Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

The Silent Majority. Nixon had come up with the phrase himself, at 4 A.M. on the last night he spent at Camp David.4 “Silent majority” was an old phrase meaning dead people, noted Nixon wordsmith William Safire—to join the silent majority meant to die and go to a cemetery.5 But Nixon’s brilliant reinvention of the term was a political masterstroke. It was a natural extension of a theme he had been working on ever since he figured out how the Orthogonians might trump the Franklins. He had long spoken of “quiet Americans” and “forgotten Americans”; now he had found a way to capture the flag back from the protesters—the “loud minority” who, alone, could humiliate the United States.6 Nixon wasn’t sure how the speech had played. He dined alone afterward in the Lincoln Sitting Room, refusing to watch the TV commentators. His family did, however, and they were “livid,” Nixon recalled. Tricia came in and said to her father, “They talked as if they had been listening to a different speech than the one you made.”7 ABC News had put on Averell Harriman as a scoffing commentator—the same Harriman who had announced, “I will not break bread with this man” at Joe Alsop’s house after the 1950 senate campaign. Most of the TV commentators tried to be balanced. They were not so much biased as dim: They missed the political significance of Nixon’s appeal to the Silent Majority.