Читать книгу The Nixon Effect - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 5
ОглавлениеI believe the second half of the 20th century will be known as the age of Nixon. Why was he the most durable public figure of our time? Not because he gave the most eloquent speeches, but because he provided the most effective leadership. Not because he won every battle, but because he always embodied the deepest feelings of the people he led.
—BOB DOLE, AT RICHARD NIXON’S FUNERAL, APRIL 27, 19941
[Nixon] was the inventor of the wedge issue, and his effort to Republicanize the South post-Lyndon Johnson because of civil rights helped redefine the parties. When there was no [longer] a conservative bloc within the Democratic Party, that pushed the Democrats to the left and the Republicans to the right.
—JOHN DEAN2
[Nixon] may never be fully understood by the historians and biographers who attempt to put a label on him. Even with his resignation, however, it is indisputable that he was and will likely always be one of America’s most significant presidents, one whose actions had among the most far-ranging consequences of any man to occupy the Oval Office.
—PETER ROFF, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT3
For forty years, Richard Nixon has been held up as the symbol of all that is corrupt and wrong about American politics. Despite his substantial accomplishments, Nixon became reviled across the political spectrum. Elected in reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s, he was always hated by the Left on the basis of being the dark and sinister figure who squelched the glorious social experiment of the counterculture. The Right never liked or trusted him either, preferring ideologically purer politicians. After Watergate, the Middle Americans of his silent majority abandoned him, and the elite media has always portrayed his presidency through the lens of its inglorious end, which became a mythic (and self-congratulatory) episode in American newspapering.
Beneath the hatred, however, lies a different reality. The shadow of Watergate obscures one of the most consequential and even salutary American presidencies of the twentieth century. In my view, historians have yet to grasp the full scale and implications of Nixon’s legacy, especially the broadly positive influence of his policies, his impact on the ideological formation of the two major parties, and his formative influence on modern politics and campaign strategy. Nixon’s influence is so overarching that I have no hesitation in declaring him to be the most important American politician of the postwar era—for both parties.
Why Nixon? some readers may ask. If our focus is on presidential achievement, why not Ronald Reagan or Lyndon Johnson, both of whom, from different ideological poles, effected profound changes for the United States? If our focus is instead turned to the degree of influence on our politics, why not Barack Obama, with the divisions he has fostered with his health care law; or George W. Bush, with his Iraq War and War on Terror; or even Bill Clinton, with his sex scandal and impeachment struggle? Indeed, our three most recent presidents have been participants in—and, their detractors would say, purveyors of—a political climate that for two decades has grown increasingly polarized. Yet, as I will show, all of these politicians inherited, in some form or another, the divisions that Nixon identified, exploited, and to some extent perpetuated. In most of the key battles of not just the Obama, Bush, and Clinton years but even of those going further back, Nixon’s footprints can be clearly seen. In cultural politics, too, Nixon’s impact on American life remains profound: he is the spiritual father of the now well-known Red-and-Blue division that continues to shadow our electoral map.
It is the argument of this book, then, that Richard Nixon is the central figure behind the identification, articulation, and exploitation of America’s contemporary political divisions—between urbanites and city dwellers, liberals and conservatives, patriots and critics, and hawks and doves. But it is also the argument of this book that Nixon is the central figure in laying the template for transcending these divisions politically and electorally, and that the presidents who have followed him have failed to unite the electorate when they forgot Nixon’s lessons—when, as I put it, they didn’t listen to Nixon.
Nixon was both divider and uniter—he united by dividing, in fact. In his case, that meant separating the electorate into a vast and electorally unbeatable silent majority, on one side, and a much smaller but impassioned political base, known variously as “the counterculture,” “the peaceniks,” and “the liberals,” on the other. Nixon presided in explosive times, when tempers in American politics ran hot, and when the nation seemed at times about to split at the seams—and yet, in running for reelection in 1972, he marshaled his silent majority into the greatest landslide in American history, winning forty-nine states, 61 percent of the popular vote, and 515 electoral votes. If that’s what we see as “division,” the United States today could use more of it.
Before proceeding further, it’s important to articulate how profoundly at odds this argument is with the conventional views of Nixon held in August 1974, when he resigned the presidency in disgrace and was written off as a political force. To be sure, that judgment modulated as the years passed and as Nixon, as I show in my chapter on his post-presidency, proved, once again, the depth of his political insights. Over the last forty years, Nixon has been acknowledged as a master statesman for opening US relations with Beijing, and for pioneering détente with the Soviet Union. On the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, in 2014, pundits across the spectrum acknowledged his tremendous political acumen and achievements in foreign policy. Even liberal critics conceded that he was a man of great intellectual gifts.
