Читать книгу The Nixon Effect - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThe Domestic Policy Pragmatist
Nixon remains the only modern president whose personality, rhetoric, and image can be used with impunity to dismiss or ignore his concrete achievements, especially in the area of expanding civil rights enforcement in particular, and domestic reform in general.
—JOAN HOFF1
Since [Nixon assumed office] . . . the great symbol of racial subjugation, the dual school system of the South, virtually intact two years ago, has quietly and finally been dismantled. All in all, a record of good fortune and much genuine achievement. And yet how little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.
—DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN2
The 2,027 days Nixon spent in office have been remembered most for Watergate, next for foreign policy, and least for domestic reform. I think this order should be reversed.
—JOAN HOFF3
Richard Nixon is many things to many people, but a little more than forty years after his crushing 1972 reelection victory, he is also something few would have imagined: America’s last liberal. That may sound like a stretch, a misunderstanding of Nixon’s presidency and his policies. But if we look back over the last forty-five-odd years, Nixon’s credentials have put him starkly at odds with today’s Republican Party. Though Nixon, and other Republicans in the 1970s, would never have expressed it in this way, our thirty-seventh president was a pro–big government, pro–public spending, and pro–safety net president.
To some extent his domestic liberalism resulted less from deep-seated convictions than from political pragmatism. Because the truth about Nixon is that he was never terribly interested in domestic policy. He once said: “I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President. . . . You need a President for foreign policy.”4 To be sure, this perspective sometimes got Nixon into trouble domestically: as I go on to briefly outline, Nixon’s economic policies were scattershot, inconsistent, and not terribly successful by any measure. He lacked a firm foundation in economics, and it showed in his policies. Yet, in other crucial domestic areas—especially civil rights and the environment—he achieved remarkable successes unmatched by any of his successors (and some of his immediate predecessors). In further areas—especially health care and social welfare—he proposed bold, innovative reforms that, while not becoming law, helped to shape the reforms adopted decades later.
What’s striking about all of these areas is how much Nixon’s record plays against the conventional image of him. Nixon’s image today, on racial and civil issues, for instance, is almost wholly negative. It’s an image that he himself did much to create, especially on the White House tapes, in which he is heard saying things about blacks that had they been heard publicly, would have destroyed him politically. And yet Nixon’s record on racial issues is remarkable for its substantive achievements. Few Americans know that the president’s school desegregation legacy dwarfs that of his Democratic predecessors. When Nixon ran for president in 1968, nearly 70 percent of black children in the South attended all-black schools. By the time he left office in 1974, just 8 percent did.5 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former Nixon White House aide, lamented “how little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.”6
On issues of social welfare, Nixon was emphatically not a Barry Goldwater conservative. He attempted to institute one of the most far-reaching plans of social welfare ever in the United States: the Family Assistance Plan. The plan was designed to expand welfare benefits and job-training programs, but more importantly, to provide all Americans with a guaranteed annual income. He pushed for a national health care plan to require employers to buy health insurance for their employees and to subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. Nixon’s version of national health care was far more liberal than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s—and it in fact failed because of Democratic opposition, not lack of support from Nixon’s own party. (Ted Kennedy later said that opposing Nixon’s health care plan was one of his biggest political regrets.)
Nixon was the nation’s first—and, some would say, its only—“environmental president.” He was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level, he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. The creation of the EPA was part of a broader environmental agenda embodied in the Natural Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which some refer to as the “natural environment’s Magna Carta.” NEPA set forth unprecedented ecological goals and targets and required the use of environmental impact statements—documents that describe anticipated environmental effects, positive and negative, of proposed policies.7 With NEPA, Nixon instituted a systematic national environmental policy, which would include the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. These decisions clearly represented a significant expansion of a government mandate to oversee areas of economic and civic life that were previously lightly regulated. The Nixon environmental regulatory framework would face fierce opposition were it being debated today.
Finally, Nixon also ended the military draft. Ending the nation’s system of military conscription single-handedly weakened the main impetus of the antiwar movement, dramatically calmed down social tensions, and ultimately put the US military on a much stronger footing. If a Democratic president had done that, there would be monuments to him in every state in the country. Yet for Nixon, this major reform is somehow regarded as an afterthought.
As I previously suggested, Nixon himself had much to do with his negative image. Yet he serves as perhaps the most dramatic example of how one must separate private behavior—and tape-recorded conversations—from actual policy. What made Nixon so divisive domestically was that while his governance was mostly centrist, and sometimes flat-out liberal, his politics were much more confrontational. The dichotomy is best illustrated in a pair of quotations attributed to Attorney General John Mitchell: In one instance, Mitchell told reporters, “This country is going so far to the Right you won’t recognize it.”8 Another time, Mitchell warned people: “You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.”9
Indeed, however rough, even callous, Nixon and his men could sound in their public rhetoric, the administration’s policy record was one of innovation and substantive achievement. Mitchell’s “watch what we do” comment, in fact, was made, fittingly, to a group of disappointed activists for civil rights—and no area illustrates the Nixonian tension between words and deeds more dramatically.
Civil Rights
Nixon’s enduring image as a political villain, his appeal to the silent majority of mostly middle-class Americans, and especially his notorious Southern strategy—all of which I’ll discuss at length in later chapters—have contributed to a widespread view that his record on racial matters is poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whatever the complexities of Nixon’s racial politics, his policies achieved far more than those of his great rival, John F. Kennedy, who dragged his feet on civil rights until near the end of his time in office. Nixon’s record on race today would qualify him, again, as a liberal.
“The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nixon’s counselor for urban affairs, in a memo that would become as infamous as it was misunderstood. “The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.”10 What Moynihan was urging was not a retreat from government concern for minority advancement but less public attention to the highlighting of disputes between the races. Critics have often portrayed Moynihan’s statement literally, as a proposal to “neglect” blacks, and Nixon’s Watergate image and his own comments about race in the Oval Office tapes fed that impression. In some areas, Nixon gave them fuel for their conclusions.
Consider the tortured subject of busing, on which Nixon struggled to define a clear public position. Nixon was on the record opposing the forced busing of school children for the purpose of integration. At the same time, he tried to make clear his civil rights record, which had been strong throughout his career. As vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon helped lead support for the 1957 Civil Rights Act—for which Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to thank him. Nixon opposed segregation. In a 1968 interview on Face the Nation, presidential candidate Nixon said that “no funds should be given to a district which practices segregation.”11
Some brief background: When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was drafted, Vice President Hubert Humphrey proposed amendments banning the act from ever being interpreted as one that required forced busing. Humphrey wanted to outlaw segregation, but he opposed forcing integration according to race. Republican Senator Jacob Javits expressed similar views. However, by 1966, the Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) had mandated that the success of desegregation efforts could be measured by numbers—that is, by how many children had been integrated. In certain areas, the only way to satisfy those targets was through busing.
