Being Nixon: A Man Divided

by Evan Thomas

The French word was détente; Nixon’s savvy pursuit of it would push the nuclear superpowers away from the brink.45 At Kissinger’s suggestion, the White House and Kremlin decided to open a back channel—direct, secret communications that cut out the bureaucracy. About once a month—as often as every day during tense periods—Dobrynin would slip into the White House through a little-used and little-noticed entrance in the East Wing and join Kissinger in the Map Room, where the two men would begin the long, tedious, and vital slog toward a nuclear arms control treaty.

Nixon loved unpredictability and surprise, and he didn’t mind being seen, under the right circumstances, as a little unhinged. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

The press sniped that Nixon was a little too eager to bask in the reflected glory of a moon-launch program started by JFK, but the president was genuinely energized by the example of American cando spirit. Borrowing from NASA jargon (“All systems go”), Nixon had the idea of using the word go as a theme for his presidency. “Means all systems ready, never to be indecisive, get going, take risks, be exciting,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “Must use the great power of the office to do something.”30

And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support…. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.3

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.

The congratulatory telegrams were partly contrived, but Nixon was not wrong when he told Haldeman that his speech was the greatest turnaround job since the Checkers Speech (or, as Nixon preferred, the Fund Speech) in 1952. Polls showed that more than three out of every four Americans approved of the speech, and Nixon’s approval rating shot up from 52 to 68 percent.10

He had caused a mild stir in October by referring to antiwar activists as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

Love it

Now he ramped up the rhetoric, referring to the “media elite” as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

To be so stridently called out by the vice president of the United States was intimidating to communications executives whose businesses were licensed by the federal government. At first, they were cowed. They worried, not unreasonably, about losing their broadcast licenses.16 And for the next massive antiwar demonstration, on November 15, the news coverage was different, more skeptical, cooler. The protest was different, too—uglier, more violent. At the Justice Department, protesters chanting “Smash the state!” tore down the American flag and hoisted a Vietcong flag. Standing on the balcony, Attorney General John Mitchell gave them the finger.17 At the White House, ringed by city buses to keep the mob away, there was talk of using helicopters to blow out the protesters’ candles. Nixon pretended to ignore the whole thing, watching a football game on TV.18 He knew that he had shifted the public perception, aligned himself with patriots and identified the antiwar movement with the bombers and flag-burners. He was winning the PR war.

Nixon was never going to reconcile the man he wished to be with the man he feared he was.

When Nixon took office, Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for all but four years going back to FDR and the New Deal. LBJ’s Great Society had ushered in a raft of programs to help the poor and the middle class. Americans might grumble about government, but they had become accustomed to its benefits and wanted more. Although the country had veered slightly right in 1968, partly in reaction to the over-promising of the Great Society, the body politic was actually tilting leftward again in 1970.33 Social scientists were still in the ascendancy and dominated federal agencies; the conventional wisdom among most opinion makers held that, with enough money and brainpower, government technocrats could cure society’s ills.34

His contradictory acts and impulses have to be seen in light of the liberal zeitgeist of the era and political necessity (or expediency).

While Nixon wanted to take the high road to govern, politics—getting elected—was a different matter. “He had an idealistic view of government,” recalled Jim Schlesinger, whom Nixon appointed to run three different agencies (Atomic Energy Commission, the CIA, and Defense). “But then politics were dog-eat-dog, get-them-before-they-got-you. It was as if there was no connection.”35 Of course, there was a connection—Nixon was perfectly well aware that his ability to govern depended on political skills, his ability to persuade lawmakers that it was in their political interest to back his policies. But Schlesinger’s bafflement is understandable. Nixon’s approach to government is a riddle that needs to be solved with proper attention to Nixon’s political genius and his complex psyche. Nixon liked to rail against “liberal bureaucrats” and suspected, not wrongly in many cases, that they were working against him. He tried from time to time, without much success, to restrain federal spending, which was largely controlled by a free-spending Congress. In the winter of 1970, Schlesinger was assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget and spent “hours and hours” with the president going over spending requests. He vividly recalled the Nixon approach and the inevitable pushback: I’d bring up an agency and invariably he would say, “Not worth a damn. Cut ’em in half.” I’d go back and say this to the budget examiners, and they would go to pieces before your eyes. “Cut in half? Good God, wha...