At the same time, however, Nixon’s fundamental image has not changed all that much. Nixon is widely portrayed as a racist, for example—and to be sure, he does himself no favors in that regard on the White House tapes. He is seen on racial issues as a backward politician, one whose Southern strategy helped set the stage for more subtle but potent racial appeals to the electorate that have continued to the present day. “The worst thing Richard Nixon ever did was tell racists they had a point and welcome them into the party of Lincoln,” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. “The best thing he ever did for the Democratic Party is give its racists a place to go.”4
Yet the truth is far more complex, as I will show.
Similarly, Nixon is seen as a warmonger—the man who dropped an untold tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam in his desperate attempt to win the unwinnable Vietnam War. His invasion of Cambodia was not only illegal and immoral, critics say, but it also set off the last great wave of US domestic antiwar protests, which culminated in the tragedies at Kent State and Jackson State. And his Christmas bombings of 1972 were widely decried as bloodthirsty. “To send B-52s against populous areas such as Haiphong or Hanoi could have only one purpose: terror,” wrote Anthony Lewis. “It was the response of a man so overwhelmed by his sense of inadequacy and frustration that he had to strike out, punish, destroy.”5 The truth here, too, is more complex.
And finally, Nixon is still remembered by many as our criminal president, the only one ever to resign the nation’s highest office. John Dean, who served as Nixon’s White House counsel, helped engineer the Watergate cover-up, and then served as a witness for the prosecution, has written several books about the Nixon years. His most recent, in 2014, ironically titled The Nixon Defense, exhaustively chronicled the cover-up in day-by-day detail. The book “will remind people of why Nixon deserves so unflattering a historical reputation, despite the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union,” wrote historian Robert Dallek. “It should also serve as a renewed cautionary tale about elevating politicians with questionable character to high office.”6
“I think we should celebrate August 9 as a day of national liberation every year,” Democratic strategist Frank Mankiewicz said. “Every country celebrates the day the government got rid of its tyrants. We should too.”7
Nixon’s negative image is enduring across age groups. Those old enough to have lived through Nixon’s presidency tend to have hardened views of his misdeeds, while those born after his tenure are even less inclined to give him a fair shake, more or less accepting the verdict of history.
I should make clear that I carry no brief as a defender of Nixon on the Watergate affair. It’s clear to me from extensive reading of the Watergate literature that Nixon was willing to do things that few if any presidents would have seriously considered—ordering burglaries of private citizens’ medical files and break-ins to safes that contained sensitive documents, and using the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct a criminal investigation by the FBI, among other things. I believe that the House of Representatives’ decision to vote impeachment articles against the president in August 1974 was justified, and that President Nixon’s subsequent decision to resign the office, rather than face that ordeal, was the right one. He had lost the capacity to lead and squandered his moral and legal authority. Watergate will always shadow his reputation and legacy.
But to see Watergate as the primary Nixonian legacy, especially in light of the scandals that have followed, is to miss the range of Nixon’s achievements. A close examination of the Nixon record reveals that few presidents achieved as much on a substantive, and enduring, level as he did. This most controversial and detested of American politicians created a new American governing coalition—one predicted by the writer and political commentator Kevin Phillips in his seminal book The Emerging Republican Majority—that became the dominant force in presidential elections for a generation. And no candidate owned that new majority more than Nixon: his forty-nine-state landslide in 1972 is the greatest wipeout in American history.8 No politician can achieve that degree of consensus without great political skill and a deep attunement to the wishes of the electorate.
What were those wishes? Put most broadly, Americans of Nixon’s time wanted a general continuation of the domestic liberal consensus that had prevailed since FDR: They were looking for maintenance and even some expansion of the New Deal social programs, especially those geared toward the middle class. They wanted progress in racial relations and equality, but without the fevered confrontational style of the 1960s—and certainly without the rising crime and sense of menace that had started to permeate American life. Americans wanted law and order and a return to some form of social stability. All of these things Nixon strove to provide, in policies or in rhetoric, or in both. He saw himself, in fact, as a “Disraeli conservative,” a leader who could offer a “strong foreign policy, strong adherence to basic values that the nation believes in, combined with reform, reform that will work, not reform that destroys.”9
Nixon’s domestic-policy approach has often been characterized as canny and shrewd, even Machiavellian—but I think that misses the mark. To be sure, Nixon was a pragmatist, and as a president whose chief passion was foreign policy, he did regard domestic policy more flexibly than he regarded the great issues of statesmanship. Yet, at the same time, his approach also represented a more coherent, visionary program than either ideologically committed liberals or staunch conservatives could offer. His program was, in the end, a response to the moods and needs of the American people at this time. It was a philosophy of responsiveness that Republicans today have for the most part abandoned.