The integration of schools was upheld by the Supreme Court’s 1968 ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, which ordered an immediate end to de jure segregation.12 The busing views were further bolstered in the Court’s 1971 ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which ordered the school district to desegregate, allowing it to redraw districts, if necessary, and also to use busing. These two rulings effectively brought an end to de jure segregation—that is, segregation by explicit arrangement—in the South though they did not address de facto segregation, which was common in the North and West, not so much as a matter of law but as a result of residential patterns. Now several lower courts began to mandate busing as a means to eliminate de facto segregation as well.13 Backlash to busing grew across the country, especially in suburban districts in the North and West.
Nixon did not see busing—forced integration—as a solution to racial inequality, let alone as a way to foster harmonious relations between whites and blacks. In addition, he objected to it on the grounds of community control. After the Swann ruling upheld the constitutionality of busing, Nixon asked Congress to pass a moratorium on new court-ordered busing rulings—which would not affect those already in place. The moratorium made it through the House but not the Senate. Throughout the first half of the 1970s, busing continued to be a hugely divisive issue socially and politically, sparking parent protests, sporadic violence, and even the firebombing of school buses in Pontiac, Michigan. By 1974, reflecting the new public mood, the court had ruled, in Milliken v. Bradley, that federal courts could not bus between school districts unless they could prove that these districts were deliberately drawn up so as to create segregation.14
Liberals at the New York Times and elsewhere blamed Nixon for his resistance to busing, but they somehow missed the astounding success he was having desegregating American schools, which was busing’s main goal. When Nixon entered the White House, the desegregation of Southern schools was proceeding at a snail’s pace. The fact that he had reduced the percentage of black children attending all-black schools from 70 percent to 8 percent by the time he left office in 197415 makes the record crystal clear: Richard Nixon desegregated more schools than all other presidents combined.
He accomplished this historic feat in no small part by applying Republican, conservative principles of governance, especially federalism—the philosophy that grants maximum autonomy to the states. Where desegregation was concerned, Nixon deferred to federalist principles as long as the states’ efforts were consistent with federal mandates on civil rights. As the speechwriter and author Ray Price put it: “Nixon’s aim was to use the minimum coercion necessary to achieve the essential national goal, to encourage local initiative, to respect diversity, and, to the extent possible, to treat the entire nation equally—blacks equally with whites, the South equally with the North.”16
George Shultz, who served as Nixon’s secretary of labor before heading up the Office of Management and Budget and later working as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, told the story of how Nixon worked to enforce the mandate of Brown v. Board of Ed in a powerful New York Times op-ed in 2003. In the article, Shultz described how Nixon supported this legislation—which had been flouted for nearly twenty years—by asking him and Vice President Agnew to form biracial committees in the seven affected Southern states. The idea was that white and black representatives would work together to manage the process of desegregation with minimal interference from Washington—as long as the committees understood that they had to reach some kind of workable solution, or risk federal intervention. In many instances, the whites and blacks who served together got to know and respect one another to an extent few had foreseen. As the committees got closer to bringing their plans to fruition, Shultz knew that it was time to bring the president in. As Shultz told the story:
When the time was right, I let President Nixon know that we were ready for him. We walked across the hall into the Oval Office, where the president gathered his guests around his desk. “We live in a great democracy where authority and responsibility are shared,” I remember him saying. “Just as decisions are made here in this office, decisions are made throughout the states and communities of our country. You are the leaders in those communities and you have to step up to your responsibilities.” They left the Oval Office inspired.17
Reflecting on the gathering, Nixon said, “One of the most encouraging experiences that I have had since taking office was to hear each one of these leaders from the Southern states speak honestly about the problems, not glossing over the fact that there were very grave problems. As a result of these advisory committees being set up, we are going to find that in many districts the transition will be orderly and peaceful, whereas otherwise it could have been the other way.”18
One of the black members of the fifteen-member Mississippi State Advisory Committee who sat in the president’s office that day was so encouraged by the meeting that he told the president: “The day before yesterday I was in jail for going to the wrong beach. Today, Mr. President, I am meeting you. If that’s possible anything can happen.”19 His optimism proved warranted. “In the end, the school openings were peaceful,” Shultz wrote. “To the amazement of almost everyone.”20
“There has been more change in the structure of American public school education in the last month than in the past 100 years,” Moynihan wrote when he was Nixon’s counselor. His verdict on Nixon’s civil rights record remains true: “How little the administration seems to be credited with what it has achieved.”21
Writing many years later, the New York Times’s Tom Wicker, hardly a champion of the president, stated: “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years, or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort. Halting and uncertain before he finally asserted strong control, that effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”22
And desegregation was not the only area in which Nixon worked for the advancement of African Americans. How many remember today that Nixon was a champion of affirmative action? “Incredible but true,” is how Fortune magazine described it in 1994 when Nixon died, “it was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.”23 Though many credit John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson with initiating affirmative action, it was Nixon who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to break barriers to minority employment (to be sure, the merits of these policies depend on one’s political views).
Nixon’s administration also put together the Philadelphia Plan, a forceful federal-level initiative to guarantee fair hiring practices in construction jobs, with definitive “goals and timetables” for minority inclusion. The administration would not impose quotas, Nixon himself said, “but would require federal contractors to show ‘affirmative action’ to meet the goals of increasing minority employment.”24 The plan took its name from the city in which the first test case was run. Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher said: “The craft unions and the construction industry are among the most egregious offenders against equal opportunity laws . . . openly hostile toward letting blacks into their closed circle.”25
The Philadelphia Plan was part of a broader agenda of supporting what Nixon called “black capitalism.” It came at a time, several years after Dr. King’s death, when the traditional civil rights paradigm seemed to have broken down amid a changed legal and political climate. Some problems had actually been solved; others remained. But the old-line civil rights leadership seemed unable to grasp the new realities, and the urban violence of the late sixties had exposed the limitations of its approach—while prompting a backlash from whites. Nixon saw support for black business efforts not only as a logical next step in black advancement but as a way to defuse racial tensions.