“the New Federalism”

Nixon knew that conservatives would oppose a guaranteed minimum income—really, a negative income tax—as a “mega-dole.”41 But he hoped to win enough moderates and liberals to pass Congress. For once, he lowballed liberal contempt. Defensive of the welfare state, which provided jobs for middle-class whites as well as services for poor people, the liberal establishment labeled the program as “racist.” FAP, said the lobbyists for the National Welfare Rights Organization, stood for “Fuck America’s Poor.”42 FAP passed the House but ultimately died in the Senate—“an idea ahead of its time,” Nixon wrote, correctly, in his memoirs.*

Compromise was essential. Nixon was more of an activist than an obstructionist, and he worked with the Democrats to pass a great deal of progressive legislation.

The list of what the Nixon administration accomplished domestically makes Nixon look like a great liberal as well as one of the last of the big spenders.

Historian Melvin Small cites what Congress passed and Nixon signed into law, sometimes after resisting but usually by compromising: extension of the Voting Rights Act, postal reorganization, the Clean Air Act, the Water Pollution Control Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the establishment of an Office of Consumer Affairs in the White House, expansion of the national park system, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA), the Rail Passenger Service Act that created Amtrak, the vote for eighteen-year-olds, the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act (revenue sharing), the end of Selective Service (the draft), the beginning of the federal “war” against cancer, and dramatic increases in spending on the arts and public broadcasting. He increased spending on social security and Medicare faster tha...

You would be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say.”

Nixon’s views on America’s racial problems were carefully considered and usually empathetic, notwithstanding his intemperate or provocative utterances. He believed that the best cure to racism was economic.

He wanted to help blacks get jobs. To that end, he had quietly pushed to fund small black businesses and to set up a program (“the Philadelphia Plan”) that would require some federal contractors to set aside jobs for minorities (thereby infuriating Democratic-dominated, mostly white trade unions).

Absolutely astonishing he could get into trivia on brink of biggest step he’s taken so far.”32

We live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all the world over find themselves under attack from within and without….If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.35

Nixon had done what only Nixon could do—make a courageous decision and wrapped it in a pious and divisive speech.”41

have seen them,” he said, talking about the soldiers in Vietnam. “They’re the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue.”43

searching forty years ago, for an answer to this problem. I just wanted to be sure that all of them realized that ending the war, and cleaning up the streets and the air and the water, was not going to solve spiritual hunger, which all of us have and which, of course, has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time.”5

Once again, Nixon eyed the cultural divide between the longhairs and their liberal supporters in the elite press and the rest of America that disapproved of permissiveness and disrespect.

Same

swamp Yankee*2 from Boston, Colson was proud to have rejected admission at Harvard, an enormous plus in Nixon’s book. (Colson went to Brown instead.)

Kissinger knew that for Nixon, entering a crowded room or talking to a stranger required an enormous act of will.

Foreign policy was Nixon’s first love, but electoral politics finished a close second. Nixon loved playing chief campaign strategist, partly because he knew he was good at it. On the morning of September 9, he held forth for

The Democrats are all reading it.” In The Real Majority, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg argued that the election would come down to which party could win the hypothetical forty-seven-year-old Dayton, Ohio, housewife whose husband was a machinist. She was concerned with “the Social Issue,” wrote the authors, which, roughly speaking, meant fear of crime and declining morality brought on by hippies and black militants. “Permissiveness is the key theme,” said Nixon.*3 The Democratic Party regulars were scurrying to distance themselves from student radicals and angry blacks by becoming centrists. Don’t let them, said Nixon—a Republican candidate should put his Democratic opponent on the defensive by saying, “I don’t question his sincerity—he deeply believes in his radical philosophy.” This will cause the Democrat to squawk, “Gee, I’m not a radical,” said Nixon.37

“pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “vicars of vacillation.”

Nixon wanted him to pick fights with the peaceniks and the Yippies. “If the vice-president were slightly roughed up by these thugs nothing better could happen for our cause. If anybody brushed up against Mrs. Agnew, tell her to fall down,” Nixon instructed.38 But

The GOP was sinking in the polls. Fearing that the Republicans would lose as many as thirty-five seats in the House—the historic norm for the party in power during the first midterm elections—Nixon decided to take to the hustings himself for the final two weeks of the campaign.40

“It’s time for the Silent Majority to stand up and be counted!” Nixon told crowds across the country.41 Nixon seemed to relish his return to the stump, though his social awkwardness never went away. In St. Petersburg, Florida, a policeman was severely injured when his motorcycle flipped over while driving in the presidential motorcade. In his considerate way, Nixon rushed from his limousine to express his sympathies. As was his way, he also didn’t know what to say, blurting to the policeman who lay bleeding on the ground, “Do you like your work?”42

Haldeman saw an opportunity for Nixon’s favorite kind of showmanship. “We wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled the departure a little so they could zero in outside,

On Election Day, the Republicans lost nine House seats and gained two in the Senate. It was a respectable showing by the incumbent president’s party at the midterm, but the press for the most part declared victory for the Democrats.