On foreign policy, too, Americans of Nixon’s era wanted an approach that reflected a proud but pragmatic people’s approach to the world: They were interested in self-defense and self-interest, a strong defense of our ideals and values, and the flexibility to make accommodations where necessary and possible in a dangerous world. What Nixon gave them, in bringing the Vietnam War to an end, in ending the military draft, and especially—and most historically—in forging new relations with Communist China and less hostile relations with the Soviet Union, was the embodiment of this complex and necessarily imperfect approach. Nixon is best remembered today for his foreign policy achievements, and for good reason, as I’ll examine in detail in chapter 2.
Nixon’s impact, then, is enduring, and the lessons of his presidency remain transcendent, despite the impact of his bad acts. That’s the message of this book.
There were many ironies to Richard Nixon’s career. He was the red-baiting young politician who helped bring down Alger Hiss, who called Senator Helen Gahagan Douglas “pink right down to her underwear,”10 and who mixed it up with Nikita Khrushchev in the famous Kitchen Debate—yet he was also the American president who went to Beijing and forged a new American relationship with China.
He was the candidate, and president, who skillfully played on the political fears of whites and the working class with his Southern strategy and identification of the silent majority—yet he was also the president whose record on civil rights completely outstripped Jack Kennedy’s and that stands as a worthy successor to that of Lyndon Johnson.
In this book, I’ll examine one of the least known Nixon paradoxes: it was Nixon, a nonideological thinker, for the most part, who more than anyone else pushed the two parties further out to their ideological poles, but it was also Nixon who devised ingenious political strategies for navigating between them. The man who continues to stir up so much passion today was a consummate centrist, a pragmatic politician who nevertheless understood how to play on ideological loyalties with the skill of a maestro. Where major ideological realignments developed all around him—and often as a result of, or in response to, him—Nixon himself was nimble and adaptable. Smarter than his adversaries and supporters, he managed to confound both.
Nixon did all of this despite the fact that not just Democrats but also Republicans rejected, or claimed to reject, his political approach. In addition to being hated by liberals and Democrats, Nixon was also distrusted by Republican conservatives for his moderate domestic policies and realpolitik foreign policy. At the same time, the Right emulated his approach to cultural issues and New Democrats like President Bill Clinton explicitly built on his “triangulation” approach. He was the most successful politician of his era and unquestionably the smartest political operator the Republican Party ever had. In the end, Watergate gave both parties license to disown him—but neither party would be able to escape him.
Shaping Party Ideology and Identity
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon has shaped the ideological identities of the two parties today.
He has done this on the Republican side in two ways: first, by providing the party with conceptual formulations and concrete political strategies that have shaped its positioning ever since, and second by inadvertently prompting a conservative upheaval in the Republican Party through his centrist, even liberal, policies.
Nixon’s impact on the ideological positioning of the GOP cannot be understood without understanding the context of the 1964 election, when President Lyndon Johnson crushed the Republican contender, Barry Goldwater, by what was then the largest margin in history and the Democrats won their largest majority in Congress since Roosevelt. At that time, Republicans held only seventeen of the nation’s fifteen governorships. The Goldwater campaign was regarded as an historic presidential debacle, causing some to wonder about the future of the Republican Party. Yet the Democratic Party was also deeply in flux, mostly due to the Vietnam War. In spite of Johnson’s powerful 1964 victory, his popularity waned as the war dragged on. He faced steep opposition from within his own party, embodied by such figures as the antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein and Senator Eugene McCarthy.11 In 1968, the Democratic Party suffered a traumatic collapse symbolized by the street violence that took place outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Thus, the two major parties were both in turmoil in 1968. The Republicans, suffering as a result of their rightward turn in 1964, were struggling for a new identity. The Democrats were divided and leaderless. It was a perfect storm for the ideological realignment that was to come. And here is where Nixon entered the picture. (Or reentered it: Nixon had, of course, run as the Republican nominee for president in 1960, losing the narrowest election in history, and before that he served eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president.)