As Nixon speechwriter Ray Price put it, the rioting and other inner-city violence posed the danger of “hardening attitudes into a simple formula of ‘it’s us against them.’” Price lambasted liberal Democrats, “who, faced with a riot, beat their breasts in a chorus of collective mea culpas,” along with white conservatives, “who don’t recognize the cultural gulf between the ghetto and suburbia.”26
Nixon’s approach sought to bring Republican values of entrepreneurialism to the black community, while also—so Nixon hoped, anyway—reaching out to blacks and demonstrating to them that Republicans also sought their advancement and wanted their support. As a result, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE), championed by Republicans, put liberal Democrats on the defensive. Instead of a constant drumbeat for government assistance or legislation, here was a different emphasis for black advancement: free enterprise and the American way. Eventually, some liberal politicians endorsed the OMBE. Black capitalism, said Graham T. Molitor, a pollster for liberal Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, was “a stroke of political genius.”27
A good portion of the liberal establishment showed its myopia, however, in harping on the Nixon plan’s limitations. The New York Times argued that the plan ignored institutional discrimination in home sales and wages and failed to fully account for the social, economic, and political concerns of blacks. But Nixon continued, undaunted.
In 1972, after presidential candidate George Wallace once again proved strong in Southern primaries, Nixon showed his newfound confidence in exerting a civil rights agenda—without losing his majority support among whites and even most conservatives. Nixon proposed the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1972, affirming that no state or locality could discriminate in education based on race, color, or national origin, while also making it clear that busing would be regarded only as a last resort.28
Writing thirty years later, in 2002, Patrick Buchanan summarized the administration’s civil rights achievements in the following list. According to him, the administration:
* raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
* doubled the budget for black colleges;
* appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
* adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
* invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise) . . . ;
* raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent.29
“The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie,” Buchanan wrote. “Nixon routed the Left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war [Vietnam] into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.”30 Indeed, Nixon showed that civil rights could be advanced in a rational, reasonable way that emphasized cooperation while deemphasizing areas of conflict. His achievements in this area exemplify his nonideological political approach.
Nixon’s social liberalism also extended to the other key group then making demands for inclusion, economic opportunity, and political influence—women. Moynihan played a role here, too, in urging Nixon to get out in front of the issue. “Male dominance is so deeply a part of American life that males don’t even notice it,” Moynihan wrote to the president. “I would suggest you could take advantage of this. In your appointments (as you have begun to do), but perhaps especially in your pronouncements. This is a subject ripe for creative political leadership and initiative.”31
In today’s politics, women’s rights have often been seen as synonymous with abortion—an issue on which Nixon vacillated. He believed that the issue should be resolved by the states, though he called New York’s Cardinal Cooke in 1971 to express support for repealing the state’s liberal abortion law. After the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, Nixon worried that the decision might encourage promiscuity. (Infamously, he was caught on tape saying that abortions were justified in cases of rape or “when you have a black and a white.”)32 Vocal feminists, like Betty Friedan, certainly did not see Nixon as an ally—yet they overlooked the rest of his record.
Nixon also extended affirmative action to women at educational institutions. Perhaps his foundational achievement here was in signing Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, in 1972. “It’s hard to exaggerate the far-reaching effect of Title IX on American society,” wrote longtime sports columnist Allen Barra in 2012. “The number of female athletes at the high school level has increased more than tenfold and at the college level, more than twelvefold. . . . The year before Title IX was enacted, there were about 310,000 girls and women in America playing high school and college sports; today, there are more than 3,373,000.”33
Barra concedes that Title IX wasn’t Nixon’s brainchild; it was pushed primarily by Democratic representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii. “It’s almost certain that Nixon signed it into law without considering the potential impact on women’s athletics,”34 Barra wrote, and that’s probably true. But it was part of Nixon’s broader civil rights efforts on behalf of women—including his support for the Equal Rights Amendment (though Nixon did not push seriously to get the ERA passed).35
From 1971 to 1973, Nixon’s administration tripled the number of women working in high-level positions.36 “There is no denying,” wrote Joan Hoff, “as with desegregation of southern schools and public institutions, that Nixon’s advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities far outweighed those of his predecessors, belying the ‘divisive public rhetoric’ his administration employed in the process.”37
Pioneering “Strict Constructionism”
Another reason that Nixon’s civil rights achievements aren’t better recognized is because, in his efforts to appoint “strict constructionist” Supreme Court justices—meaning that they would interpret the Constitution narrowly—civil rights issues were often the backdrop. That was certainly the case with his first two appointments, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, neither of whom made it to the court. Both judges were Southerners, and their nominations have been widely seen as a perpetuation of Nixon’s Southern strategy. Haynsworth would have been the first Southerner named to the court since the civil rights movement, but civil rights and labor leaders helped sink his nomination. Carswell’s nomination imploded on questions of his competence, but also on civil rights grounds: he had given a prosegregation speech in 1948.
The failed nominations were seen as politically damaging, but Nixon was able to rally political support with an angry denunciation of what he saw as bias against Southern judicial candidates. “I have reluctantly concluded,” Nixon told reporters, “that it is not possible to get confirmation for a judge on the Supreme Court of any man who believes in the strict construction of the Constitution, as I do, if he happens to come from the South.”38 He said that the only choice left for him was to nominate judicial conservatives from outside the South, since his opponents were biased against that region of the country.
As divisive as these nominations were, Nixon did not look at the court in the hardened ideological terms his public pronouncements sometimes suggested. As with so many other domestic issues, he showed considerable flexibility when dealing with the court—and thus, on the negative side, his flexibility could lead him to subordinate his choices to political considerations, as many assumed he did with these early nominations, as he sought further to strengthen his Southern appeal.
However, Nixon did believe in “strict construction”—a phrase and concept that he made familiar to millions of Americans. “It is my belief that it is the duty of a judge to interpret the Constitution and not to place himself above the Constitution,” he said. “He should not twist or bend the Constitution in order to perpetuate his personal, political and social views.”39 He meant it, but for Nixon, “strict construction” was not about ideological purity so much as addressing specific issues. In his first term, the two issues that meant the most to him were law and order and antibusing. More broadly, he wanted justices who rejected judicial liberalism in its many manifestations. But he recognized that the most hardline judicial candidates, especially on civil rights issues, would not enjoy the support of the American people.
Eventually, Nixon nominated Harry Blackmun from Minnesota as a justice for the Supreme Court, and he was confirmed unanimously. Blackmun was seen as a law-and-order man, and in the early years of his tenure, he cast mostly conservative votes. But in time, he became a key cog of the court’s liberal wing, famously writing the Roe opinion legalizing abortion and, two decades later, coming out against the death penalty. The judge would come to exemplify a truism about Supreme Court nominations: no president, no matter how careful his selection, can depend on a justice being “reliable” throughout his tenure.
