Nixon was hardly an expert on the ins and outs of social policy. Indeed, walking out of their first meeting in November 1968, his chief domestic adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan would say to a friend, “He’s ignorant! He doesn’t know anything!”55 But, as Moynihan would soon learn to his delight, Nixon was ready to learn. The very fact that Nixon would hire a liberal intellectual Harvard professor as his chief domestic policy adviser suggests Nixon’s openness to new and transformative ideas. As he read philosophy and the biographies of statesmen in the winter of 1967, he was preparing
...more