The remarkable thing about Nixon’s influence in pushing the GOP to the right is that Nixon himself was hardly an ideological conservative. He had a troubled relationship with the intellectuals who had forged the conservative movement, as well as with conservative Southern politicians. National Review refused to endorse Nixon for president in 1960; when the magazine decided to back him in 1968, it did so mostly for pragmatic reasons. Yet after Nixon, the Republican Party was primed for a conservative revolution. How did this happen?
Perhaps Nixon’s most enduring influence on the GOP today is his formulation of conservative populism—a force that first took shape in his 1968 campaign and that, nearly half a century later, is still the vital engine powering the American Right, from the Tea Party to talk radio. Nixon put conservative populism on the map by pioneering a new target of populist opposition: not big business and the rich per se—the usual targets of FDR and other Democrats—but rather the intelligentsia, whether in the media, the academy, or the professions. Nixon portrayed these groups as privileged, out-of-touch mandarins no longer fit for governance.
Like all populist appeals, this one had a class-based element—but Nixon’s class arguments were based on culture and values, not economics. Nixon helped show Republicans that they could borrow a traditionally Democratic strategy and make it work for them. And his timing was exquisite—the late 1960s, when the promises of liberalism’s “best and brightest” lay in shards, from Watts, to the War on Poverty, to South Vietnam. Nixon’s identification with ordinary Americans—he called them the “silent majority”—inspired conservatives and rallied them to his side, at least for a time.
To be sure, Nixon made race a political hot button in ways that continue to influence the GOP. He did this, most importantly, through his Southern strategy in 1968, in which the Republican candidate sought to sweep Southern states by playing on the resentments of white voters—some of them were threatened by the civil rights movement and explicitly antiblack in their views, and others were angered by the aggressive agenda of the Johnson administration and how it signaled Washington’s increasing willingness to impose mandates on states in the most explosive areas of social life. Though he never made this an explicit pitch, Nixon’s message unquestionably had racial undertones: he tapped into white fears, not only of black advancement but also of black crime and black militancy, and he forged a formidable voting bloc out of white anger at increasing black demands. Nixon sought to walk a tightrope, where he would stress racial moderation and his own civil rights record while also appealing to Southern whites drawn to Alabama segregationist governor and presidential candidate George Wallace. In effect, Nixon ran in 1968 (and 1972) as if all of white America were Southern—and it worked.
Here again, Nixon campaigned from the Right but governed from the center. Though he pushed racial buttons with his Southern strategy, he went on, as president, to effect remarkable and substantive gains for the civil rights agenda. But his political rhetoric and the tenor of the times conspired to present him as racially unsympathetic.
On race, then, the Nixon legacy has left the Republicans with unwanted baggage: the party has made major efforts to renounce the Southern strategy in the years since 1968, but it has had little luck in breaking free of the Nixonian identification. In a hotly contentious 2011 essay, Sam Tanenhaus branded the GOP “the party of white people.”12 Tanenhaus’s characterization is unfair and historically dubious, but his opinion is widely shared among commentators and millions of minority voters. On race then, too, Nixon continues to shape the GOP reality—in this case, much to the party’s chagrin. This legacy must be doubly frustrating to conservatives, since Nixon was never truly one of them.
By his own admission, Nixon said that “political positions have always come to me because I was there. . . . It all depends on what the times call for.”13 Except for his support for law and order, Nixon infuriated conservatives with left-leaning policies on everything from education, the environment, welfare, and affirmative action, to wage and price controls and monetary policy. In 1971, Patrick Buchanan, who had worked in the Nixon White House, wrote that conservatives were “the niggers of the Nixon administration.”14 National Review publisher William Rusher called the magazine’s earlier endorsement of Nixon “the blunder of 1968”15 and urged readers not to vote for Nixon in 1972. Many conservative Cold Warriors were appalled by Nixon’s outreach to Moscow and Beijing. They saw his reaching out to Chinese totalitarians as shameful and his policies as an abdication of American anti-Communism and leadership on issues of democracy, liberty, and human rights.
As the seventies dragged on after Nixon’s presidency, his ill-considered economic policies helped create stagflation—unemployment plus high inflation, a combination once thought impossible. A tax revolt began around the country. In California, businessman Howard Jarvis sparked Proposition 13, the landmark property tax reform that kicked off the modern tax-reform movement. A split developed and widened between mainstream Republicans and movement conservatives that continues to play out four decades later, though it has mostly been resolved in favor of the conservatives. Ever since President Reagan rode the conservative ascendancy to the White House in 1980, the GOP has been staunchly antitax and antiregulation. Moderates—especially domestic moderates, of the kind Nixon himself was—have become nearly extinct in GOP ranks.