Perhaps the judicial pick who best exemplified Nixon’s own predilections was Lewis Powell, whom the president appointed in 1971. Powell was a centrist, with views often reflective of Nixon’s own—he was generally proprosecution in criminal cases and a limited advocate of affirmative action and prochoice, but not at public expense. Warren Burger, whom Nixon appointed in 1969 to replace Chief Justice Earl Warren, also had views that were reflective of Nixon in some ways. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican but not an ideological conservative. The justice often frustrated committed conservatives, but he also represented an entirely different sensibility than the departed Warren, who had led a judicial revolution. Burger’s chief justiceship, which ran until 1986, brought an end to that era.
But it was William Rehnquist, a committed conservative, who represented Nixon’s most vital impact on the court. Rehnquist’s nomination ran into serious opposition. He had written a 1952 memorandum supporting the premise of Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 decision that enshrined “separate but equal” public facilities for whites and blacks. He tended to vote “with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases.”40 As John Ehrlichman told Nixon: “If you want to salt away a guy that would be on the Court for 30 years [and] is a rock-solid conservative, he’s it.”41
Once he was joined by more conservative colleagues in the 1980s—when Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and especially Antonin Scalia—Rehnquist, who became chief justice in 1986, led a more conservative court. Sparked by the “strict constructionist” ideal, which became more commonly described as “originalism,” conservatives formed organizations like the Federalist Society to train legal scholars and jurists. But things didn’t go entirely as conservatives hoped at the court—they never do. Whether under Chief Justice Burger, Justice Rehnquist, or Justice John Roberts, the court has tended to side with liberals on social issues—abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, and, in 2012, on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. At the end of the 2014–2015 court term, the justices handed down two landmark rulings celebrated by liberals: one effectively upholding a main component of Obamacare (for a second time) and the other declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
While conservatives currently rue many of these decisions, it is not clear that Nixon himself would have: he had a more traditionally Republican (that is, not ideologically conservative) outlook on most social issues. Yet, while his record of appointments to the court proved uneven, he unquestionably began the push against the Warren-era court’s social activism—especially in the area of expanded criminal-defendant rights—and engendered what would become a prevailing critique among conservatives against “activist judges” who interpreted the Constitution and statutory law according to their own predilections. The critiques Republican candidates make in campaign after campaign—against judges who “legislate from the bench,” for instance—have become deeply familiar to millions of Americans, and not in a positive sense. Nixon, then, was the president who put the brakes on the court’s liberal momentum; made the court a political field of battle in which certain issues strongly favored conservatives; and discredited the concept of judicial activism in the public mind.
Social Welfare
In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the historic Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, legislation that reformed the nation’s welfare system to encourage work among the poor. The law included a work requirement and a five-year cutoff period for welfare benefits. It was the most sweeping change in the nation’s welfare policies since the 1960s. Today, welfare reform is counted among President Clinton’s most significant achievements in office. Yet the law had many liberal critics who felt that it stigmatized poor mothers and did not provide adequate job training. And its cutoff period—after receiving two years of consecutive benefits or five years of cumulative benefits—was decried by liberal advocates as too harsh. They saw the Clinton bill as a betrayal of the Democrats’ historic commitment to the poor.
What some older Democrats might have recalled was that, a quarter-century earlier, they had had a chance to pass a much more comprehensive, and more generous, welfare plan. But this plan was offered by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, with whom they were often engaged in political war. For various political reasons that I will describe in detail in chapter 4, liberals, who should have been the most reliable supporters of Nixon’s welfare reform effort, largely blocked it. Nixon’s pioneering effort to transform the nation’s welfare system didn’t come to fruition, but the effort to do so is an important and fascinating part of his domestic record.
Nixon was not expected to be a voice for the poor, but he began proposing initiatives to assist them when his administration was in its early days. In May 1969, in his “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America,” Nixon called on Americans to support a range of legislation and executive action that would alleviate poverty and especially hunger. “That hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable,” Nixon said. “More is at stake here than the health and well-being of 16 million American citizens. . . . Something very like the honor of American democracy is at issue.”42 On the issue of hunger, Nixon’s actions matched his words: he quadrupled spending on food stamps from $610 million in 1970 to $2.5 billion in 1973.
Thus Nixon’s most remarkable initiative in social welfare policy came in an area in which, in the end, he failed to win legislative approval: welfare reform. When thinking of Nixon today, few would note that he was a welfare reformer, much less that he was one even before there were welfare reformers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, welfare was a system largely accepted by liberals; though conservatives detested the welfare system, most didn’t envision realistic prospects of changing it. Yet Nixon did. In an August 1969 speech, given over the opposition of his most conservative advisors, he unveiled the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), his attempt to address poverty in America, especially among children. Under Nixon’s plan, which would replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the existing welfare program, all families with children would be eligible for a minimum stipend—$1,600 for a family of four, amended to $2,500 in 1971.
“What I am proposing,” Nixon continued in his 1969 congressional message on hunger, “is that the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children that cannot care for itself—and wherever in America that family may live.”43
Yet Nixon’s program was more conservative than it looked. All able-bodied heads of families, except for mothers with children younger than six, would be required to accept work or job training—very much in the manner that Clinton later envisioned. And if that parent refused, his or her portion of the welfare benefit would be cut off, even though the child’s payment would continue. Moreover, the FAP, unlike the AFDC and later welfare proposals, would have directed a substantial amount of aid to working-poor families, as opposed to solely focusing on non-working-poor families if it had passed. By one calculation, under the FAP, a family of four with an income of $12,652, in 2013 dollars, would have seen its income increase by nearly half—to $18,725, in 2013 dollars.44
The FAP was designed to provide the means to guarantee all American children a stable annual income—regardless of the behavior of their parents—and to provide such aid to three times the number of children covered by the AFDC. The FAP, Hoff concluded, “would have revolutionized welfare by switching from providing services to providing income.”45 It was, she wrote, “the most comprehensive welfare reform ever proposed by a United States president.”46
Initially, editorial pages hailed the FAP as a reform on the order of social security. “A Republican President has condemned the word ‘welfare,’ emphasized ‘work’ and ‘training’ as conditions of public assistance, suggested that the states and the cities be given more Federal money to deal with their social and economic problems, but still comes out in the end with a policy of spending more money for relief of more poor people than the welfare state Democrats ever dared to propose in the past,” wrote James Reston in the New York Times. “Mr. Nixon has taken a great step forward. He has cloaked a remarkably progressive welfare policy in conservative language. . . . But mainly he has dealt with the intolerable paradox of American life. He has insisted that poverty in a prosperous country must be eliminated.”47
The FAP passed the House in April 1970, 243 to 155, but it bogged down in the Senate, where Senator Russell B. Long, who opposed the bill, held long hearings, allowing interest groups from around the political spectrum to organize opposition. Hard-line conservatives saw the FAP as a guaranteed-income handout and opposed it. Liberal opponents also objected to the FAP on various grounds—one being, predictably enough, money. The grants were far too low, they said. They proposed grants of $6,400 for a family of four, an amount that would sink the program’s budget and lose support from the American middle class. Radical welfare rights groups also lined up in opposition, and organized labor wasn’t crazy about the FAP, either, seeing a guaranteed income as a threat to the minimum wage. Still others objected to the work requirements.
