In an immediate sense, but why did he do that? Because the currency had been debased when LBJ wanted to spend a lot of money on Vietnam and the Great Society without passing the burden on to current taxpayers. (The prevailing gold standard obviously failed to prevent this.) The Fed accommodated him, and the old gold-$ rate was simply unsustainable.
The gold standard was dead long before Nixon did the right thing and officially dumped it. It was essentially a system of currency price controls that was not well suited for the enormous economic expansion that took place after World War II. In the 1950s the communist central banks greatly expanded the practice of holding deposits in foreign banks in foreign currencies--eurodollars or marks or francs or pounds--because they had to have "hard" currencies to buy the foreign goods that centrally planned economies simply couldn't produce. The euromarkets exploded after that as businesses operating in different countries or trading across borders used them to provide finance that was restricted by currency controls and the various ill considered taxes that were imposed to keep currency flows in line with what the Bretton Woods types thought they should be. Looks like the EU needs to brush up its institutional memory.
Moral: price controls do not work.
Other moral: we now have fiat money. Its value is based on whether or not someone wants to use it to buy the things that the economy that produces it makes. If you wreck your economy with stupid fiscal policy and inane regulation, you also destroy the value of your currency.