Nixon also influenced the Democratic Party’s future direction. Domestically, he did this by co-opting liberal domestic policies, thereby taking the center away and forcing the Democrats either to support his policies or to move further left. The most relevant example today is Nixon’s attempt to mandate universal health insurance in 1971. Nixon’s proposal is now regarded as the (more liberal) precursor to the health care plans put forth by presidents Clinton and Obama, the latter of which, the Affordable Care Act, became law in 2010.16
One key reason the Nixon health care legislation failed was the opposition of key liberals, including Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Kennedy and his cohorts held out for an even-more-liberal health care proposal, and they helped kill Nixon’s legislation. Their reaction illustrates how Nixon had boxed in liberals and progressives. Having offered such a liberal, generous program, Nixon gave Democrats room to maneuver only further to his left—well to the left of mainstream Americans. The other option was to vote with him and hand a Republican president a major political victory. For the most part, the Democrats chose to move further left, and their decision had disastrous results for the party. Kennedy later called it his biggest political regret.
Or consider how Nixon incorporated a liberal concern—the environment—into policy choices that pleased not only many mainstream Democrats but also the centrist Independents who made up a good portion of his silent majority. Nixon saw the momentum of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, and he knew that the man he assumed would be his 1972 challenger, Massachusetts Senator Edmund Muskie, had been an early champion of environmental protection. So he moved to preempt the Democrats on that issue by pushing popular and ambitious environmental-protection legislation, especially on air and water pollution.17 Nixon’s advocacy of environmental issues turned out to be a shrewdly moderate and appealing pitch to the middle class constituency whose support he relied upon. Nixon positioned himself, again, as a sensible centrist between those who rejected all environmental appeals as statist interference with business and those, on the other side, who wanted more radical ecological measures.
A similar dynamic occurred with Nixon’s Vietnam War policies, which turned almost all Democrats into doves. Nixon made Democrats appear weak on national security and foreign policy by pursuing policies that were, again, essentially centrist: He emphasized a tough approach to peace—withdrawing our troops while simultaneously bombing aggressively in an attempt to force the enemy to the negotiating table. Americans supported this policy. To oppose it seemed defeatist or unpatriotic. The image of Democrats as guilt-ridden apologists, weak on national security and defense, took shape in the Nixon years and has held, more or less, ever since.18 And, of course, Nixon’s brilliant overtures to China and Russia both served America’s national-security interests—by exploiting divisions between the two Communist powers and, at home, by blunting the antiwar Left’s energy and bringing calm to the American domestic scene.
Nixon’s perceived political cynicism also pushed Democrats leftward, inaugurating an era of Democratic efforts to reform the political process—leading to things from open primaries and campaign finance reform to an all-out embrace of identity-group politics. These efforts first took concrete form at the 1972 Democratic Convention, in which the party set up a commission to reform how it chose delegates. The commission eventually decided to impose a quota system so that blacks, women, and young people could be selected as delegates “in reasonable relationship to the group’s presence in the population of the state.”19 The commission’s chairman was Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who would go on to become the party’s 1972 nominee, with the most diverse set of delegates—including minorities, women, grassroots activists, and the young—in American history. What the Democrats did, in effect, was to empower activists at the grassroots level, maximizing local participation but creating unwinnable candidacies at the national level—such as with presidential nominees George McGovern and Walter Mondale and Governor Michael Dukakis. Except for President Jimmy Carter’s narrow win in 1976, the Democrats, from 1972 until 1992, suffered one presidential blowout defeat after another, an unprecedented run of failure for a national party.
Even Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal proved hugely influential on the opposing party: it ushered in a new generation of Democratic congressional leaders—the Watergate Babies—who were less traditional and considerably more liberal than their predecessors. That orientation has more or less held ever since. Though the Democratic party moved toward the center in the Clinton years, in 2008, it nominated Barack Obama, who couldn’t have won without the key changes made to the primary system and whose coalition represented the maturation and fulfillment of the McGovern candidacy.
The Great Polarizer
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon planted the seeds of the polarization and partisan warfare that characterize our politics today. This is partly because, as just described, Nixon pushed both parties out to their ideological poles—a result not likely to produce political bipartisanship. Not only can the Nixonian dynamics be glimpsed between the two parties; they also can be glimpsed within the parties themselves, even forty years after he left office. Consider the state of the respective parties’ current leadership.