Yet in his 1971 State of the Union address, Nixon pressed on:
The present welfare system has become a monstrous, consuming outrage—an outrage against the community, against the taxpayer, and particularly against the children it is supposed to help. . . . So let us place a floor under the income of every family with children in America—and without those demeaning, soul-stifling affronts to human dignity that so blight the lives of welfare children today. But let us also establish an effective work incentive and an effective work requirement. Let us provide the means by which more can help themselves.48
But the partisan hurdles were too much to overcome, and the FAP died in the Senate in October 1972, three years after it was first proposed. “Clearly, partisan politics prevented reform of the country’s welfare system,” Hoff wrote.49 By that time, the FAP had taken a pounding in the political debates and was regarded, by conservatives and more and more centrists, as a “guaranteed annual income”—which was anathema to most from the center rightward. In fact, the program was a guaranteed annual income, but it came with substantive conditions, and the guaranteed income in question was for children, not adults. Nixon tried to stress these points in defending the FAP, but ultimately the program became enshrined in the public mind as a massive new welfare benefit. Even George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 election, who in January of that year had proposed “demogrants” of $1,000—with broader eligibility and fewer conditions—for every poor family in America, retracted his proposal before election day in an effort to disassociate himself with what had become an unpopular (if poorly understood) proposal.
However, the FAP’s defeat did not preclude Nixon’s achievements in other related programs. The original FAP plan, released in 1969, contained a proposal for supplemental security income (SSI), a new program that would provide regular income for disabled, blind, and aged recipients. On October 17, 1972, just two days after the FAP’s final demise in the Senate, SSI passed both houses of Congress. It is likely that SSI had such an easy time because its target population was unambiguously needy—the blind, the old, and the disabled, unlike poor mothers, have few critics. Some didn’t even regard SSI as a genuine “welfare” program, seeing it as more of a subset of the most unassailable of all American social welfare programs: Social Security. It seems no accident that SSI’s name resembles that of the much larger program. Still, SSI may not have seen the light of day without the momentum—temporary though it was—that the FAP achieved.
Some Nixon critics see the FAP failure as incidental to his presidency. They point out, correctly, that Nixon’s true passion was foreign policy. Thus, they claim, his more liberal domestic policies were undertaken solely for political expediency—to blunt liberal initiatives and broaden his political base with moderate policies. Certainly there is some truth to this interpretation—Nixon’s domestic moderation did broaden his political base—but the critics don’t give Nixon enough credit (sometimes any credit) for caring about these issues. On welfare, in particular, the evidence in his presidential papers is that Nixon stayed engaged with the FAP—both in the long and sometimes contentious battle within his administration to formulate the policy and during the political battles that ran for years—to try to get it passed. Welfare reform was definitely something he wished to accomplish, and the time he devoted to it makes that clear. Even more proof of his commitment came in January 1974, when Nixon, already reeling under the Watergate scandal and fighting to save his presidency, still found time, in his State of the Union speech, to urge the Congress once again to take up the cause of welfare reform. This time, for obvious reasons, the effort never got off the ground.
Nixon’s mostly unheralded efforts to reform welfare and address poverty and hunger in the United States grew out of his own personal experiences and the suffering he witnessed during his stark childhood. He remembered how his mother and father struggled to put food on the table and clothe their children, and their hardships left a searing mark on him. In an evocative memo to speechwriter Ray Price, Nixon wrote:
In the depression years I remember when my brother had tuberculosis for five years and we had to keep him in a hospital, my mother didn’t buy a new dress for five years. We were really quite desperately poor, but as Eisenhower said it much more eloquently at Abilene in his opening campaign statement in 1952, the glory of it was that we didn’t know it.
The problem today is that the children growing up in welfare families receiving food stamps and government largess with social workers poking around are poor and they do know it.50
As Nixon saw it, changing welfare from a system of services to a system of income maintenance would alleviate this problem. The state, he believed, should stop reminding the children of modern welfare families that they were poor, and thereby stigmatizing them, when they already had daunting challenges to face in their lives. He sympathized with those in such difficult circumstances—though he also agreed with millions of Americans that the welfare system, as it had evolved by the early 1970s, perpetuated dependency while offering no incentives to poor adults to improve their lives. And he agreed with conservatives that the AFDC was contributing to family breakdown, placing more and more children in undesirable and sometimes precarious circumstances. All in all, his welfare reform proposals were conservative in spirit, if liberal in their means—a description that fits much of his domestic policy.
Nixon, Joan Hoff wrote, sought to use a “peace dividend” that he had gained from the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam for domestic purposes. Under this moderate Republican president, social welfare spending more than doubled, from $55 billion in 1970 to $132 billion by 1975. It was Nixon, not Lyndon Johnson, Hoff wrote, who more properly deserves the label of “last of the big spenders” on domestic programs. Indeed, from 1970 to 1975, for the first time since World War II, spending on social welfare and other human resources exceeded defense spending.51 It’s never happened again.
Health Care
For years, health care has been a flashpoint of partisan conflict in the United States, and the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, has recently elevated the issue to a defining one in American politics. Here again, however, the combatants on both sides are battling over terrain that Nixon had previously trod. And as many commentators pointed out in 2010, the ACA bears more than a passing resemblance to the various health care proposals that Nixon made during his presidency.
These proposals were not incremental reforms but rather transformative new formulations designed to address the growing cost crisis in health care as well as the problem of the uninsured. Nixon’s first attempt came in 1971, in his State of the Union address, when he set out an ambitious reform agenda for health care that still sounds remarkably contemporary, over forty years later:
I will offer a far-reaching set of proposals for improving America’s health care and making it available more fairly to more people. I will propose:
—A program to insure that no American family will be prevented from obtaining basic medical care by inability to pay.
