American Lawyer in New York. Most books that Li read about Nixon focused on his political activities, not his law career. At the time Nixon joined what was then Mudge Rose in 1963, the firm was a power player on Wall Street.

Rather than wait for someone else to write it, Li decided to roll up his sleeves and delve into the material. Of course, reporting and researching a period of Nixon's life nearly 50 years ago came with its own set of challenges. Many people who were around at the time had died or were elderly with fading memories.

Victor Li.

But then Li came upon Thomas Evans, a former Nixon aide who would become managing partner of Mudge Rose.

“He was there for a long time and functioned as the unofficial historian of the firm,” Li said.

Evans had even started writing a bit about Nixon before his death in 2013. With the permission of Evans' daughter, Li pored through the former Mudge Rose partner's papers, which included an interview with Nixon himself.

“The ball just got rolling from there,” Li said.

As he began researching his historical account of Nixon's legal career, Li said he was surprised to learn that Nixon was, actually, an impressive lawyer and a rainmaker for the firm.

“Mudge hired him to be the public face of the firm—someone who could bring in business, who had a lot of contacts in the corporate world [and] someone who when [clients] called, they would get that phone call returned immediately,” Li said.

For the first time in his life, Nixon was making a ton of money. He had grown up poor in Southern California and now could travel the world on Mudge Rose's dime.

“For most people on Wall Street that would be the dream—that's what you aspire to,” Li said about Nixon's time in Big Law.

But for Nixon, that was never going to be enough.

“He wanted to be president. He wanted that more than anything else,” Li said. “There's a quote in the book that [Nixon] said, “If all I have to do is practice law then I'll be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.”

At the end of 1967, Nixon announced his plans to run for president.

“The firm took the position that what was good for Nixon would be good for the firm,” said Li about Mudge Rose.

Many of the firm's partners, such as Evans, had roles in Nixon's presidential first campaign. Patrick Buchanan, then an executive assistant at Mudge Rose, became Nixon's adviser, an opposition researcher and speechwriter. John Mitchell, a senior partner at the firm, agreed to become Nixon's campaign manager.

After Nixon was elected in 1968, many of the Mudge Rose lawyers went into the White House in various roles, including Buchanan and Mitchell, the latter of whom was appointed U.S. attorney general until he resigned in 1972 to head a committee to re-elect Nixon. (Mitchell, who died in 1988, was disbarred in New York state for his actions related to the Watergate scandal.)

Mudge Rose became known as the firm you hired if you had an issue with the federal government, Li said.

But this boom went bust almost as soon as Watergate hit. Though the firm was never implicated in the scandal, its reputation suffered.

Though Mudge Rose experienced a resurgence in the 1980s, a subsequent recession and collapse of the municipal bond market critically wounded the firm. In 1995, a year after Nixon's death, Mudge Rose dissolved. (Click here for a feature story from The American Lawyer at the time about Mudge Rose's collapse, which saw several Am Law 100 rivals pick up remnants of the storied firm.)

Nixon died at 81 on April 22, 1994. Copies of Li's book can be purchased through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Google Play.