Former House speaker John Boehner represents the contemporary Republican mainstream; by 2015 standards, he is a Republican moderate, or at least a Republican pragmatist, of the kind Nixon himself was. On the far right is Senator Ted Cruz, champion of the Tea Party and hero of conservative intellectuals. Cruz’s leadership and rhetoric played a crucial role in the fall-2013 government shutdown, as he inspired his Tea Party caucus not to give in and make a deal with the Democrats. Cruz resembles no one as much as he does Barry Goldwater—the leader of the right wing during Nixon’s time, a right wing that Nixon both neutralized and exploited for political advantage.
On the Democratic side, similar tensions prevail. Bill and Hillary Clinton remain the standard bearers of post-Nixon Democratic centrism; they are “small-l” liberals who learned from history that, for contemporary liberalism to survive, it needs to stay close to the concerns of the American middle class on both domestic policy and on matters of national defense. Further to the left are President Obama, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and most other congressional Democrats. Like Ted Kennedy in the early 1970s, they see themselves as progressives, and their political goals remain to institute an expansionist social welfare state and a pullback from American military commitments abroad.
Moreover, relations between the parties have deteriorated steadily since the end of the Nixon era, in no small part due to the scorched-earth political tactics that he and his team unleashed.
One of Nixon’s longtime political adversaries, Democratic senator Adlai Stevenson, described what he called “Nixonland” as “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.”20 Nixon’s approach to politics—being obsessed with leaks, at war with the media, determined to cripple political foes—was something like war, in that opponents were not just seen as misguided or wrong but, in fact, as evil and dangerous. It’s an approach that has become the operative outlook of both parties today. (The obsessive secrecy of the Obama administration is a vivid example.)
Its genuine criminality aside, the lasting legacy of Watergate is less noted: it is the key event in shaping today’s intense partisan polarization. Our Red-and-Blue political map—the outline of mutually incompatible Americas that don’t understand one another and have mostly stopped listening to the other side—was forged in the Nixon White House.
As a young lawyer, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton served on the Watergate Committee investigating the impeachment charges against Nixon. Congress eventually voted to bring those charges, but before it could proceed, Nixon resigned from office. Twenty-four years later, some saw a Watergate redux—“payback,” some called it—when conservatives in Congress marshaled enough votes to impeach President Clinton. Clinton was only the second Democratic president to win the election since Nixon, and the first Democratic president to win two terms since FDR. It was impossible to watch the Clinton impeachment drama unfold and not consider the lingering political bitterness that Watergate created.
The George W. Bush years were even more contentious. Bush’s wars reawakened the split between Republican hawks and Democratic doves that had first surfaced in the Nixon years. Like Nixon, Bush possessed a seemingly limitless capacity to derange Democrats with fury and political resentment. The result was a party pushed further and further left until, by 2008, it nominated Barack Obama, its most liberal candidate since Franklin Roosevelt. During Obama’s presidency, the polar split between the parties has grown even wider. Obama became the first president ever to pass major domestic legislation without a single vote from the opposition party, and he presided over the first downgrade of US credit in history when, in the face of a debt default, he was unable to make a deal with Republicans until the very last moment.
In short, polarization—between the two parties, between competing visions of the country, and between Red and Blue America—is a lasting legacy of the Nixon years. Even as we begin to look beyond Obama, the same Nixonian dynamics between parties seem likely to shape the playing field.
Those dynamics are often cultural as well as political, as Americans well know—and more than any other politician, Richard Nixon articulated the fundamental division in the ongoing American culture war: that between “elites” and ordinary Americans. It would not be an overstatement to declare that Nixon is the father of the culture war.
Nixon coined the term the “silent majority” to refer to the ordinary, hardworking, tax-paying Americans, or as he described them the “forgotten Americans—the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators,”21 who felt under siege by the political and social tumults of the late 1960s. He first identified this group in a November 3, 1969, speech on the Vietnam War. Where his attacks on the media and intellectuals had redefined populism’s targets, his recognition of the silent majority redefined populism’s heroes—not as the proletarians or impoverished farmers of an earlier era but as the ordinary middle-class Americans, some in cities, some in suburbs, who were trying to live decent lives and who were contemptuous of political agitators.