—I will propose a major increase in and redirection of aid to medical schools, to greatly increase the number of doctors and other health personnel.
—Incentives to improve the delivery of health services, to get more medical care resources into those areas that have not been adequately served, to make greater use of medical assistants, and to slow the alarming rise in the costs of medical care.
—New programs to encourage better preventive medicine, by attacking the causes of disease and injury, and by providing incentives to doctors to keep people well rather than just to treat them when they are sick.52
Nixon called his plan the National Health Insurance Partnership, and included in it the now-familiar set of competing interests: private insurers who write plans for employers, government-provided plans for low-income people, and the then-new concept of health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which Nixon believed held great potential for improving services. In 1973, Nixon signed a bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy pledging federal dollars for the creation of HMOs (unfortunately, forty years later, HMOs haven’t quite fulfilled their promise, to put it gently). Nixon’s plan was comprehensive and ambitious, the first genuine attempt to provide national insurance since Harry Truman. However, Nixon’s 1971 plans never got anywhere in Congress.
Yet again, as with welfare reform, Nixon did not give up. In his 1974 State of the Union address—the last he would give as president, delivered under a swelling cloud of the Watergate scandal—he put health care reform back on the agenda: “I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses. This will be a plan that maintains the high standards of quality in America’s health care. And it will not require additional taxes.”53
Nixon also made clear during the address that he opposed what would come to be known as a “single payer” system—making the government the sole health care insurer in the United States in a vast federal system of nationalized health care:
Now, I recognize that other plans have been put forward that would cost $80 billion or even $100 billion and that would put our whole health care system under the heavy hand of the Federal Government. This is the wrong approach. This has been tried abroad, and it has failed. It is not the way we do things here in America. This kind of plan would threaten the quality of care provided by our whole health care system. The right way is one that builds on the strengths of the present system and one that does not destroy those strengths, one based on partnership, not paternalism. . . . Government has a great role to play, but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the Federal Government.54
One week later, on February 6, 1974, Nixon introduced the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan (CHIP). Nixon’s plan, like subsequent plans that would be proposed by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and, in Massachusetts, Governor Mitt Romney, was built around private, employer-provided insurance. CHIP would penalize all but the smallest employers for failing to sponsor insurance for their employees—just as Obama’s plan does today—though it would also provide subsidies to small employers and the self-employed to help them cover these costs. Like the ACA, Nixon’s plan guaranteed coverage with no exclusions for preexisting preconditions. Nixon’s plan had generous coverage as well for mental illness, drug addiction, and alcoholism. But unlike Obama’s ACA, the Nixon plan contained no mandate—Americans would enter CHIP voluntarily. When they agreed to participate, they would get a health card that could be used like a credit card to pay for their services. (Bill Clinton copied this detail in 1993, when he pushed for national health insurance reform, and it did not go over well. Twenty years later, millions of Americans had developed more skeptical attitudes toward big government, and they saw the health card as a symbol of an overweening government.)
CHIP had three main parts: an expanded system of employer-provided health insurance, in which employers would pay 75 percent of premiums and employees would pay 25 percent; an improved Medicare program; and, for lower-income Americans or those with special occupations or health status, a new system, Assisted Health Insurance, which, for most services, would replace state-run Medicaid. Nixon felt strongly that the lower-income health insurance coverage benefits needed to be standardized nationally; Medicaid, by contrast, had benefits that varied state by state. To get CHIP started, Nixon envisioned a price tag of about $7 billion. If “promptly enacted by Congress,” Nixon said, CHIP would be fully operational by 1976.
The roots of these bold ideas could be found, once again, in Nixon’s upbringing. Not only had the struggles of his parents made him sympathetic to those who struggled to make ends meet but he had also seen how medical crises could wipe out a family’s savings and leave them in desperate circumstances—to say nothing of the human toll of the tragedy. Nixon lost two of his brothers to tuberculosis, an experience that stayed with him all his life. As an adult, he was heartened by the medical profession’s achievement in finding a cure for TB, and he pointed to it and other advances as examples of how government and private industry could work together on health care issues. His interest in the issue dated back to the beginning of his political career: in 1947, as a first-term congressman, he had proposed a system of national health care. “It was something personal for him,” said speechwriter Ray Price.55
Now, a quarter century later, Nixon stood before the Congress with a better-thought-out, more-comprehensive health care proposal than the one he had floated in 1971. Unfortunately, while his plan was better in 1974, his timing was worse. Watergate already hovered over everything.
“The wagons were not only circling, but they were heavily arming and out for blood,” Price remembered. “It was very difficult to get anything through at that point.”56
But it wasn’t just Watergate that brought CHIP down. As had happened with the FAP, Nixon faced opposition from both the Left and the Right on his health care plan—but given the Democrats’ edge in numbers in both houses of Congress, it was liberal opposition that really sank the program. In chapter 4, I’ll describe in detail why liberals blocked Nixon’s health care reform plans, which, as many have noted today, were far ahead of their time and retain relevance for today’s political debate.
It’s worth noting that Nixon, who is remembered in history as a foreign policy president, did not stop thinking about what might have been possible in health care, even during his postpresidency. In one of his final books, Seize the Moment, he wrote with remarkable prescience: “We need to work out a system that includes a greater emphasis on preventive care, sufficient public funding for health insurance for those who cannot afford it in the private sector, competition among healthcare providers and health insurance providers to keep down the costs of both, and decoupling the cost of healthcare from the cost of adding workers to the payroll.”57
An Inconsistent Economist
“Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” said Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser for presidents Nixon and Ford. It should be noted that Nixon was not especially interested in economics. He had no economic background, so he surrounded himself with experts who could help him make decisions without too much personal involvement. Most of his advisers were moderate-to-conservative Republicans, including Paul McCracken, Arthur Burns, Robert Mayo, and David Kennedy. Nixon took office just as America’s long economic boom was coming to an end. Throughout the 1960s, the economy had been robust and jobs plentiful. By 1968, though, the federal budget deficit had reached $25 billion, the highest level since the Second World War, and inflation was nearing 5 percent. Nixon believed that standard Republican solutions—tight monetary policy and spending cuts—wouldn’t do. As Stein noted, Nixon’s aim was “to be a conservative man with liberal policies.”58
Thus Nixon devised a four-phase “game plan.” In Game Plan I (1969), Nixon pursued a traditional conservative laissez-faire, tight-money approach. As a result, unemployment rose, as anticipated, but inflation continued to climb, as well. In 1970 and 1971, Nixon implemented Game Plan II, abruptly announcing, “I am now a Keynesian”59 and pursuing full employment. He embraced an expansionist monetary policy in the hope of stimulating the economy, possibly with an eye toward improving his electoral prospects for 1972. But Game Plan II proved equally ineffective.
