I went over a brief history of the Gold Standard in the United States in a previous post here. To summarize some key points, there had already been a number of cases of instability tied in part to the gold standard leading into the FDR administration. Because of the Great Depression, FDR and the Federal Reserve needed an expansionary monetary policy which was fundamentally incompatible with what the gold standard could provided at the time.

As u/cucumber-250 had outlined, the Bretton-Woods system was about cementing the United State’s post-war hegemony and establishing international checks on monetary policy like the IMF. There were quite a bit of problems from the US perspective between the establishment of Bretton-Woods and Nixon as well: the 1950s payment crisis leading into the 1958 recession, which Nixon viewed as one of the main reasons he was not elected in 1960; the devaluation of the Pound in 1967 and the subsequent policies of the Johnson Administration; the rise of Japan’s economy and that of the European Economic Community; and finally the various economic crises under the Nixon Administration, which I addressed in some detail in this thread.

If you happen to have additional questions I would be more than happy to work through them with you.