Nixon’s identification of the silent majority had a long and deeply personal pedigree. While attending Whittier College in the 1930s, Nixon was already fighting his own culture war. He started an alternative student organization, the Orthogonians, or “straight shooters” (a made-up term using ortho, the Latin prefix for “straight”) to counter the elitist Franklins (the liberals), who didn’t accept him for membership (because, he suspected, of his humble origins). From this episode flows much that would come later: his instinctive suspicion, as a young congressman, of Alger Hiss, upon the former FDR aide being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and denying having been a Communist; his instinctive sense that Whittaker Chambers, the Time magazine editor and former Communist, was telling the truth about Hiss’s Communist past; his resentment and jealousy of John F. Kennedy and the whole Kennedy crowd; his distrust of the Ivy League media and professoriate; and his powerful identification with modest Middle Americans and all Orthogonians, people like his father—even though he had almost as little in common with these people as did most of his political rivals. But these were the identifications, and they have endured.
The Master Campaigner and Strategist
More than any other politician, Richard Nixon designed the political strategy, communications, and tactics—including the television ads and message management—that national politicians are still using to get through to voters and win elections.
Nixon’s explosive television ads—like his 1968 commercials that bluntly raised the issue of crime, his skillful repackaging of his image, and his disciplined message management forged the modern campaign-strategy model for the presidency. The Nixon political strategists and communication team pioneered a shrewd, fearless, and just-short-of-incendiary style of political communication.
The team included twenty-six-year-old wunderkind Roger Ailes, the media consultant who had helped make talk show host Mike Douglas into a “national icon of square chic.”22 Ailes and his team recreated the Nixon brand via television—the very medium that had sunk Nixon’s presidential hopes against Kennedy in 1960. They achieved this by using staged campaign events to put Nixon in the most flattering light and play up a sympathetic image: the “New Nixon,” as the slogan had it, was a common man at peace with himself, not the haunted, nervous character of the 1960 presidential debates against Kennedy or the suspicious-seeming figure dubbed “Tricky Dick” by his political enemies. The New Nixon was determined to bring America’s polarized electorate back together behind shared goals. Ailes and his team produced a series of pioneering, made-for-TV “town halls,” in which Nixon took questions from mostly friendly audiences and got his message out to millions around the country. The town halls, although seemingly spontaneous, were actually tightly choreographed; New York Times reporter James Reston called them “masterpieces of contrived candor.”23
The town halls’ influence on political communications strategies and tactics remains foundational to this day. Staged political events have become so routine that the authenticity of any seemingly spontaneous incident is immediately questioned. (The presidential “town hall” debate, a staple of the debate season during recent election cycles, often provokes accusations on both sides about questions being “planted” by attendees who may be secretly working for one of the campaigns.)
The Nixon communication team’s true genius, though, was for televised campaign ads, in which they made heavy use of attacks on Democrats. The 1968 Nixon campaign broke new ground for negative campaigning, elevating the art of political attack to a new level. Nixon’s ads often featured ominous voice-overs and music set against images of the unrest around the country, a subject with which Americans had become all too familiar. In the most memorable ad, directed by filmmaker Eugene Jones, a montage of still photographs showing scenes of unrest was accompanied by angry, disturbing music. The ads tapped into Americans’ sense that the country was plunging into chaos.24 Even viewed today, the ads retain their power and sophistication.
Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign was not as confrontational as the first, as is befitting to an incumbent, but it was equally as shrewd. Nixon used his ad campaign to portray himself as a successful world leader and to depict his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, as a dangerous radical. Pro-Nixon ads touted Nixon’s accomplishments and also tried to humanize the president, showing him dancing with his daughter at her wedding and playing piano with Duke Ellington. These folksy touches would soon become prerequisites in political campaigning, mastered most notably by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and to some extent by George W. Bush. Yet, the anti-McGovern ads continued to build on the 1968 imagery, playing on voters’ fears of McGovern’s dovish tendencies: one ad showed the image of a hand sweeping away toy soldiers, planes, and warships, depicting the opponent’s plans for scaling back American military power. Another ad suggested that, under McGovern, nearly half of Americans would be on welfare.
Part of the effectiveness of this messaging owed to the Nixon team’s skilled writers, especially Pat Buchanan and William Safire, who excelled at different things. Safire was urbane and witty—he coined Vice President Spiro Agnew’s phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” to describe the liberal press—while Buchanan’s eloquence was for pugnacity and aggression. As a team they were the perfect combination to capture the sense of alienation and resentment of Nixon’s silent majority.