Nixon made another radical departure with Game Plan III, announced in August 1971. Called the New Economic Policy, it aimed both to stimulate the economy and to cut inflation. The plan involved floating the dollar against gold for the first time, imposing a 10 percent import tax, restoring the investment tax credit, providing income tax relief, repealing the excise tax on automobiles, and imposing a ninety-day freeze on wage and price hikes. This last measure, never before done in peacetime, was particularly extreme.
Coming from a moderate Republican who supposedly favored the free market, the wage and price freezes were surprising. Even more oddly, the Democrats helped set the stage for many of these freezes by passing the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, which granted the president unprecedented power to “stabilize prices, rents, wages, and salaries.”60 The Democrats never believed that Nixon would resort to these measures; they thought they could embarrass him, at no cost to themselves, by giving him tools that he would never use and then blaming him for not using them. But as he so often did, Nixon out-thought the Democrats, and they were forced to go along with his liberal, stimulative policies.
As the 1972 election neared, Nixon increased the fiscal stimulus, hoping to prime the economy and win over voters. By the final quarter of 1972, the economy was growing at a robust 11.6 percent. Nixon won reelection in a landslide. By 1973, however, when the administration finally lifted the price controls, inflation returned and the bill for his artificial overheating of the economy came due. Finally, Nixon implemented Game Plan IV, involving a return to the “old Nixon” of tight fiscal and monetary policies.
On the economy, in particular, the Nixon record has long been a sore spot for conservatives. Nixon’s economic policies were all over the map, ranging from traditional Republican approaches, to mainstream Democratic ones, to leftist wage and price controls, and finally back to traditional Republican measures. His economic apostasies alienated conservatives, as did his big-government focus in other areas.
Reviewing Nixon’s domestic policy record in full, as I did for a 2013 op-ed I wrote marking the centennial of his birth, I was struck by his willingness to inject government into domestic policy. This was the case whether Nixon was implementing economic measures, as we have just seen, or implementing a vast web of new regulatory and administrative bureaucracies, which have endured in the American economy and had major influence on business and consumer behavior, ranging from the Consumer Product Safety Commission to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. But it was in the area of environmental protections that the Nixon administration may have left its most enduring regulatory legacy.
The Environmental President
“I hope that you become known as Mr. Clean,” Democratic senator Edmund Muskie, a leading environmentalist, told William D. Ruckelshaus at his 1970 confirmation hearing to become the first head of the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which Nixon had announced the creation of earlier that year.61 “It was not long,” Jack Lewis wrote, “before the media were portraying William Ruckelshaus as a knight in shining armor charging out to do battle with the wicked polluters of America.”62
Today, Democrats and Republicans eagerly tout their environmental credentials, though Democrats, with their more favorable attitudes toward regulation, enjoy, by far, a stronger public identification with proenvironmental “green” policies. Few today realize the irony of this association—most do now know that it was Richard Nixon, not the any of the Democrats, who first forged a strong environmental record for the White House, and it was Nixon who put in place the framework of the modern environmental regulatory apparatus.
As recently as the early sixties, the environment was barely on the American radar screen as a political issue. But in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s powerful bestseller Silent Spring, awareness increased and momentum built for environmental legislation. An oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969 had been the largest in American history up to that point and caused public outrage.63 In 1970, Wisconsin Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day, putting environmentalism onto the national agenda.64
Unlike welfare and health care reform, where past personal experience motivated Nixon, he did not come to the environmental issue with any real passion. He had not regarded the environment as a pressing issue before it came onto the public agenda. As the movement gained momentum, he was slow to become receptive to its message—and, in fact, in private conversations in the Oval Office, was heard calling environmentalists “kooks” and “enemies of the system.” It was John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and assistant for domestic affairs, who did the most to get the environment onto the Nixon agenda. Ehrlichman, despite his Watergate infamy, had a progressive side: he had specialized in land-use law, and one forest preservationist even called him “the most effective environmentalist since Gifford Pinchot,”65 referring to the head of the US Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt. Ehrlichman’s advocacy finally woke up Nixon to the issue’s importance, though to Nixon, the importance was political more than anything else. Showing his lack of genuine conviction about the cause, he once told Ehrlichman, “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.”66
And yet, in 1985 the EPA Journal conceded Nixon’s achievement in turning his initial reluctance on environmental policy into “a show of visionary statesmanship.”67 The president declared that “our national government today is not structured to make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food.”68 Thus in 1970, Nixon created the EPA, installed Ruckelshaus as administrator, and also created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).69 Eventually, Nixon also supported and signed the Clean Air Act, which required that the EPA establish national air quality standards and set deadlines for reducing automobile emission target levels.70
Even though Nixon’s critics have pointed out that he vetoed the Clean Water Act, the president generally supported the goals of that law. He vetoed the bill when it came to his desk because he objected to the $18 billion price tag the Democratic Congress had put on it, which he viewed as a budget buster. Congress passed the bill over his veto in 1972, but Nixon’s objections later proved to be valid: the $18 billion wasn’t even spendable within the time frame for which it was intended, and the cost of the act was in reality closer to Nixon’s lower estimates. It is likely that the Democrats set the cost deliberately high to force Nixon into a politically unpopular move. His veto had nothing to do with his views on the issue.
But the Clean Water episode is a good illustration of how Nixon approached environmentalism in true Republican fashion, in the best sense of that term—that is, he endorsed the role and capacity of government to address a public problem, while at the same time insisting that these government efforts should not be so prohibitively expensive or counterproductive to economic growth that they would wind up doing more harm than good. The Nixon administration’s rigorous cost-benefit analyses of every environmental proposal infuriated ardent members of the Green movement, who felt that price tags should be irrelevant. The most extreme among them tended to confirm Nixon in his views that environmentalists could be broken out into two groups: antimarket or promarket. The antimarket Greens wanted the most sweeping reforms passed without regard to economic impact, whereas the promarket Greens recognized the need to harmonize environmental protection with economic growth. As Nixon thought of it, when given a choice between “smoke and jobs,” he would take jobs. This approach, which movement environmentalists saw as being hopelessly compromised, is responsible for the most important set of environmental regulations ever written in America.