But, as ever, he was determined to rally, to be positive. He tried to put on a good show for his family. “My father

On November 15, two days after returning from Paris, Nixon repaired to the Lincoln Sitting Room to write down what, as he put it, “I have learned about myself and the Presidency. From this experience I conclude: The primary contribution a President can make is on Spiritual lift.”

The same day that Nixon ordered his staff to contrive feel-good stories, Nixon received some genuinely good news—a small signal from a faraway source that was momentous in its significance. On December 9, at 6 P.M., Kissinger was visited in his office by the Pakistani ambassador bearing an envelope containing a handwritten missive on white, blue-lined paper. It was a personal message from Chou En-Lai, the prime minister of the People’s Republic of China, to President Richard Nixon. After some obligatory agitprop about Taiwan, the message stated that a “special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking.” Kissinger later recalled that the participants in a drawn-out diplomatic process rarely know when history is being made, but this time he had no doubt. The national security adviser’s initial skepticism that Nixon could open Red China was fast disappearing. Nixon’s feelers to Beijing, delivered through Pakistan’s Yahya Kahn, had teased out a surprising, enticing response. The world order was about to change, thanks to the farsightedness of a lower-middle-class boy who had once lain awake listening to trains in the night. The moment the Pakistani ambassador left his office, Kissinger hurried down the hall to the Oval Office to tell Nixon.53 The

Kissinger thought that Nixon had been so often stung by defeat that he would not let himself savor victory. He could not reveal his hopes because they might be snatched away. “He always believed his enemies would prevail,” Kissinger told Richard Reeves. “He was conditioned for rejection or failure, confused by success.”54

Swamp Yankees” were white Protestants who had been left behind in the “swamp” of Catholic and Jewish immigrants in late-nineteenth-century Boston when the rich WASPs withdrew to their mansions on Beacon Hill.

KISSINGER: They don’t mind losing. They don’t like America, and that’s the difference. NIXON: They don’t, huh? That’s fine. Isn’t that just great? I wish to Christ they had to live someplace else. I wish they did. KISSINGER: They don’t have the patriotism.25

“It would be god damn easy to run this office if you didn’t have to deal with people.”34, *2

In March, Nixon had waxed on to Haldeman about the spectacle of the Ali-Frazier boxing match, “how the chemistry and drama [had] really lifted public spirits,” wrote Haldeman. “The P feels that people need to be caught in a great event and taken out of their humdrum existence.”

Public tastes and mores were moving away from Nixon’s values, which remained firmly rooted in small-town, prewar rural America. On May 13, Safire wrote in his diary this “aside” from Haldeman: “The President turned on the ballgame Tuesday night, and when it was rained out, he watched a show called ‘All in the Family.’ It really bugged him. He remembers all the dialogue and he acts it out when he tells about it. It had to do with a fag who was portrayed sympathetically. The President feels that the decline of civilizations has always been marked by an acceptance of homosexuality and a general decline of moral values.”42

Nixon had already ordered a wiretap on Halperin for suspected leaking, and Gelb and Halperin both now worked at the Brookings Institution, a think tank Nixon regarded as a government-in-exile for Democrats. Nixon was irked at Kissinger for having even darkened the door at Brookings. “Chrissakes, he went over and talked to Brookings people himself,” Nixon fumed. “I warned him about it. I said, ‘Henry, don’t go over there.’ You know, I said, ‘Those people—that’s the Democratic National Committee.’

Indeed, liberal elitists were conspiring against him, and the justification of “national security” was hardly bogus during wartime when the president was engaged in secret diplomacy abroad. Journalists would later scoff at the term national security as a cynical excuse to conceal and cover up, but on the White House tapes, Nixon and his aides sound genuinely worried that leaks could, literally speaking, undermine national security.

Ehrlichman and Mitchell, “they’re always saying, well, we’ve got to win the court case through the court.” But Nixon scorned the slow-turning wheels of justice. “I mean, just let—convict the son of a bitch in the press. That’s the way it’s done….Nobody ever reads any of this in my biographies. Go back and read the chapter on the Hiss case in Six Crises and you’ll see how it was done. It wasn’t done waiting for the goddamn courts or the attorney general or the FBI….We have got to get going here.”

Nixon was furious; Ellsberg was going around speaking on television and at antiwar rallies promoting unlawful dissent, and the American legal system was cowering. Kissinger told Nixon that the country was in a “revolutionary situation.” In early July, Nixon gave a speech to newspaper and TV executives in front of the columned portico of the National Archives. “When I see those columns, I think of what happened to Greece and Rome,” the president said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilizations. The United States is reaching that period.”