And, in an early sign of the “dirty tricks” for which the Nixonites would become infamous, Nixon’s team staged incidents at campaign rallies, in which protesters attempted to shout down the president and were then removed by police, to the cheering of crowds. In a typical incident, Nixon was speaking at a campaign event when a handful of antiwar veterans started chanting, “Stop the bombing, stop the war!’” Unflustered, he paused, then turned to look into the cameras.
“I have a message for the television screens,” Nixon said. “Let’s show, besides the six over here”—pointing to the demonstrators—“the thousands over here.” He gestured to the large crowd, which included schoolchildren, who now began shouting, “Four more years!” Police carted away the protesters; it later turned out that they had been mysteriously invited to the event by someone in the Nixon campaign.25
These incidents reinforced Nixon’s critique of a country that was badly off the rails and in need of a return to law and order. By raising social, cultural, and even, very subtly, racial issues, Nixon tapped into a deep groundswell of conservative attitudes in an American electorate exhausted by 1960s political unrest, radicalism, and rising crime.
The Nixon tactics and style have been emulated ever since—perhaps most famously in the 1988 Willie Horton ad by the George Bush campaign, which used the story of a convicted murderer let out on furlough, only to then commit armed robbery and rape, to eviscerate Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis and portray him as a soft-on-crime liberal. In 2004, George W. Bush used the image of his presidential rival, John Kerry, windsurfing to depict him as privileged and—subtly—unmanly, a risky steward of the nation’s security.
Similarly, Nixon’s influence can be seen in every candidate who seeks to remake him or herself. Whether it be Mitt Romney trying to prove that he’s a regular guy or Al Gore trying to show that he has a sense of humor, they each channel the New Nixon in the hopes of convincing the American electorate that its prevailing image of them as a candidate is wrong. Yet no one has ever been more successful than Richard Nixon himself in pulling off that feat.
A Record, an Influence, a Legacy
The picture that emerges from all of this is of a man derided and disliked—often hated—yet as accomplished as any American politician of the twentieth century, as measured not only by his political impact and influence but also by his substantive achievements in office. Though I freely acknowledge that mine is a minority view, I see Nixon on par with Franklin Roosevelt: he helped to bring an end to the Vietnam War on terms the United States could still have prevailed under; he developed a foreign policy framework that, along with the leadership of Ronald Reagan a decade later, helped to spell the end of the Cold War; and domestically, he institutionalized New Deal policies more extensively than Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon’s record on civil rights and desegregation is stellar, and he was the first president to take a leadership role on the environment.
The majority of the chapters in this book focus on how Nixon’s presidency influenced and shaped American politics. But before we try to understand why his influence has been so far-reaching, we must first reckon with his substantive record. Thus, in the first section, “The Nixon Record,” chapter 1 begins with a survey of Nixon’s domestic policy record—in which I argue that he was not only a pragmatic centrist but also perhaps America’s last liberal president. In chapter 2, I look at the politician’s foreign policy achievements, which have cast a long shadow—mostly positive—over American statesmen to the present day.
Section 2, “The Nixon Influence,” dives into the American political history of the last forty-five years, looking at it through the lens of the Nixon record and its effect on both major parties. In two chapters devoted to each party, I argue that it is Nixon who is the presiding influence on the shape both parties have taken since the late 1960s—often in ways little noted or poorly understood. The section’s final two chapters bring matters up to the present day, examining first how Bill Clinton, through his wielding of triangulation and middle-class appeals, became Richard Nixon’s truest political heir, and then how George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from different ideological directions, forgot Nixon’s lessons—especially in foreign policy—and pursued base-oriented presidencies, both of which would be marked by historic levels of ideological polarization and voter disgust.
In section 3, “The Nixon Legacy,” the book’s final section, I examine Nixon’s place in history from two perspectives: The first involves an in-depth analysis of the Watergate scandal and its analogues in subsequent decades—especially the Iran-Contra scandal, the Iraq War, and the Obama administration’s IRS scandal. Taking on Nixon’s influence from another perspective, I then look at how Nixon’s postpresidency deserves to better remembered as a template for influential statesmanship in retirement—not to mention, on its own terms, as a personal story of grit and resilience.
This book is being published as Americans gear up for what promises to be, in 2016, another crucial and highly contested presidential election. While commentary and analysis will not be in short supply, Americans would do well to step back and consider the deep roots of our current political divisions—and that examination relies heavily on understanding Richard Nixon’s impact, the forces he set in motion (for good and ill), and the strategies he used. This book aims to make clear how we must understand our thirty-seventh president to understand American politics today.