Under Nixon, the federal government joined the environmental movement and gave the force of law and regulatory muscle to controlling industrial pollution and monitoring air and water standards. He passed much of his environmental program with bipartisan cooperation.71 Nixon’s environmental record—“yet to be improved upon by any president,” wrote Tom Wicker72—is one of his most enduring legacies.
Some environmentalists, however, did appreciate what Nixon had given to the movement. “I doubt seriously whether Richard Nixon ever envisioned the way the environmental movement would develop when he assembled the EPA from a federal hodgepodge of diverse offices,” James F. Ryan wrote for the American Chemical Society. “Although Nixon was presumably motivated by politics, he undeniably did a good thing. Meanwhile, you wonder how succeeding presidents will be judged on their environmental records.”73
Indeed, few presidents have matched Nixon’s achievements in this area. For a time, Nixon also inoculated the Republican Party against charges of environmental sensitivity. He provided a template, as he so often did, for how to claim the positions of the center and even some of the Left on an environmental policy issue and use them to strengthen Republicans’ stance against unpopular proposals of Democratic opponents. As late as 1988, for instance, George H.W. Bush was able to attack his Democratic opponent for president, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, for the polluted condition of Boston Harbor. Moreover, the Republicans were able to paint Democrats, often, as too liberal and extreme on environmental issues—such as in the late 1980s, when Democrats wanted to stop logging in Washington state in order to save the spotted owl. With so much mainstream environmental ground already covered by the Republicans, moderate American voters found these Democratic positions too extreme.
Since then, however, the Republican Party has lost almost all of its ground on environmental issues. Republicans have become the party of climate change denial, and this position has cost them in public perception. Even Republicans on the Senate Environment Committee have indicated their scorn for climate science. Senator James Inhofe called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” while Senator David Vitter described talk of climate change as “ridiculous pseudo-science garbage that’s so common on the left on this issue,” adding that, “I think there is beginning to be a serious reconsideration of the science of this.”74
It’s difficult to imagine Richard Nixon taking such positions. More likely, he would have acknowledged the reality of climate change, pushed for serious but reasonable efforts to combat it, and ensured that such measures did not hamper American economic competitiveness. That type of pragmatic approach squared with most Americans’ positions on the issue in the early 1970s—and the ones most hold today as well.
The “Warmonger” Who Ended the Draft
Finally, there is the remarkable story of the Republican president whose political adversaries never tired of branding him a warmonger—even though he was actually the one who ended the draft. Nixon, with his fine-tuned political antennae, sensed that abolishing the draft was not only in the public interest but also smart politics. In 1968, he ran, in part, on a promise to bring an end to the draft and transition the US military to an all-volunteer service while also pledging to be the candidate who could conclude the war in Vietnam. “It is not so much the way they are selected that is wrong, it is the fact of selection,” he said.75 In his ever-agile mind, Nixon saw multiple rationales—and multiple benefits—to ending the draft.
One of his reasons was pragmatic. In 1967, during his run for the Republican nomination, Nixon hired as his research director Martin Anderson, a conservative thinker who made an economic case against the draft. Anderson argued that an all-volunteer service would be good for national security, as there were “a high number of trainees and inexperienced men who must constantly be replaced.” The research director told Nixon that the reason the draft had been necessary in the first place was “simply that we have not been willing to pay even reasonably fair wages to our men in the military.”76
Not long after being inaugurated, Nixon set up a commission to explore the idea of a volunteer army. The commission developed a number of compelling proposals, but it is best remembered today for the debate that broke out between two men who came to testify before it, resulting in an all-volunteer army in the United States. The debate was between Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago professor and founder of monetarist economics, and General William Westmoreland, the former commander of American forces in Vietnam. After listening to Friedman argue for the merits of an all-volunteer army—which Friedman believed would both advance personal freedom and national security, Westmoreland replied: “Professor, everything you say makes so much sense, but I’m not sure I’d like to command an army of mercenaries.”
“Would you rather command an army of slaves?” Friedman shot back.
When Westmoreland replied that he didn’t like hearing patriotic draftees being compared with slaves, Friedman said that he didn’t like hearing patriotic volunteers being compared with mercenaries.77 The exchange showed the strong feelings that existed on both sides of the issue. The commission eventually reported back that, in its view, the United States could maintain its military strength without conscription. The last draft call took place on December 7, 1972. Since then, the US military has been all volunteer.
Nixon’s decision to end conscription was hugely popular, and any move to bring back the draft—as some have suggested in the years since—never gets very far. Still, in its forty-plus years, the all-volunteer army has had its critics. Some, like New York congressman Charles Rangel, say that the draft should be reinstituted, because the burden of fighting America’s wars has fallen disproportionately on poor and working-class citizens who enlist in the military. Rangel’s criticism is not without merit, though it is also ironic: this same criticism—that the poor and working class were doing most of the nation’s fighting in Vietnam—contributed to the move to end the inequitable draft system in the early 1970s, on the basis that more privileged Americans could avoid service by obtaining college deferments.
Another criticism of the volunteer army is political. Some say that since only a small proportion of Americans fight the nation’s wars, the public can “check out of” foreign policy and pay less attention to our military engagements. Some generals believe that if the draft were still in force, America would never have invaded Iraq in 2003.
These are important considerations, yet there is no denying the success of America’s professional military, which remains the best in the world. In the generation since Nixon ended military conscription, the US military has become an unparalleled force, setting a new standard of effectiveness and professionalism. From the Gulf War in 1991—its first great test—to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the all-volunteer American military has proved essentially unbeatable. The wars in which it has engaged, however, have proved intractable, for political and cultural reasons. The military’s job is to fight and win, and the American military has never been better at doing that. How the politicians choose to use this power, of course, is another matter.
The American armed forces today are also the best trained and best educated that we have ever had. The mindset of a professionalized army is completely different from that of a fighting force filled with involuntary conscripts serving eighteen- to twenty-four-month tours. The casualty rates for American forces in armed conflicts since the institution of the all-volunteer army began have been dramatically lower than in previous wars.
“The record of the Nixon years,” wrote a member of the Gates Commission in a New York Times op-ed in 1994, “must include his role in ending compulsion and expanding freedom of choice. Thanks to his actions, the United States armed forces are stronger and more efficient.”78
Of course, it was not just on the draft that Nixon’s policies would prove surprising when it came to military and national-defense issues. For it was in the realm of foreign policy itself that he would pave the ground of his greatest achievements. And, just as with domestic policy, his achievements as a statesman often ran counter to the image he had fostered in the public mind.
